Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (ASMAR), Vol. 30

Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period

By Yasmin Haskell (University of Western Australia) and Juanita Feros Ruys (University of Sydney)
2010 | 312 + vii pp. | 2 ills. | Hardcover | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-408-9 | MRTS 360
$56 | €40

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The essays in this volume, many of which are in dialogue with Françoise Waquet’s Latin or the Empire of a Sign, showcase some of the most exciting and sophisticated new work in the field of neo-Latin studies. They illustrate the significance of “Latinity” for understanding the early modern world from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and will be of interest not only to neo-Latinists but also to students of the modern European vernaculars, social historians of language, lexicographers, intellectual and scientific historians, and to cultural and cross-cultural historians. Under the second term of the title, “Alterity,” this volume explores the “opposition” of humanist Latin to medieval Latin and the modern vernaculars, the “otherness” of women’s Latinity, the construction of the non-European in Latin humanism, and the Latin writings of non-Europeans, from indigenous Americans to Africans. The exploration of these issues helps us more fully to understand what Latin “really meant” during the early modern period.

Table of Contents

  • Yasmin Haskell: Distant Empires, Buried Signs: In Search of New Worlds of Latin in the Early Modern Period (Introduction)

  • Ann Moss: Other Latins, Other Cultures

  • Siobhan O’Rourke and Alison Holcroft: Latin and the Vernacular: The Silence at the Beginning of Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum

  • John Considine: De ortu et occasu linguae latinae: The Latin Language and the Origins of the Concept of Language Death

  • Christopher Allen: Boileau’s Art poétique Latinized

    Appendix: Gacon’s Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) Art Poétique translated into Latin by François Gacon (1667–1725), text edited and annotated by Christopher Allen and Frances Muecke

  • Juanita Feros Ruys: From Virile Eloquence to Hysteria: Reading the Latinity of Heloise in the Early Modern Period

  • Andrew Laird: Latin in Cuauhtémoc’s shadow: Humanism and the Politics of Language in Mexico after the Conquest

  • Alexandra de Brito Mariano: New World ‘Ethiopians’: Slavery and Mining in Early Modern Brazil through Latin Eyes

  • John Gilmore: “Sub herili venditur Hasta”: An Early Eighteenth-Century Justification of the Slave Trade by a Colonial Poet

  • Grant Parker: Can the Subaltern Speak Latin? The Case of Capitein

  • John Gallucci: Latin Terms and Periphrases for Native Americans in the Jesuit Relations

  • Marc Laureys: History and Poetry in Philippus Meyerus’s Humanist Latin Portraits of the Prophet Mohammed and the Ottoman rulers (1594)