The World of Neo-Latin: Epistolography

This paper discusses the first of twelve books that constitute the letter collection of Marsilio Ficino, who was a fifteenth-century philosopher from Florence and a major figure in the development of Neo-Platonism. I argue for the first time that Ficino deliberately structured his letters into an autonomous narrative that transcends historical accuracy and self-promotion.

In my paper, I would like to present the self-fashioning strategies of Nicolaus Olahus while he wrote and compiled his collection of letters, Epistolae familiares. Concerning the collection, Olahus obviously tried to produce a favorable image of himself, that he was a honored member of Erasmus of Rotterdam’ network, loyal to the Habsburg Emperors, and last but not at least, devoted to the Catholic Church, all throughout the decade he spent in the Netherlands.

The role of learned and writing women in the early modern period has been increasingly studied since the 1970’s, when pioneering scholars started questioning whether, briefly put, women, too, had a Renaissance (Kelly 1977).

Celio Secondo Curione (1503-1569) was amongst the leaders of the so-called ‘Italian Heretical Movement’: as a heterodox thinker he published several works of wide success in Europe, such as especially the Pasquillus ecstaticus, translated and published in many languages, and immediately included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Jacobus Trigland the Younger, 1652-1705, was a highly respected Professor of Theology, and the Hebrew Language at Leiden University. He was particular involved in the field known as “Christian Hebraism,” the study of Hebrew literature from all eras, in parallel with the Humanistic study of Greek and Latin.

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century the humanist scholar Cassandra Fedele (1465-1558) embarked upon a correspondence in Latin with Beatrice of Aragon (1457-1508), daughter of Ferdinand I of Naples and wife of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, whom she married in 1476.