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.

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.

This book contains thirteen essays on European princes and princely culture between 1450 and 1650. Many products of medieval and renaissance culture – literature, music, political ideology, social and governmental structures, the fine arts, and even forms of devotional practice – found their best expression in the context of the courts of greater and lesser princes. This volume, the first of two concentrating on the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, has essays on selected courts north of the Alps and the Pyrenees: the court of Burgundy under the Valois dukes, that of France under Catherine de Médicis and of Henry IV, that of Scotland under Jameses III, IV, V, VI and of Mary, Queen of Scots, that of Margaret of Austria at Mechelen, of Scandinavia, of Heidelberg under Frederick the Victorious and Philip the Upright, and that of Maximilian I. Contributors include: Gayle K. Brunelle, Dagmar Eichberger, Annette Finley-Croswhite, Martin Gosman, Margriet Hoogvliet, Michael Lynch, Alasdair A. MacDonald, Olaf Mörke, Jan-Dirk Müller, Rita Schlusemann, Alan Swanson, Arjo Vanderjagt, and Janet Hadley Williams.

Because of its history, art, and natural and cultural landscapes, Italy has been a popular destination for North-European travellers since the age of the Grand Tour. Yet, literary images of Italy are not all linked to the tradition of the journey to this country and cannot be labelled as a manifestation of Northerners’ yearning for the Southern sun. The corpus of critical literature which deals with Italy in Nordic literatures is very wide but also fragmentary. While many scholars have written about this topic and chiefly on the relations between individual Scandinavian literatures or well-known authors – such as Henrik Ibsen, Selma Lagerlöf and Hans Christian Andersen – and Italy, few have emphasised their variety, plurality, and complexity. With its comparative approach, this study casts a new light on a selection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Italy and presents some of these Nordic Italies. Taking into account texts of different genres – poetry, drama and novel – and focusing on theories of representation, genre, and space, this book examines complex and heterogeneous literary representations that cannot be reduced to a single stereotype. In these texts, Italy emerges both as a set of physical spaces and as a series of metaphorical concepts. How are these Italian spaces and identities constructed and what do they stand for? What forms does the broad concept of Italianness take in these literary works? How are the Italian settings and characters, as well as the aspects of Italian politics, history, society, culture, and folklore that populate so many literary texts, shaped and combined? Is there a relationship between specific literary genres and the way in which Italy is represented? These are only some of the questions addressed by this study, which demonstrates how Nordic representations of Italy express much more than unanimous praise for the sun, idyllic landscapes, ruins, and mandolin players.

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.

Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular offers a collection of studies that deal with the cultural exchange between Neo-Latin and the vernacular, and with the very cultural mobility that allowed for the successful development of Renaissance bilingual culture. Studying a variety of multilingual issues of language and poetics, of translation and transfer, its authors interpret Renaissance cross-cultural contact as a radically dynamic, ever-shifting process of making cultural meaning. With renewed attention for suitable theoretical and methodological frames of reference, Dynamics of Neo-Latin and the Vernacular firmly resists literary history’s temptation to pin down the Early Modern relationship between languages, literatures and cultures, in favour of stressing the sheer variety and variability of that relationship itself. Contributors are Jan Bloemendal, Ingrid De Smet, Annet den Haan, Tom Deneire, Beate Hintzen, David Kromhout, Bettina Noak, Ingrid Rowland, Johanna Svensson, Harm-Jan van Dam, Guillaume van Gemert, Eva van Hooijdonk, and Ümmü Yüksel.

Through detailed historicized and interdisciplinary readings of the performances of Anna Denmark in the Scottish and English Jacobean Courts, Women on the Renaissance Stage fundamentally reassesses women's relationship to early modern performance. It investigates the staging conditions, practices, and gendering of Denmark's performances, and brings current critical theorizations of race, class, gender, space, and performance to bear on the female court of the early 17th century.

Volume III of The Oxford History of Historical Writing contains essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from 1400 to 1800. The volume proceeds in geographic order from east to west, beginning in Asia and ending in the Americas. It aims at once to provide a selective but authoritative survey of the field and, where opportunity allows, to provoke cross-cultural comparisons. This is the third of five volumes in a series that explores representations of the past from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.

A Companion to the Classical Tradition accommodates the pressing need for an up-to-date introduction and overview of the growing field of reception studies. A comprehensive introduction and overview of the classical tradition - the interpretation of classical texts in later centuries Comprises 26 newly commissioned essays from an international team of experts Divided into three sections: a chronological survey, a geographical survey, and a section illustrating the connections between the classical tradition and contemporary theory