Did you know that many reputed Neo-Latin authors like Erasmus of Rotterdam also wrote in forms of Ancient Greek? Erasmus used this New Ancient Greek language to celebrate a royal return from Spain to Brussels, to honor deceded friends like Johann Froben, to pray while on a pilgrimage, and to promote a new Aristotle edition. But classical bilingualism was not the prerogative of a happy few Renaissance luminaries: less well-known humanists, too, activated their classical bilingual competence to impress patrons; nuance their ideas and feelings; manage information by encoding gossip and private matters in Greek; and adorn books and art with poems in the two languagges, and so on. As reader, you discover promising research perspectives to bridge the gap between the long-standing discipline of Neo-Latin studies and the young field of New Ancient Greek studies.

Who or what makes innovation spread? Ten case-studies from Greco-Roman Antiquity and the early modern period address human and non-human agency in innovation. Was Erasmus the ‘superspreader’ of the use of New Ancient Greek? How did a special type of clamp contribute to architectural innovation in Delphi? What agents helped diffuse a new festival culture in the eastern parts of the Roman empire? How did a context of status competition between scholars and poets at the Ptolemaic court help deify a lock of hair? Examples from different societal domains illuminate different types of agency in historical innovation.

This volume offers a wide range of sample passages from literature written in Latin in the British Isles during the period from about 1500 to 1800. It includes a general introduction to and bibliography to the Latin literature of these centuries, as well as Latin texts with English translations, introductions and notes. These texts present a rich panorama of the different literary genres, styles and themes flourishing at the time, illustrating the role of Latin texts in the development of literary genres, the diversity of authors writing in Latin in early modern Britain, and the importance of Latin in contemporary political, religious and scientific debates. The collection, which includes both texts by well-known authors (such as John Milton, Thomas More and George Buchanan) and previously unpublished items, can be used as a point of entry for students at school and university level, but will also be of interest to specialists in a number of academic disciplines.

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.

Inspired by Theodore Papanghelis’ Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death (1987), this collective volume brings together seventeen contributions, written by an international team of experts, exploring the different ways in which Latin authors and some of their modern readers created narratives of life, love and death. Taken together the papers offer stimulating readings of Latin texts over many centuries, examined in a variety of genres and from various perspectives: poetics and authorial self-fashioning; intertextuality; fiction and ‘reality’; gender and queer studies; narratological readings; temporality and aesthetics; genre and meta-genre; structures of the narrative and transgression of boundaries on the ideological and the formalistic level; reception; meta-dramatic and feminist accounts-the female voice. Overall, the articles offer rich insights into the handling and development of these narratives from Classical Greece through Rome up to modern English poetry.

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.

Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas opens a window onto classical receptions across the Hispanophone, Lusophone, Francophone and Anglophone Americas during the early modern period, examining classical reception as a phenomenon in transhemispheric perspective for the first

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 volume addresses the idea of the Baroque in European literature in Latin. With contributions by scholars from various disciplines and countries, and by looking at a range of texts from across Europe, the volume offers case studies to deepen scholarly understanding of this important literary phenomenon and inspire future research. A key aim of the volume is to address the distinctiveness of these texts by interrogating the usefulness and specificity of the term 'Baroque', especially in relation to the classical rules it transgresses to produce effects of grandeur, richness, and exuberance in a range of secular and sacred arts (e.g. music, architecture, painting), as well as various forms of literature (e.g. prose, poetry, drama). The contributors consider how and why Latin writing mutated from earlier humanist paradigms, thus exploring how ideas of 'early modern' and 'Baroque' are related, and examine the interplay of the theory and practice of the 'Baroque', including its debts to and deviations from ancient models, and its limits and limitations.

Presenting a range of Neo-Latin poems written by distinguished classical scholars across Europe from c. 1490 to c. 1900, this anthology includes a selection of celebrated names in the history of scholarship. Individual chapters present the Neo-Latin poems alongside new English translations (usually the first) and accompanying introductions and commentaries that annotate these verses for a modern readership, and contextualise them within the careers of their authors and the history of classical scholarship in the Renaissance and early modern period. An appealing feature of Renaissance and early modern Latinity is the composition of fine Neo-Latin poetry by major classical scholars, and the interface between this creative work and their scholarly research. In some cases, the two are actually combined in the same work. In others, the creative composition and scholarship accompany each other along parallel tracks, when scholars are moved to write their own verse in the style of the subjects of their academic endeavours. In still further cases, early modern scholars produced fine Latin verse as a result of the act of translation, as they attempted to render ancient Greek poetry in a fitting poetic form for their contemporary readers of Latin.