Neo-Latin studies is the study of Latin and its literature from the Italian Renaissance to the present day. [1] Neo-Latin is important for understanding early modern European culture and society, including the development of literature, science, religion and vernacular languages.
The study of Neo-Latin began to gain momentum as a specific topic in the 1970s. The International Association for Neo-Latin Studies was founded in 1971, leading to a series of conferences. The first major guide to the field appeared in 1977. [2]
While the topic is reasonably easy to define, the result is a very wide topic, covering many centuries, different subject matter and a very wide geographical spread, creating significant challenges for methodology. [3] Nevertheless, the literature is often some of the most significant output of the period:
we are dealing with literature (in the wider sense of the word) that witnesses the development of ideas and knowledge in Europe for almost four hundred years, indeed, with texts that are in reality very often the chief and most important sources for the investigation of the history of learning and culture. It is remarkable that many learned scholars today are unaware of the existence of this huge treasury. [4]
Study of Neo-Latin is necessarily cross-disciplinary and requires Latinists to engage with audiences who are unfamiliar with Latin and the extent of contributions in Latin to their own fields, which are usually untranslated and untranscribed. Part of the work of the field is to make texts accessible, and translated, and another is to help non-Latinists to engage with the material and where necessary to challenge misconceptions about the nature of Latin writing in the period. Such misconceptions include the longevity of the relevance Latin, which is typically underestimated, [5] the "derivative" nature of Neo-Latin writing, [6] or that it competed, in direct opposition, with vernaculars. Neo-Latin studies help reveal subtler relationships between languages, through promotion of standardisation and cross fertilisation through introducing new models of genre, for example.
The relevance of Neo-Latin studies to other areas of enquiry can be said to decline after 1800, when Latin has become much more marginal to the production of knowledge in Europe. [7]
Neo-Latin studies suffers from being a relatively new discipline, without large resources attached to it. Longer term, there are challenges from the predominance of English, as Neo-Latin needs to be studied with knowledge of the vernaculars of the period, as well as the decline in confidence in Latin even among Renaissance scholars. [8]
Where it meets linguistic questions, Neo-Latin studies does not have a clear remit within studies of Latin, which often do not look at post-Classical Latin in depth: "Despite the number and importance of the texts written in Latin of the Modern Era, the overwhelming bulk of linguistic research is still limited to its ancient varieties." This is especially striking given the vast size of the Neo-Latin corpus, which is currently simply unquantifiable. [9]
Neo-Latin is the style of written Latin used in original literary, scholarly, and scientific works, first in Italy during the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then across northern Europe after about 1500, as a key feature of the humanist movement. Through comparison with Latin of the Classical period, scholars from Petrarch onwards promoted a standard of Latin closer to that of the ancient Romans, especially in grammar, style, and spelling. The term Neo-Latin was however coined much later, probably in Germany in the late 1700s, as Neulatein, spreading to French and other languages in the nineteenth century.
The Latin school was the grammar school of 14th- to 19th-century Europe, though the latter term was much more common in England. Other terms used include Lateinschule in Germany, or later Gymnasium. Latin schools were also established in Colonial America.
Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Literary Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the Renaissance humanism movement. This style of Latin is regarded as the first phase of the standardised and grammatically "Classical" Neo-Latin which continued through the 16th–19th centuries, and was used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international audience.
Latin is a member of the broad family of Italic languages. Its alphabet, the Latin alphabet, emerged from the Old Italic alphabets, which in turn were derived from the Etruscan, Greek and Phoenician scripts. Historical Latin came from the prehistoric language of the Latium region, specifically around the River Tiber, where Roman civilization first developed. How and when Latin came to be spoken has long been debated.
Jozef A. M. K. IJsewijn was a Belgian Latinist. He studied classical philology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he became a professor in 1967. An authority on Neo-Latin literature, IJsewijn has been called "the founding father of modern neo-Latin studies". In 1980, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences. A collection of essays in his memory was published in 2000.
Contemporary Latin is the form of the Literary Latin used since the end of the 19th century. Various kinds of contemporary Latin can be distinguished, including the use of Neo-Latin words in taxonomy and in science generally, and the fuller ecclesiastical use in the Catholic Church – but Living or Spoken Latin is the primary subject of this article.
Dirk Martens was a printer and editor in the County of Flanders. He published over fifty books by Erasmus and the very first edition of Thomas More's Utopia. He was the first to print Greek and Hebrew characters in the Netherlands. In 1856 a statue of Martens was erected on the main square of the town of his birth, Aalst.
Jesuit drama was a form of theatre practised in the colleges of the Society of Jesus between the 16th and 18th centuries, as a way of instructing students in rhetoric, assimilating Christian values and imparting Catholic doctrine.
The Grammarians' War (1519–1521) was a conflict between rival systems of teaching Latin. The two main antagonists were English grammarians and schoolmasters William Horman and Robert Whittington. The War involved Latin primers called Vulgaria, which were thus named because they contained "vulgar" sayings or phrases that schoolchildren were expected to use in normal life, such as "Sit away or I shall give thee a blow," and, "Would God we might go play!"
The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies (LBI) in Innsbruck is a research institute of the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft. Partner organizations of the LBI are the University of Innsbruck, the University of Freiburg, the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and the Pontificio Comitato di Scienze Storiche in Rome.
Germain de Brie, sometimes Latinized as Germanus Brixius, was a French Renaissance humanist scholar and poet. He was closely associated with Erasmus and had a well-known literary feud with Thomas More.
Herman Hugo was a Jesuit priest, writer and military chaplain. His Pia desideria, a spiritual emblem book published in Antwerp in 1624, was "the most popular religious emblem book of the seventeenth century". It went through 42 Latin editions and was widely translated up to the 18th century.
Jacob Cruucke or Jacob van Cruyck, also known by his Latinized name Jacobus Cruquius and in French-language literature as Jacques de Crucque was a Flemish humanist, philologist, and scholar of the 16th century. He is mainly known for his publications on the works of the Roman lyric poet Horace based on ancient manuscripts kept in the library of a local monastery, since lost to fire.
Conrad Goclenius was a Renaissance humanist, and Latin scholar, and the closest confidant of humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who was born in Mengeringhausen in the Landgraviate of Hesse in 1490, and died in Leuven on 25 January 1539.
Matthias Garbitius or Matija Grbić was a German humanist, classical philologist and translator. Born in Istria, he emigrated to Nuremberg. Between 1545 and 1557 he was the dean of the philosophical faculty at the University of Tübingen. He is the first known Protestant from the Balkans.
Hendrik Alfons De Vocht (1878–1962), sometimes Henry or Henri, was a pioneer in the academic study of Renaissance Latin texts from the Low Countries.
Terence Tunberg is a professor of Latin at the University of Kentucky, specialising in Neo-Latin studies, especially the use of Ciceronian language; and the use of spoken Latin as a teaching tool. He is also Director of the university's Institute for Latin Studies. His academic output is in both Latin and English.
Dirk Sacré is a professor of Latin at KU Leuven. He was general editor of Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia, and is co-editor of Officina Neolatina and Pluteus Neolatinus. He is also on several editorial boards including of Vox Latina. He is an advisor to the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies and was Vice-President of the Academia Latinitati Fovendae, an institute that promotes the use of Latin. He also authored the second part of the standard volume on Neo-Latin, the Companion to Neo-Latin studies, published in 1998.
Giovanni Armonio Marso, called Johannes Harmonius Marsus in Latin, was an Italian Renaissance humanist, friar, playwright, poet and organist.