Lotman and Viiding Open the Poetic World of Early Modern Livonian Noble Children at a Poetry Conference

Lotman and Viiding to present at poetry conference insights into the verse world of early modern Livonian noble children At the international verse conference „Frontiers in Comparative Metrics V,“ organized jointly by the University of Tartu and the Estonian Literary Museum, leading scholars of versification will gather in Tartu on 23–24 April 2026. On the second day, a presentation will be given by Senior Researcher Maria-Kristiina Lotman and Director and Research Professor Kristi Viiding of the Under and Tuglas Literary Institute.

In their talk, Maria-Kristiina Lotman and Kristi Viiding examine the versification practices of children and adolescents from the nobility of Livonia, Estonia, and Courland in the early modern period, based on a newly compiled corpus of Latin- and German-language poems written by authors up to the age of 19. They focus in particular on the Latin section of the corpus, which makes it possible to show how young writers entered the adult literary world through mastery of classical verse forms, especially the dactylic hexameter.

Their analysis concentrates on the rhythmic and prosodic structure of poetry created by young nobles and assesses to what extent these authors followed humanist norms or deviated from them. On the basis of metrical and prosodic features, they also consider whether the technical profile of a given poem allows us to infer authorship by a young noble or whether adult intervention (or even full authorship) is more likely.

By comparing this new corpus with established adult poetic and epigraphic traditions, the presentation shows how young nobles learned the craft of versification and how the acquisition of metrical skill functioned as a means of early socialization and cultural self-fashioning in early modern Livonia.

The conference takes place at the Estonian Literary Museum (Tartu, Vanemuise 42) and is dedicated to the memory of Reuven Tsur and Barry Scherr.

According to the head organizer of the conference series, Mihhail Lotman, „Frontiers in Comparative Metrics“ is the only regular international conference specifically devoted to versification studies, encompassing a wide range of poetic cultures and research perspectives. The conference is notable both for the quality of its presentations and for being a unique forum where leading metrics scholars meet to discuss various problems of verse studies outside formal frameworks.

This year’s conference topics include comparative and historical metrics, phonopoetics including phono-semantics and auditory imagery, verse forms in folklore and oral performance, statistical and quantitative approaches to metrics and poetics, digital tools and corpora in verse analysis, cognitive and psychological aspects of poetic rhythm, the relationship between meter and meaning, and multilingual and cross-cultural research on poetic form.

The conference program, abstracts, and further information are available here.