Insolitum est feminam scire Latine: on the gender of Latin in early modern educational treatises
By Irene Peirano Garrison, Harvard University
While many of the pedagogical tools and practices employed today in the study of Latin were
developed in the early modern period, much work remains to be done to delineate and
complicate these genealogies and histories (Moss; Jardine and Grafton; Waquet; Ostler). This
Patagonian Giants, Orinocan Acephaloi: The Recursive Printed Legacy of the "Plinian Races" Transplanted to the Americas, Image and Text
By Julia C. Hernandez, New York University
That Greco-Roman accounts of wondrous or “monstrous” races at the far-flung corners of the oikumene—from giants to dog-headed cynocephaloi to headless blymmyae—shaped medieval Europeans’ conceptions of regions distant to their own may not be entirely surprising to casual observers: many modern interpreters remain primed to see a medieval “Dark Age” rather than the era of rich global interconnectedness recent scholarship has emphasized.
The Early Modern Re-Invention of Rome’s ‘African Monstrosities’
By Elena Giusti, Warwick University
Classical Tradition and the Alterity of the New World in Peter Martyr’s Letters to Pomponius Laetus
By Nicoletta Bruno, Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald
Peter Martyr of Anghiera has always been classified as a humanist, but more recently as an ‘anthropologist’, due to the originality of his thought and the novelty of his position on various aspects of history and culture of his time and on humankind. Both in De Orbe Novo Decades (1530) and in the Opus Epistolarum (1488-1525) a ‘New Humanism’ comes to light, which sees in the novelty of the encounter with the ‘Other’ a way to reconsider the traditional canons of human values.