In Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella, Iphis loves caring for her family farm on Crete. She loves the smell of the ocean, olives, and grain carried by the wind, and she loves watching lambs race through their fields. Yet, she also feels the burden of her secret—a secret only her mom knows. Before she was born, her father said they could only afford to raise a boy, so her mother lied to protect her.
Iphis is stuck between two parents who don’t see her as she is. She isn’t the perfect son to her sick father because she’s a young woman, and she’s certainly not the perfect daughter because she’d rather be searching for lost lambs in the twilight than spinning wool with her mother.
If that pressure weren’t enough, her whole world is uprooted when another young woman joins her school, a young woman whose wit and passion for storytelling is rivaled only by Iphis’ burning desire to hear her tell such stories. Iphis finds herself aflame with love and trying to keep the woolen threads of her life from snarling, but all she can see is a hopeless tangle.
Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella is suitable for use in Latin IV. This novella may be appropriate at other levels depending on the students’ years of study and its intended use. The prefātiō for the novella is available here.
Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella is available on Amazon. It will also soon be available as part of a FVR package of novellas on Bombax Press.
About the Plot of Virgo Ardens
Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella is based on Ovid’s myth about Iphis and Ianthe in the Metamorphoses. Although I track the story arc with similar events, my retelling has a dramatic difference in it. Iphis and Ianthe fell in love as two women in his myth, but Isis does not transform Iphis into a man in my retelling. Love is itself a transformation. This novella also contains significant allusions to other literature. For example, Ianthe at one point recites a sheltered and adapted version of a poem written by Sulpicia. There are other literary allusions and references as well. The novella is both pastoral and a little poetic and tackles the role of storytelling in how we view and grapple with the world.
This novella deals with weighty issues related to gender and identity. The novella starts, for example, with a husband telling his wife they would have to expose a daughter because they could not afford to raise one. This novella explores what it means to be a woman in antiquity and also what it means to be educated. At one point, Telethusa tells Iphis that there are many ways for a woman to be strong, which is a point I touch upon through the novella. This novella also, somewhat obviously by this point, contains LGBTQ characters. A driving theme and question is: what is more natural than love?
About the Vocabulary and Grammar
The vocabulary is intentionally sheltered to allow for more extensive and independent reading. The novella contains about 16,500 words, and it uses 433 total unique words. Of those words, a significant number are clear cognates that were used infrequently, and others were names or glosses that were essential to the story but appeared less frequently than I preferred. I aimed to have most words appear more than 20 times. When pronouns, cognates, and glosses are removed from the 159 words that constitute the novella’s 16,500 word length, a student would need a working vocabulary of 318 words to read this text.
In addition, I paid careful attention to the frequency that words appear in Latin literature. When choosing between synonyms, for example, I chose the more common word or compounds with frequently occurring words. I am also careful about what I consider to be a cognate and choose only words that I consider to be especially clear and in most students’ English vocabulary at the level that the book was written. After all, it doesn’t matter if a word is a clear cognate if it’s not in a typical student’s vocabulary. Because this is suitable for advanced Latin students, I considered some words cognates that I would not at lower levels of Latin.
Unlike the vocabulary, the grammar in this novella is not sheltered. This novella contains grammar that is considered advanced, including cum clauses, fear clauses, purpose clauses, result clauses, and ablative absolutes.
About the Artwork
Due to the length and intended level of Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella, I opted to to omit interior artwork and to include a complete index of words would be available.
The covert art for this book is an oil on wood painting by Charles Jacque titled “Springtime.” I thought it evoked the setting of Virgo Ardens, particularly with the sheep and the lamb in central positions. I also particularly enjoyed the tree’s appearance as if it is buffeted about by the winds. The woman in the picture would have to be Ianthe because she is wearing a dress, which Iphis steadfastly refuses to do throughout the novella.
I remain grateful to my friend and neighbor Linda Renaud who turned the artwork into a cover image for me. You can find her wildlife artwork at lindarenaudart.com.
About the Text Features
Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella has a full index of all 16,500 words in their various forms. In the index, the reader can look up all unknown words. The index lists verbs separately. As such, a reader could independently look up both lāta essent and tulī without knowing the dictionary entry of the word. The index provides a general translation of the word. Verbs include a translation that is grammatically appropriate and would fit the context of the sentence. This text also contains a dictionary. This dictionary offers all the principal parts. The dictionary notes how frequently the words appear in Latin Literature according to the Core Latin Vocabulary or Essential Latin vocabulary.
If you would like to review the vocabulary used in Virgo Ardens: A Latin Novella, the dictionary is available here.
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