Merton student wins Senior Paget Toynbee Essay Prize

Doctoral student Lachlan Hughes has been awarded the 2023 Senior Paget Toynbee Prize for his essay 'Dante’s Arethusa and the Art of Transition’. 

The Senior Paget Toynbee Prize is awarded annually for an essay written by an Oxford graduate student on ‘the works of the poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Old French Language and Literature, or Old Provençal Language and Literature’.

Lachlan's essay (‘Dante’s Arethusa and the Art of Transition’) examines an allusion in the opening lines of Dante’s Purgatorio to Ovid’s account in the Metamorphoses (V, 294–678) of a song contest between the Muses and the Pierides, the mortal daughters of Pierus. In Ovid’s poem, the defeated Pierides are transformed into chattering magpies for having dared to challenge the divine Muses. While critics have tended to see Dante’s allusion as an expression of the Commedia’s salvific pretensions, Lachlan's essay instead considers the Ovidian episode’s pervasive concern for transition, seen in its many embedded and digressive tales. In particular, it claims that the nymph Arethusa, who travels from the underworld to ‘see the stars again’ in Ovid’s poem, serves as an important but hitherto unacknowledged model for the pilgrim’s arrival in Purgatory.

A revised version of the essay will be published in the journal Modern Language Review in October 2023.

Lachlan is a final-year DPhil student at Merton, supported by the Clarendon Fund and a Merton College Humanities Award. His thesis examines Florentine song traditions from the late thirteenth century, and in particular their influence on the lyric poetry of Dante Alighieri. Next year he will be staying in Oxford, working as a Lecturer in Italian at St Hilda’s College and Pembroke College.