Part II of the landmark Companion to Neo-Latin Studies covers all the relevant literary forms and genres of Neo-Latin literature, as well as their characteristics and evolution.
Neo-Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland is the first detailed examination of the vibrant culture of literature written by Scots in Latin in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essays in this collection draw on several recent ground-breaking research projects to examine a wide variety of aspects of Scottish Latin culture, including: Scottish participation in Latinate humanist circles across Europe, particularly in France and England; scientific, philosophical and didactic Latin culture in Scotland prior to the Scientific Revolution; and the reception of classical literature in Scotland, particularly Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. It also features in-depth examinations and translated excerpts of several key works, including the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (Amsterdam, 1637) and The Muses' Welcome (Edinburgh, 1618). Contributors are: Alexander Broadie, Robert Cummings, Alexander Farquhar, Roger Green, L.B.T. Houghton, Miles Kerr-Peterson, Ralph McLean, David McOmish, Gesine Manuwald, William Poole, and Steven J. Reid.
From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book printing and new literary and cultural dynamics. Latin also entered into a complex interplay with the rising vernacular languages. This Handbook gives an accessible survey of the main genres, contexts, and regions of Neo-Latin, as we have come to call Latin writing composed in the wake of Petrarch (1304-74). Its emphasis is on the period of Neo-Latin's greatest cultural relevance, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its chapters, written by specialists in the field, present individual methodologies and focuses while retaining an introductory character. The Handbook will be valuable to all readers wanting to orientate themselves in the immense ocean of Neo-Latin literature and culture. It will be particularly helpful for those working on early modern languages and literatures as well as to classicists working on the culture of ancient Rome, its early modern reception and the shifting characteristics of post-classical Latin language and literature. Political, social, cultural and intellectual historians will find much relevant material in the Handbook, and it will provide a rich range of material to scholars researching the history of their respective geographical areas of interest.
Material Philology and the study of Renaissance Latin literature Neo-Latin Philology: Old Tradition, New Approaches explores the question whether the approaches developed in the so-called New or Material Philology can be applied to the study of Renaissance Latin literature. Two contributions in this volume focus on theoretical issues, the first presenting a critical assessment of the debate on New Philology in the 1990s, the second providing some guidelines for researchers of the materiality of sources. The remaining seven contributions discuss various ways in which the material presentation in either manuscript or print played a part in the interpretation of a variety of texts, including Basinio of Parma’s Hesperis, Niccolò Perotti's Cornu copiae, some poems by Janus Secundus, a commentary on Horace’s Ars poetica, Otto Venius’ Emblemata Horatiana, Johann Lauremberg's playPompejus Magnus, and the Alithinologia by John Lynch. Contributors Haijo Westra (University of Calgary), H. Wayne Storey (Indiana University, Bloomington), Christoph Pieper (Leiden University), Marianne Pade (Academy of Denmark, Rome), David Rijser (University of Amsterdam), Werner J.C.M. Gelderblom (Radboud University Nijmegen), Marc van der Poel (Radboud University Nijmegen), Tom Deneire (Antwerp University Library), Nienke Tjoelker (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies, Innsbruck)
The epigram is certainly one of the most intriguing, while at the same time most elusive, genres of Neo-Latin literature. From the end of the fifteenth century, almost every humanist writer who regarded himself a true "poeta" had composed a respectable number of epigrams. Given our sense of poetical aesthetics, be it idealistic, postidealistic, modern, or postmodern, the epigrammatic genre is difficult to understand. Because of its close ties with the historical and social context, it does not fit any of these aesthetic approaches. By presenting various epigram writers, collections, and subgenres from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, this volume offers a first step toward a better understanding of some of the features of humanist epigram literature.
First critical edition of Burmeister's newly discovered Aulularia Joannes Burmeister of Lüneburg (1576–1638) was among the greatest Neo-Latin poets of the German Baroque. His masterpieces, now mostly lost, are Christian ‘inversions’ of the Classical Roman comedies of Plautus. With only minimal changes in language and none in meter, each transforms Plautus’s pagan plays into comedies based on biblical themes. Fascinating in their own right, they also bring back to attention forgotten genres of Renaissance literature. This volume offers the first critical edition of the newly discoveredAulularia (1629), which exists in a sole copy, and the fragments of Mater-Virgo(1621), which adapts Plautus’s Amphitryo to show the Nativity of Jesus. The introduction offers reconstructions of Susanna (based on Casina) and Asinaria(1625), Burmeister's two lost or unpublished inversions of Plautus. Fontaine also provides the only biography of Burmeister based on archival sources, along with discussions of his inimitable Latinity and the perilous context of war and witch-burning in which Burmeister wrote. Burmeister's inversions bear witness to the special talent of his age for the creative reworking of Classical literature, such as Monteverdi's Poppea or Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, as well as to his tumultuous times, with his views on military abuses in the Thirty Years' War prefiguring those of Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus.
As well as presenting articles on Neo-Latin topics, the annual journal Humanistica Lovaniensia is a major source for critical editions of Neo-Latin texts with translations and commentaries. Please visit www.lup.be for the full table of contents.
The printed book caused an explosion of knowledge and major changes in the perception of texts. In investigating how knowledge was presented to the early modern reader, this volume treats both book-historical issues and the intersections of layout with issues of genre, content and function.
The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.