Neo-Latin Texts in the Americas and Europe

Soon after Poggio's re-discovery of the text in 1417, Statius' Silvae became a favorite subject of scholarship and imitation among Italian Renaissance intellectuals. Yet no other neo-Latin poet assimilated Statius' poetics as thoroughly and deeply as Angelo Poliziano. Besides gathering a huge amount of scholarly material for his lectures on Statius, he composed four inaugural praelectiones (held at the Studio between 1482 and 1491) in the form of long hexametric poems, under the Statian title of Silvae.

Although 16th century Latin travel narratives of the New World's conquerors and colonizers provide a wealth of contemporary perspectives on timeless questions about identity and human nature, these texts are largely neglected because they occupy a space between disciplines; historians of the early modern Americas are rarely trained in Latin, while classicists and medievalists primarily treat pre-modern Europe.

At the end of the long theological work Consilia et Responsa Theologica appear thirty-nine Latin poems by Susanna Sprögel. This paper will connect these poems to the Consilia, to Pietist religious movements in Germany, and to traditions of Classical education, especially verse composition.

Like Iberian Neolatin poetry in general, the three surviving Latin odes of Garcilaso de la Vega (1501-36) have received almost no critical attention, despite the recent efflorescence of work on the reception, in his Spanish-language output, of Roman poetry and of the Roman imperial idea (stimulated especially by Helgerson 2007). This paper aims to fill part of that gap where the third ode, “Sedes ad Cyprias Venus,” is concerned.

Niels Hemmingsen (Nicolaus Hemming) (1513-1600), the Danish Lutheran humanist, theologian, philosopher, and professor of Greek, Hebrew, dialectic, and theology at the University of Copenhagen, was famous in his own day but now languishes in almost total obscurity, although he deserves to be much better known.