 In this collection of ten Latin eclogues, he brought together the characters, situations, and themes of Virgilian pastoral with a strain of religious allegory rooted in Carmelite spirituality and a rustic realism compounded of personal observation and the conventions of medieval pastoral art.Schoolmasters commonly used the poems because of their relatively easy Latin and attractive subject matter (the opening eclogues deal with love, a topic one educator notes of interest to all young men).An attack on Papal corruption in one of the poems made Mantuan's collection an especially popular text in Protestant England.