Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World
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Subject: History
Edited by: Philip Ford (†), Jan Bloemendal and Charles Fantazzi
With its striking range and penetrating depth, Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World traces the enduring history and wide-ranging cultural influence of Neo-Latin, the form of Latin that originated in the Italian Renaissance and persists to the modern era. Featuring original contributions by a host of distinguished international scholars, this comprehensive reference work explores every aspect of the civilized world from literature and law to philosophy and the sciences.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
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With its striking range and penetrating depth, Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World traces the enduring history and wide-ranging cultural influence of Neo-Latin, the form of Latin that originated in the Italian Renaissance and persists to the modern era. Featuring original contributions by a host of distinguished international scholars, this comprehensive reference work explores every aspect of the civilized world from literature and law to philosophy and the sciences.
Subscriptions: Brill.com
Neo-Latin and Renaissance Schools
(4,151 words)
¶ Since there were no native speakers of Latin in the Renaissance, grammar school education was needed to train both the writers of Neo-Latin and their audiences. As in the Middle Ages, the main goal o…
Neo-Latin and the Plastic Arts in Northern Europe
(9,170 words)
¶ Neo-Latin literature on art, the first expression of which can be found in Italy (Alberti,
De pictura, Landino)—if one does not consider as literature on art the mediaeval ‘books of recipes’, like the famous
De diversis artibus, writte…
Neo-Latin and the Vernacular: Methodological Issues
(7,554 words)
¶ This chapter was conceived within the context of the NWO-project
Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular. The Role of Self-Representation, Self-Presentation and Imaging in the Field of Cultural Transmission, …
Neo-Latin and the Vernacular: Poetry
(8,444 words)
Introduction ¶ Side by side with classical antiquity, Neo-Latin poetry has long been cited to explain the development of the vernacular poetic culture of the early modern era. The impact of the vernacul…
Neo-Latin and the Visual Arts in Italy
(10,061 words)
¶ When Horace wrote his famous simile, ‘ut pictura poesis’, he was not addressing the visual arts, but clarifying the criteria for judging epic poetry. Although known in the Middle Ages,1 it was not until the Neo-Latin critics of …
Neo-Latin and Vernacular Influences in Prose Writing
(1,225 words)
¶ The history of Neo-Latin prose style basically reads as a debate between Ciceronianism and Anti-Ciceronianism, from the Ciceronian controversies of Quattrocento Italy, to the complicated seventeenth-…
Neo-Latin Book Series
(669 words)
¶ Several series of publications are specifically dedicated to or are otherwise relevant for Neo-Latin studies. Most of these provide editions (with or without translations into a modern vernacular) of…
Neo-Latin: Character and Development*
(10,212 words)
Introduction Definition of Neo-Latin ¶ * I am grateful to Minna Skafte Jensen and Marianne Pade for reading this chapter and suggesting improvements. The word
Neo-Latin is both a chronological and a stylistic term.1 Chronologically i…
Neo-Latin Drama
(7,257 words)
Introduction ¶ In Italy around 1300 and in Germany around 1500 a new genre arose that would flourish for centuries: Neo-Latin drama.1 It was a pan-European genre—even stretching to the colonies!—that was written by both R…
Neo-Latin Erotic and Pornographic Literature (c. 1400–c. 1700)
(9,031 words)
¶ What one regards as ‘erotic’ and ‘pornographic’ depends on cultural, social, religious, and intellectual discourses, and those of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certainly differ f…
Neo-Latin ‘Essays’: An Absent Genre that is Omnipresent
(7,602 words)
¶ Authors such as Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Voltaire, and Oscar Wilde are notorious for having made sharp observations in a typically concise style. The literary genre they considered most suitable for…
Neo-Latin Fiction
(8,555 words)
¶ The subject of this article is the Neo-Latin novel, a genre whose texts are far less well-known today than either their contents or their literary achievement merit. Such was not the case in the long…
Neo-Latin Forgeries
(2,304 words)
¶ It might seem counterintuitive to assert that the height of neo-Latin scholarship in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries was also a golden age of historical forgeries. After all, this was the…
Neo-Latin Grammars—Guarino da Verona’s Regulae grammaticales
(1,078 words)
¶ Guarino (1374–1460) composed his Latin textbook, the
Regulae grammaticales (
Rules of Grammar), around 1418, but he may well have revised the work later, in the light of experiences collected during his long teaching career.1 It was …
Neo-Latin Grammars—Niccolò Perotti’s Rudimenta grammatices
(1,102 words)
¶ Though not a highly original work, Niccolò Perotti’s (1430–1480)
Rudimenta grammatices (Elementary Grammar, 1468) is a milestone in Latin grammar and became the most widely diffused humanist Latin grammar of t…
Neo-Latin in North America
(11,043 words)
¶ I am grateful to many scholars for their generous help: Kevin Chang, Anthony Grafton, Jaap Jacobs, Thomas Keeline, Donna LaRue, Stuart McManus, John Pollack, Michele Valerie Ronnick, Peter Schineller…
Neo-Latin Journals
(575 words)
¶ Only two journals are explicitly and exclusively devoted to Neo-Latin studies. The first is
Humanistica Lovaniensia (HL), which was originally founded as a series of monographs concerning Renaissance humanism in th…
Neo-Latin Literary Genres and the Classical Tradition: Adaptation and Inventions
(3,670 words)
¶ Much of Neo-Latin
bonae litterae is oriented towards classical literature. In the various genres, as they are traditionally called, this literary production looked back to Latin—and to a lesser extent Gr…
Neo-Latin Literature—Bohemia
(2,189 words)
¶ The Latin language was used by Bohemian cosmopolitan authors until the early nineteenth century. Many Bohemian scholars studied and worked in academic positions at prestigious European universities, …
Neo-Latin Literature—France: The Seventeenth and Later Centuries: Contexts
(833 words)
¶ Although Neo-Latin has no definite starting point, introduced into Europe and the New World through the humanist reforms initiated in the Renaissance and gradually developed alongside the continuing …