Between Babies and Earnest Men : the Genethliacum in search for Aptum

The genre of the occasional birth-poem, or genethliacum, is by its very nature pulled in various and even opposite directions, for two main raisons: on the one hand, the splitting of the person celebrated and the actual dedicatee (the honoree being a new-born child, whose present activities are limited to smiling, weeping, sleeping and eating, and the dedicatee being an adult, most often the child’s father); and on the other hand, the very theme of birth, which almost inevitably calls to mind the entire process it initiates, that is: life and death. Authors of genethliaca are hence navigating between various literary tones: sometimes affectionate, sometimes eulogistic and focussing on great deeds, sometimes sententious and filled with philosophical, ethical or religious universal concerns. This paper analyzes how Neo-Latin poets from the Low Countries, in the 16th and 17th centuries, dealt with these tensions in their genethliac poetry, finding various solutions to reconciliate some or all of those aspects. It also examines what early modern theoretical reflections on the genre (e.g., in treatises and school manuals of poetry) had to say in this respect.