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
Poetic Genres—Epistles
(820 words)
¶ Letters-in-verse were composed in Latin throughout the Middle Ages. Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) and Lovato Lovati (
c. 1240–1309) brought the metrical epistle into the early Italian Renaissance, and it became a po…
Poetic Genres—Heroides
(808 words)
¶ The
Epistulae heroidum of Ovid, a collection of fifteen elegiac epistles written in the person of mythological heroines to their absent lovers, and three sets of paired epistles in which heroines reply…
Poetic Genres—Occasional Poetry: Practice
(1,233 words)
¶ The term ‘occasional poetry’ is mostly used to designate poetry that is specifically written for certain social occasions. On these occasions the poems could be orally presented, but they could likew…
Poetic Genres—Occasional Poetry: Theory
(1,530 words)
¶ ‘Occasional poetry’ (
Gelegenheitsdichtung, poésie de circonstance, poesia occasionale, poesía ocasional), also described as ‘casual poetry’ (
Casualpoesie) or ‘celebratory verse’, refers to poetry composed for a par…
Poetic Genres—The Cento: Poetry
(947 words)
¶ The cento (a Latin word meaning ‘patchwork’) is a form which became popular in the fourth century ad, in both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. According to Tertullian (
De praescriptione haereticorum xxxix), the first cento was the
M…
Poetic Genres—The Cento: Theory
(868 words)
¶ A cento is a text that is wholly composed of passages taken from other (often canonical) texts to form a new, continuous message. Some centos will explicitly mention (part of) their sources, while ot…
Poetic Psalm Paraphrases
(5,927 words)
¶ The genre of poetic Psalm paraphrase—the rendering of the biblical Psalms into the metres and styles of classical Latin verse1—has been overshadowed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the great importance attaching to the que…
Poetics—Scaliger, Vida, Pontanus, Vossius
(1,253 words)
¶ Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), a humanist and physician, was the author of the poetical encyclopaedia,
Poetices libri septem (1561), first published three years after the author’s death and republished several t…
Political Philosophy
(12,350 words)
¶ It is a remarkable fact that some of the best-known early modern works on politics were written in the vernacular. This is no coincidence. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) intended his
Il principe only for the eyes of Lorenzo de’ …
Praise and Blame
(1,514 words)
¶ The notions of
praise and
blame are of central importance for both the production and the consumption of Neo-Latin literature. First of all, they have a well-defined place in the system of classical rhetoric:
laus and
vituperatio const…
Preface
(1,998 words)
¶ It has become increasingly apparent as we move further into the twenty-first century that the scholarly reference work, which had become rather unfashionable a generation ago, is undergoing a renaiss…
Print and Pedagogy
(1,967 words)
¶ Educational reform was one of the central concerns of the Renaissance. Before the advent of printing, Italian humanists led the way in composing treatises outlining a rhetorical education in the Lati…
Printing Centres—Basel: Johannes Frobenius, Johannes Amerbach and Others
(828 words)
¶ Basel’s university was founded in 1459 and printing was established in the city around 1470. Learned print culture flourished there, and in the sixteenth century Basel became the pre-eminent internat…
Printing Centres—Estienne Family
(967 words)
¶ The Estienne family was a family of scholar-printers, active from the beginning of the sixteenth century until 1664. Henri I Estienne, the first of the dynasty, began printing in 1502 in partnership …
Printing Centres—Geneva: Henri II Estienne, Jean Crespin, and Others
(906 words)
¶ Geneva held an insignificant place in the world of printing until the arrival of Calvin. In the incunabular period the city’s printers had been responsible for approximately one hundred editions, a r…
Printing Centres—Paris: Jodocus Badius Ascensius, Robert I Estienne and Others
(1,324 words)
¶ Second only to Venice in its output of printed books during the incunabular period, Paris remained in the sixteenth century the most productive print centre in northern Europe, producing a total of a…
Printing Centres: Strasbourg
(869 words)
¶ During the incunabular period, Strasbourg was among the leading producers of printed texts; in northern Europe, only Cologne, Leipzig, Paris and Lyon were more prolific. In the first third of the six…
Printing Centres—The Officina Plantiniana
(2,323 words)
¶ In the sixteenth century, Antwerp became one of the major printing centers of Europe. In 1555 Christopher Plantin (
c. 1520–1589) founded the
Officina Plantiniana and soon earned quite a reputation in religious and humanist…
Printing Centres—Venice: Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press
(1,872 words)
¶ Although it was at Subiaco near Rome in 1465 that the first books were printed in Italy, it was in Venice that printing first became firmly established. The success of the enterprise depended, as the…
Pronunciation of Latin
(6,350 words)
¶ ‘Quod ad nos attinet, in pronuntiando peregrini aeque sumus omnes’ (‘As far as we are concerned, we are all equally foreigners in our pronunciation’) (Diego Abad (1727–1779)1 At the court of Emperor Maximilian I (1493–1519), E…