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Nathaniel Hess

Nathaniel Hess’ research centres on the classical philology and poetry of the Renaissance. Trained as a classicist at Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated as a BA in 2017 and as an MPhil, with a dissertation on the Hellenistic poet Lycophron, the following year. His doctoral thesis comprised of a study of Greek-to-Latin verse translation in the 15th and 16th centuries, with a particular emphasis on the influence of Angelo Poliziano and his groundbreaking translation of Callimachus.

At the LBI, he is working on collections of Latin hexameter hymns by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Marco Girolamo Vida. These hymns, which adapt classical, pagan models to Christian subjects, span four turbulent decades of religious history in the early 16th century, and reflect changing attitudes to the Christian present as well as to its relationship with the intellectual heritage of antiquity.