From ca. 1300 a new genre developed in European literature, Neo-Latin drama. Building on medieval drama, vernacular theatre and classical drama, it spread around Europe. It was often used as a means to educate young boys in Latin, in acting and in moral issues. Comedies, tragedies and mixed forms were written. The Societas Jesu employed Latin drama in their education and public relations on a large scale. They had borrowed the concept of this drama from the humanist and Protestant gymnasia, and perfected it to a multi media show. However, the genre does not receive the attention that it deserves. In this volume, a historical overview of this genre is given, as well as analyses of separate plays. Contributors include: Jan Bloemendal, Jean-Frédéric Chevalier, Cora Dietl, Mathieu Ferrand, Howard Norland, Joaquín Pascual Barea, Fidel Rädle, and Raija Sarasti Willenius.

The volume brings together contributions on 15th and 16th century translation throughout Europe (in particular Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and England). Whilst studies of the reception of ancient Greek drama in this period have generally focused on one national tradition, this book widens the geographical and linguistic scope so as to approach it as a European phenomenon. Latin translations are particularly emblematic of this broader scope: translators from all over Europe latinised Greek drama and, as they did so, developed networks of translators and practices of translation that could transcend national borders. The chapters collected here demonstrate that translation theory and practice did not develop in national isolation, but were part of a larger European phenomenon, nourished by common references to Biblical and Greco-Roman antiquities, and honed by common religious and scholarly controversies. In addition to situating these texts in the wider context of the reception of Greek drama in the early modern period, this volume opens avenues for theoretical debate about translation practices and discourses on translation, and on how they map on to twenty-first-century terminology.

Compiled by a team of experts in the field, this volume brings to view an array of Latin texts produced in British universities from c.1500 to 1700. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the production of Neo-Latin and Neo-Greek in the early modern university, the precise circumstances and broader environments that gave rise to it, plus an associated bibliography. 12 high-quality sections, each prefaced by its own short introduction, set forth the Latin (and occasionally Greek) texts and accompanying English translations and notes. Each section provides focused orientation and is arranged in such a way as to ensure the volume's accessibility to scholars and students at all levels of familiarity with Neo-Latin. Passages are taken from documents that were composed in seats of learning across the British Isles, in Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and adduce a wide range of material from orations and disputational theses to collections of occasional verse, correspondence, notebooks and university drama. This anthology as a whole conveys a sense of the extent of Latin's role in the academy and the span of remits in which it was deployed. Far from simply offering a snapshot of discrete projects, the contributions collectively offer insights into the broader culture of the early modern university over an extended period. They engage with the administrative operations of institutions, pedagogical processes and academic approaches, but also high-level disputes and the universities' relationship with the worlds of politics, new science and intellectual developments elsewhere in Europe.

This is the first history of Oxford and Cambridge drama during the Tudor and Stuart period. It guides the reader through the theatrical worlds of England's universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early Modern Drama at the Universities opens up an exciting and challenging body of evidence and offers the reader a choice of three inroads into the corpus: institutions, intertexts, and individuals. How to get noticed at university? How to get into university in the first place, or a job afterwards? Sandis pinpoints the skills that were required for success and the role of playwriting and performance in the development of those skills. We follow Oxford and Cambridge students along their educational journey--from schoolboys to scholars to graduates in the workplace. For the first time, we see the extent to which institutional culture made the drama what it was: pedagogically-inspired, homosocial, and self-reflexive. It was primarily on a college level that students lived, worked, and proved themselves to the community. Therefore, this study argues, to understand university drama as a whole we must recreate it from the building blocks of individual college histories. The hundreds of plays that we have inherited from Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in Classical culture; many are written in Latin. Manuscript, not print, was the accepted medium for keeping records of student plays, and these handwritten copies were unique and personal. It is time to recognize these plays in the context of early modern English drama, to uncover the culture of drama at the universities where many leading playwrights of the age were trained.

'From ca. 1300 a new genre developed in European literature, Neo-Latin drama. Building on medieval drama, vernacular theatre and classical drama, it spread around Europe. It was often used as a means to educate young boys in Latin, in acting and in moral issues. Comedies, tragedies and mixed forms were written. The Societas Jesu employed Latin drama in their education and public relations on a large scale. They had borrowed the concept of this drama from the humanist and Protestant gymnasia, and perfected it to a multi media show. However, the genre does not receive the attention that it deserves. In this volume, a historical overview of this genre is given, as well as analyses of separate plays.'--From publisher's website.

Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy is a volume of essays investigating European tragedy in the seventeenth century, comparing Shakespeare, Vondel, Gryphius, Racine and several other vernacular tragedians, together with consideration of neo-Latin dramas by Jesuits and other playwrights. To what extent were similar themes, plots, structures and styles elaborated? How is difference as well as similarity to be accounted for? European drama is beginning to be considered outside of the singular vernacular frameworks in which it has been largely confined (as instanced in the conferences and volumes of essays held in the Universities of Munich and Berlin 2010-12), but up-to-date secondary material is sparse and difficult to obtain. This volume intends to help remedy that deficit by addressing the drama in a full political, religious, legal and social context, and by considering the plays as interventions in those contexts. Contributors are: Christian Biet, Jan Bloemendal, Helmer J. Helmers, Blair Hoxby, Sarah M. Knight, Tatiana Korneeva, Frans-Willem Korsten, Joel B. Lande, Russell J. Leo, Howard B. Norland, Kirill Ospovat, James A. Parente, Jr., Freya Sierhuis, Nienke Tjoelker and Emily Vasiliauskas.

The fifteen articles in this volume highlight the richness, diversity, and experimental nature of French and Francophone drama before the advent of what would become known as neoclassical French theater of the seventeenth century. In essays ranging from conventional stage plays (tragedies, comedies, pastoral, and mystery plays) to court ballets, royal entrances, and meta- and para-theatrical writings of the period from 1485 to 1640, French Renaissance and Baroque Drama: Text, Performance, Theory seeks to deepen and problematize our knowledge of texts, co-texts, and performances of drama from literary-historical, artistic, political, social, and religious perspectives. Moreover, many of the articles engage with contemporary theory and other disciplines to study this drama, including but not limited to psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and performance theory. The diversity of the essays in their methodologies and objects of study, none of which is privileged over any other, bespeaks the various types of drama and the numerous ways we can study them.

Proving fruitful in various applications throughout its two millennia of predominance, the rhetorical téchne appears to have entertained a particularly symbiotic interrelation with drama. With contributions from (among others) a Classicist, historical, linguistic, musicological, operatic, cultural and literary studies perspective, this publication offers interdisciplinary assessments of specific reciprocities between the system of rhetoric and dramatic works: tracing the longue durée of this nexus—highlighting its Ancient foundations, its various Early Modern formations, as well as certain configurations enduring to this day—enables describing shifting degrees of rhetoricity; approaching it from an interdisciplinary viewpoint facilitates focusing on the often sidelined rhetorical phenomena located beyond the textual plane, specifically memoria and actio; tackling this interchange from various viewpoints and with diverse emphases, a long-lasting and highly prolific cross-fertilization between drama and rhetoric is rendered visible. In tendering a balanced panorama of both detailed case studies and descriptive overviews, this volume also points toward terrain yet to be charted in the scholarship to come. The volume was prepared in co-operation with the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet).

The sixteenth century was an exciting period in the history of European theatre. In the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, France, Germany and England, writers and actors experimented with new dramatic techniques and found new publics. They prepared the way for the better-known dramatists of the next century but produced much work which is valuable in its own right, in Latin and in their own vernaculars. The popular theatre of the Middle Ages gave endless material for reinvention by playwrights, and the legacy of the ancient world became a spur to creativity, in tragedy and comedy. As soon as readers and audiences had taken in the new plays, they were changed again, taking new forms as the first experiments were themselves modified and reinvented. Writers constantly adapted the texts of plays to meet new requirements. These and other issues are explored by a group of international experts from a comparative perspective, giving particular emphasis to one of the great European comic dramatists, the Portuguese Gil Vicente. Tom Earle is King John II Professor of Portuguese at Oxford. Catarina Fouto is a Lecturer in Portuguese at King's College London.

This handbook scrutinises the links between English literature and religion, specifically in the early modern period; the interactions between the two fields are explored through an examination of the literary impact the British church had on published work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.