Neo-Latin in the Old and New World: Current Scholarship

This paper investigates the reception of the emperor Augustus in the Latin literature of Italian Fascism (1922-1943), and specifically in two poems by the Jesuit poet Vittorio Genovesi: Roma Caput Mundi (1935) and Ara Pacis Augustae in Urbe restituta (1938). It shows how in these Latin poems Genovesi advocates the leading role of Christianity in ensuring the historical continuity between Augustus’ Empire and Fascist Rome.

This paper will examine Galileo’s classical allusions in the dedicatory preface to Sidereus Nuncius. The treatise memorializes Galileo’s discovery of four moons that orbit Jupiter which he famously observed with his telescope. He dedicated the treatise to his patron Cosimo II de’Medici (1590-1621) and conspicuously makes almost direct quotations from Cicero, Pliny the Elder, and Propertius throughout this preface. The passages that he quoted primarily involve deification and poetic memory.

This paper analyzes the ways in which the authors of the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis used intertextuality and allusions to Greco-Roman culture as tools to defend indigenous medical practices against European prejudices. In the year 1536, a group of Franciscan friars established the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (Mexico City) in order to educate Aztec (henceforth Nahua) young men in the liberal arts (Silvermoon 2007, Emmart 1940).

Martin Luther’s relationship with the city of Rome is not uncomplicated. When the young Augustinian friar first caught sight of the eternal city (probably from Monte Mario) in 1510 or 1511, he says that he dropped to his knees and saluted it as “holy” (Salve, sancta Roma!). To judge from his own reminiscences of his youthful trip years later, it seems that his attitude towards the city changed completely during the course of his only visit there.

Exemplarity was a longstanding cultural practice in antiquity, directed toward transmitting and perpetuating ethical norms and values as well as establishing historical consciousness and identity. From early on, poetry played an important role in the process of educating by verbal example and inspiring younger generations to emulation. In this paper, I would like to explore the use of exemplarity in Petrarch’s unfinished Latin epic Africa (published posthumously in 1397).

Ubertino Posculo’s decision to study Greek in Constantinople in 1452 thrust him into the heart of a cataclysmic event which ushered in a new world order: the capture of the city by the Turks in 1453. Enslaved to a Turk, ransomed, then captured by pirates and nearly sold into slavery a second time before his ultimate escape, Posculo began composing the Constantinopolis shortly after returning to Italy in 1455.