| Sumario: | The resident poets attached to court of the Tudor kings Henry VII (r. 1485–1509) and his son Henry VIII (r. 1509–44)—predominantly trained in Italy, with the exception of the English Laureate John Skelton (ca. 1460–1529)—manifest a considerable attachment to the Silvae of P. Papinius Statius (d. ca. 96), as evidenced by their quotations, reworkings, and imitations of matter from the corpus of Statius' ex tempore verse. The same early Tudor poets similarly used an array of paracorporal Roman elegy—the Panegyricus Messallae and other items of the Corpus Tibullianum ; the Consolatio ad Liviam and related Elegiae in Maecenatem —inaccessible before print, but brought to their attention by the same set of interrelated Italian incunabular editions from which they had acquired familiarity with Statius' newly recovered Silvae.
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