The World of Neo-Latin: Current Research

Giovanni Pascoli's Laureolus (1893) combines the folklore motif of the divine visitor, familiar from the Philemon and Baucis story for example, with an obscure Roman god and a notorious criminal. At rst these three ideas seem ill assorted, but I will argue that the name Laureolus is the thread that holds the poem together, and that the mood and style of the poem are more similar to Pascoli's Italian lyrics than to most of his Latin narratives.

Michael Serveto or Servetus was born in Spain in 1511 and on his mother’s side, belonged to a distinguished family of converted Jews. After a brilliant career as an author and physician, he was burned at the stake for heresy in Geneva in 1553, an act for which Serveto held John Calvin primarily responsible.

By one calculation, between 50,000 and 100,000 university dissertations were written in Latin in Germany and Austria between 1650 and 1750 (Leonhardt, 3). While the majority of these have remained unstudied, and may even deserve their obscurity, there are also some that amply reward scholarly attention. This paper analyzes one of the more unusual of these, focusing not on its stylistic merits (it is written in typical Lutheran scholastic prose), but raising questions regarding its literary structure and aspirations.

The paper intends to present an overview of the Latinity of Prospero Intorcetta (1625-1696), a Sicilian Jesuit who was sent to China as a missionary in 1657.

The purpose of this paper is to present a portion of my current research on Theodore Beza’s 1579 Latin verse translation of the biblical Psalms. I will argue for the clear influence of Catullus in Beza’s Latin Psalms, which is a proof not only of the enduring value of pagan poetry for the Genevan reformer, but more broadly, of the new and abundant life which the classical world enjoyed in the sixteenth-century Reformed church.

Despite his being perhaps the most prolific Neo-Latin author of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, Arcadius Avellanus’ work has received little or no serious treatment. A Hungarian by birth, Avellanus immigrated to the United States in his twenties and immediately began a career in writing and publishing that lasted four decades. In order to stimulate change in contemporary pedagogy, Avellanus composed a textbook of active Latin.

Theophanes Prokopovich, the right-hand man of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great in reforming the Russian Orthodox Church, had a greater influence on the political and ecclesiastical circles of his day than in education; nevertheless, his earlier pedagogical career in his native Ukraine was important because in his efforts to introduce the youth of his day to the fine points of the Latin language and literature he showed himself a person who looked to the west for the models he wished his students to emulate.

Thomas May's Supplementum Lucani (1640), often sniffed at as little more than a Latin crib of his earlier English Continuation from ten years earlier, is more fruitful when read as a unique volume treating the same subject. May's fidelity to Lucan, once considered his signal virtue, is not unswerving. The tensions between following his model and pursuing the critical concerns of his age, especially in politics, have been noted (Paleit ch. 6 & 7; Norbrook). In this paper I discuss May's sophisticated reconstitution of an early modern Caesar.

It has long been maintained that Psalm 1 is not only introductory to but is also programmatic for the rest of the collection of the Psalms (cf. Dahood 1966). It stands to reason, then, that the same would be true of the versions of Psalm 1 found in the various verse translations of the Psalter that were produced all over Europe in the sixteenth century in an outburst of literary and devotional activity that died away almost as quickly as it had arisen (Gaertner 1956).

Castiglione’s Alcon (1515) and Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis (1638/39) are pastoral laments that, in following Virgil’s second Eclogue in certain aspects of form and content, translate tropes of unrequited desire into those of mourning—though sometimes reluctantly and barely. Their narratives multiply the sense of loss and the absence of the beloved: each speaker—like the author himself—has been away from home when he hears of the death of his friend.