This chapter looks at the transmission history of Catullus and the elegists into the Renaissance and their surprising presence, given their reputation as ‘lascivious’ and ‘wanton’ , on the early modern humanist school curriculum. We consider florilegia and printed common-place books as the site where English school-boys, and some girls, first meet Latin elegy, and the institutionalised nature of imitatio as a foundational practice of writing. We then go on to look at the broad receptions of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia across Renaissance Europe as a context for the close readings which follow.