Brill Research Perspectives in Latinity and Classical Reception in the Early Modern Period – serie

The history of European integration goes back to the early modern centuries (c. 1400–1800), when Europeans tried to set themselves apart as a continental community with distinct political, religious, cultural, and social values in the face of hitherto unseen societal change and global awakening. The range of concepts and images ascribed to Europeanness in that respect is well documented in Neo-Latin literature, since Latin constituted the international lingua franca from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In Europe and Europeanness in Early Modern Latin Literature Isabella Walser-Bürgler examines the most prominent concepts of Europe and European identity as expressed in Neo-Latin sources. It is aimed at both an interested general audience and a professional readership from the fields of Latin studies, early modern history, and the history of ideas.

Situating the close relationship between Latin and music within its historical context, this volume presents an overview of Latin and music in the educational system of the time – schools, choir schools and universities – and the development and pervasive influence of musical humanism. This influence is seen primarily in the writings of music theorists, the documents of dedication found in music publications and above all in the settings of classical and Neo-Latin texts as well as in some liturgical and extra-liturgical ones. Discussion of this repertoire forms the centre of the volume. The emphasis is on practical matters: the study of Latin and music, and the music’s composition, performance and reception.

The first early modern women Latinists lived in mid-fourteenth century Italy, and were educated as diplomats. By the fifteenth century, other upper-class women were educated in order to perform as prodigies on behalf of their city. Both strands of education for women spread to other European countries in the course of the sixteenth century: the principal women humanists were either princesses or courtiers. In the seventeenth century Latin lost its importance as a language of diplomacy and was no longer needed at court, but there was still a place for the ‘woman prodigy’, and a variety of women performed in this way. However, the productions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century women Latinists are more extensive and more varied than those of their predecessors, and include scientific writing and ambitious translations. By the mid-nineteenth century the integration of studious women into the wider academy was well under way.

Did you know that many reputed Neo-Latin authors like Erasmus of Rotterdam also wrote in forms of Ancient Greek? Erasmus used this New Ancient Greek language to celebrate a royal return from Spain to Brussels, to honor deceded friends like Johann Froben, to pray while on a pilgrimage, and to promote a new Aristotle edition. But classical bilingualism was not the prerogative of a happy few Renaissance luminaries: less well-known humanists, too, activated their classical bilingual competence to impress patrons; nuance their ideas and feelings; manage information by encoding gossip and private matters in Greek; and adorn books and art with poems in the two languagges, and so on. As reader, you discover promising research perspectives to bridge the gap between the long-standing discipline of Neo-Latin studies and the young field of New Ancient Greek studies.

This volume sheds new light on the extraordinary richness and variety of love poetry written in Latin from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. It shows how Latin love poets reworked classical Roman and Greek models, and engaged in dialogue with mediaeval and contemporary vernacular traditions of poetry. They used the poetic language of love in Latin to reflect and comment on wider social, ethical and literary issues, and reconfigured its codes of representation in response to changing conceptions of love in the philosophical and religious spheres. Their poetry often aligned itself with dominant discourses of power and gender, but it could also be subtly subversive or even openly transgressive.

When did the first Latin texts describing Japan emerge? When, how and why did some Japanese people began to actively communicate in the Latin language as early as the 1580s? How did Latin, the language of the ancient Romans and a hallmark of the West (the ‘European sign’), change through contact with a region and culture so remote from its home? This monograph addresses these and other questions while looking at European-authored travelogues, missionary reports, plays, a Vergilian epic and even haiku as well as Japanese-authored Latin prose and verse. Transcriptions of several never-before published Latin texts composed by the Japanese from the 1610s to 2024s are appended.