Maffeo Vegio’s Career and Literary Conversion

This book re-evaluates the works and literary career of the fifteenth-century Neo-Latin writer Maffeo Vegio (1407—1458), best known for his Supplementum or Book XIII of the Aeneid. Vegio’s trajectory is paradigmatic of the richness of Quattrocento Italy’s intellectual life. After studying law at Pavia, he aspired to become a court poet in Visconti Milan and fashioned himself a New Virgil. He frequented various intellectual circles in Italy exchanging verses and letters with the most influential humanists of his time. He wrote epics, elegies, satires, dialogues, moral and religious treatises, and even hagiographies and liturgies. Finally, he died as a priest and historian at Saint Peter’s Basilica.Analysing Vegio’s entire corpus of writings as a continuous whole, this book examines the different ways in which the author presents himself throughout the stages of his career, with a special focus on the ‘literary conversion’ that took place in the middle years of his life – when he claims to have shifted from secular to religious literary interests. The book also highlights the importance of classical reception in the construction of a literary career and illustrates the techniques and motivations behind Vegio’s self-presentation.This book is a timely reassessment of Vegio’s life and works, which also deals with broader aspects of Renaissance culture and Neo-Latin literature — self-fashioning, classical reception, humanism and religion. Ultimately, Vegio’s carefully crafted persona and narrative of authorial development show a conception of life as inextricably intertwined with literature: a work of art to be fashioned after the best models.