Perhaps no poetic genre is as central to the ‘Classical Tradition’ as is pastoral; at times, indeed, despite its ostensibly narrow and stylized terms of reference, pastoral seems to operate as the privileged space of European classicism, a genre into which everything Greek and Roman can be subsumed, and more besides. This paper takes as its case study the Adulescentia of Baptista Mantuanus (1447-1516): its readings of Mantuan’s early modern pastoral collection offer synecdochic glimpses of the reception-history of Virgil's Eclogues, and map the generic self-awareness of the Adulescentia itself.
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