Neo-Latin

All Senior Members, Postgraduate Students, and Academic Visitors Welcome

Cultures across Languages – Cambridge Society for Neo-Latin Studies Seminar

The seminar brings together scholars and students interested in any aspect of Latin in the postclassical world, whether this is imaginative literature in Latin, or Latin as the primary language of intellectual exchange in premodern periods, and its sundry interactions with the vernaculars. In its new home under the English Faculty’s sponsorship, the seminar aims to offer a space for thinking in particular about English writing and cultural practice against the broader multilingual canvas of culture within, across, and beyond premodern Europe.

2023-24

These are all lunchtime seminars (12pm-1.15pm) -- do feel free to bring your lunch -- apart from 31st May

19th October 2023
Faculty of English, GR/04
Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge), ‘Eloquence and history, sedition and property: Defending universities in Elizabethan England’

23rd November 2023
Faculty of English, GR/04
Evgeniia Ganberg (Cambridge), 'Mistaken identity, civil unrest, and talking rivers: Staging the Trojan War in seventeenth-century Salzburg'

25th Jan 2024
Faculty of English, SR/24
Floris Verhaart (Warwick), 'Dominicus Baudius (1561-1613) and the roles of women in the early modern republic of letters'

15th Feb 2024
Faculty of English, SR/24
Tomos Evans (California State/The Warburg Institute), 'Editing Milton’s Latin and Greek poems: Challenges and opportunities'

2nd May 2024
Faculty of English, SR/24
Yves Peyré (Paul Valéry, Montpellier), 'Jean Miélot's civic mythography'

A Roundtable of the Neo-Latin Seminar 31st May 2024

Faculty of English, SR/24, 2-6:30pm

'Secondariness'

Neo-Latin has often been perceived as a profoundly ‘secondary’ medium: temporally secondary, relative to classical Latin, and in terms of language acquisition; inventively and emotionally secondary, in its supposed reliance on allusion and received ideas; even qualitatively secondary, compared to both classical and vernacular creativity. Participants will address neo-Latin's supposed secondariness from a range of perspectives and fields.

Programme

Welcome and introductory remarks by Katie Mennis (2pm)

Session 1: Position papers followed by general discussion (2:15-4pm)

Sheldon Brammall ‘Very, Very Secondary: Bembo’s De Virgilii Culice and the Play of Erudition’

Jack Colley ‘Secondary Sallust: Costanzo Felici and the Bellum Catilinae in the Early Cinquecento’

Philip Hardie ‘Secondariness and Golden Latin in Girolamo Vida’s De arte poetica’

Justin Haynes ‘Petrarch’s Exclusionary Secondariness in the Africa’

BREAK (4-4:30pm)

Session 2: Position papers followed by general discussion (4:30-6:30pm)

Anna Hartmann ‘The Death of Ajax and the Secondariness of Neo-Latin Translation’

Gesine Manuwald ‘Thomas Campion: a ‘primary’ or a ‘secondary’ poet?’

Katie Mennis ‘The New Poete in and ex tempore: Spenser’s Neo-Latin Style’

Leah Whittington ‘“Thy merit in supply”: Ben Jonson, Henry Savile, and the Paradoxes of Secondary Authorship.

Register to attend in person or online by emailing kamm5@cam.ac.uk- places limited.

Register to attend online via this Zoom link

For further information about the seminar, please contact Andrew Taylor (awt24@cam.ac.uk), Tania Demetriou (td227@cam.ac.uk) or Anna-Maria Hartmann (amrh3@cam.ac.uk