Karl A. E.. Enenkel - Böcker

The papers in this volume offer a wide range of examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present.This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

Commentaries played an important role in the transmission of the classical heritage. Early modern intellectuals rarely read classical authors in a simple and “direct” form, but generally via intermediary paratexts, especially all kinds of commentaries. Commentaries presented the classical texts in certain ways that determined and guided the readers’ perception and usages of the texts being commented upon. Early modern commentaries shaped not only school and university education and professional scholarship, but also intellectual and cultural life in the broadest sense, including politics, religion, art, entertainment, health care, geographical discoveries etc., and even various professional activities and segments of life that were seemingly far removed from scholarship and learning, such as warfare and engineering.Contributors include: Susanna de Beer, Valéry Berlincourt, Marijke Crab, Jeanine De Landtsheer, Karl Enenkel, Gergő Gellérfi, Trine Arlund Hass, Ekaterina Ilyushechkina, Ronny Kaiser, Marc Laureys, Christoph Pieper, Katharina Suter-Meyer, and Floris Verhaart.

This volume tries to map out the intriguing amalgam of the different, partly conflicting approaches that shaped early modern zoology. Early modern reading of the “Book of Nature” comprised, among others, the description of species in the literary tradition of antiquity, as well as empirical observations, vivisection, and modern eyewitness accounts; the “translation” of zoological species into visual art for devotion, prayer, and religious education, but also scientific and scholarly curiosity; theoretical, philosophical, and theological thinking regarding God’s creation, the Flood, and the generation of animals; new attempts with respect to nomenclature and taxonomy; the discovery of unknown species in the New World; impressive Wunderkammer collections, and the keeping of exotic animals in princely menageries. The volume demonstrates that theology and philology played a pivotal role in the complex formation of this new science.Contributors include: Brian Ogilvie, Bernd Roling, Erik Jorink, Paul Smith, Sabine Kalff, Tamás Demeter, Amanda Herrin, Marrigje Rikken, Alexander Loose, Sophia Hendrikx, and Karl Enenkel.

This book throws new light on the question of authorship in the Latin literature of the later medieval and in the early modern periods. It shows that authorship was not something to be automatically assumed in an empathic sense, but was chiefly to be found in the paratextual features of works and was imparted by them. This study examines the strategies and tools used by authors ca. 1350-1650, to assert their authorial aspirations. Enenkel demonstrates how they incorporated themselves into secular, ecclesiastical, spiritual and intellectual power structures. He shows that in doing so rituals linked to the ceremonial of ruling, played a fundamental role, for example, the ritual presentation of a book or the crowning of a poet. Furthermore Enenkel establishes a series of qualifications for entry to the Respublica litteraria, with which the authors of books announced their claims to authorship.