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Sedulius was a Christian Latin poet who probably lived in the 5th century CE. In a prefatory letter to his patron, Macedonius, he mentions Jerome and the fact that he dedicated literary works to female friends. This gives us a terminus post quem of the late 4th century CE for Sedulius’ Paschale carmen. A subscription preserved in a Bobbio manuscript (Torino: Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, E.IV.42; 7th cent) informs us that Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius (Roman consul in 494 CE) produced some sort of an edition of Sedulius’ “holy work” ( sacrum opus). So, the poem must have be…

Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius (consul in 494 CE) was one of the Roman elites of late antiquity whose names appear in subscriptions to manuscripts of Latin authors such as Apuleius, Caesar, Cicero, Fronto, Horace, and Livy. The name of this scion of the famous 4th-century CE Turcii Aproniani is found in a subscription to the Codex Mediceus, containing the works of Virgil (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, MS Laur. 39.1, f. 8r; following the Eclogues, possibly an autograph). Asterius declares that he “read and punctuated the codex” ( legi et distincxi codicem) and gives credit t…

¶ The dramatic resurgence of interest during the early modern period in reading, speaking, and writing Latin in the classical style should be associated not only with the Renaissance, as it often is, b…

¶ In the sixteenth century, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that the study of Latin would continue to flourish in northern Europe and other areas influenced by the Reformation. From Luther’s 1…

¶ Born in Noyon in northern France in 1509, Jean Cauvin (later Latinised to Calvinus) began his preparations for the priesthood in Paris, where he studied with the Christian humanist Mathurin Cordier. …

¶ Born Philipp Schwarzerd in 1497, Melanchthon (his Hellenised last name) studied at the Latin school at Pforzheim where he demonstrated an early mastery of the classics. He entered the University of H…

¶ Many of the Latin writings of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, born around 1469, are directly or indirectly theological in nature. As a Christian humanist, intent on exposing the abuses of power in t…

¶ Renowned as the translator of the Bible into German and the author of popular Reformation chorales in the vernacular, Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a gifted literary artist in Latin as well. One of t…