Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae – serie

Original Latin text with English translation on facing pages. In this essay from 1614 the Neo-Latin poet, translator, and commentator John Barclay describes the manners and mores of his European contemporaries. He derives the sources of an individual's peculiarities of behavior and temperament from the ‘genius' - the individual character created by each person's upbringing, time of life, and profession. Barclay likewise describes each nation's genius, its national character, and provides some of the geographical and historical background from which he claims this genius arose. The essay is a valuable study, not only for the illustration it offers of a pre-Romantic view of Europe, but for a glimpse into the continuities that mark European civilization. The introduction describes the Classical and Renaissance background to Barclay's work, with a detailed biography of the author. The Latin text reproduces Barclay's first edition, with the necessary corrections. The English translation (1631) is that of Thomas May, a skillful translator of Vergil, Lucan, and other classical authors, as well as a playwright in the manner of Ben Jonson. The book features illustrations of selected pages from early editions of the text, and includes contemporary portraits of Barclay and May. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

First critical edition of Burmeister's newly discovered Aulularia. Joannes Burmeister of Lüneburg (1576–1638) was among the greatest Neo-Latin poets of the German Baroque. His masterpieces, now mostly lost, are Christian ‘inversions’ of the Classical Roman comedies of Plautus. With only minimal changes in language and none in meter, each transforms Plautus’s pagan plays into comedies based on biblical themes. Fascinating in their own right, they also bring back to attention forgotten genres of Renaissance literature. This volume offers the first critical edition of the newly discovered Aulularia (1629), which exists in a sole copy, and the fragments of Mater-Virgo (1621), which adapts Plautus’s Amphitryo to show the Nativity of Jesus. The introduction offers reconstructions of Susanna (based on Casina) and Asinaria (1625), Burmeister's two lost or unpublished inversions of Plautus. Fontaine also provides the only biography of Burmeister based on archival sources, along with discussions of his inimitable Latinity and the perilous context of war and witch-burning in which Burmeister wrote. Burmeister's inversions bear witness to the special talent of his age for the creative reworking of Classical literature, such as Monteverdi's Poppea or Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, as well as to his tumultuous times, with his views on military abuses in the Thirty Years' War prefiguring those of Grimmelshausen's Simplicius Simplicissimus. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Review Content).

In 17th-century intellectual life, the ideas of the Renaissance humanist Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) were omnipresent. The publication of his Politica in 1589 had made Lipsius's name as an original and controversial political thinker. The sequel, the Monita et exempla politica (Admonitions), published in 1605, was meant as an illustration of Lipsius's political thought as expounded in the Politica. Its aim was to offer concrete models of behavior for rulers against the background of Habsburg politics.Lipsius's later political treatise also forms an indispensable key to interpret the place and function of the Politica in Lipsius's political discourse and in early modern political thought. The Admonitions - widely read, edited and translated in the 17th and 18th centuries - show Lipsius's pivotal role in the genesis of modern political philosophy.