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.
Neo-Latin Seminar, Michaelmas Term 2025
Thursday 23rd October, 12pm, GR/04
John Colley (Cambridge)
'From Terence’s Eunuchus to Hacket’s Loyola (1616): Muteness, Race, and Disability Drag in Early Modern Drama'
I argue that muteness is an identifiable and imitable feature of dramatic form that Renaissance playwrights inherited from ancient drama. The talk focuses on a Latin comedy staged at Trinity College, John Hacket’s Loyola (1616), which puts unusual pressure on this feature. More specifically, Hacket’s play – which reworks Terence’s Eunuchus – interrogates the conventional muteness of young women and slaves in Roman New Comedy. It does so by reworking Terence’s eunuch-as-disguise plot as a black-up disguise plot, acted out by three characters, one of whom (called ‘Mutus’) feigns a pathological inability to speak. Hacket’s response to muteness as an aspect of classical dramatic form newly suggests a relationship between classical reception and discourses of gender, race, and disability in early modern texts.
Thursday 13th November, 12pm, GR/04
Stefano Cianciosi (Oxford)
'Classical Literature at the Court of Matthias Corvinus: Naldo Naldi’s De Laudibus Augustae Bibliothecae'
This paper is an introduction to De Laudibus Augustae Bibliothecae, a Latin hexameter poem composed by the Florentine humanist Naldo Naldi between 1488 and 1490 to celebrate the library of Matthias Corvinus in Buda—the second largest library in Europe at the time, after the Vatican. Drawing on my forthcoming Italian edition, translation, and commentary, I will offer a first overview of the main features of this text and the issues they raise. While Naldi may never have visited Corvinus’ Library, recent scholarship has shown that his account draws on reliable intermediaries and on canonical descriptions of the ideal humanist library. I will sketch the poem’s structure, examine selected classical intertexts, and highlight some distinctive stylistic traits. Attention will also be paid to the poem’s ambiguous literary status, which stands at the intersection of panegyric and ekphrastic literature, and to textual problems that reveal the need for a new critical edition.
And coming up later in the year:
Lent Term 2026
Malika Bastin-Hammou (Grenoble-Alpes), 29th January: 'To put it in a nutshell: Composing Neo-Latin Argumenta to Aristophanes' Comedies in Sixteenth-Century Europe'
Maria Czepiel (Warwick), 26th February: 'Hebrew Truth in Latin Song: Poetry and Exegesis in the Biblical Lyric of Benito Arias Montano'
Easter Term 2026
Giacomo Comiati (Padova), 7th May
For further information about the seminar, please contact Andrew Taylor (awt24@cam.ac.uk), Tania Demetriou (td227@cam.ac.uk), or Jacob Currie (jmrc2@cam.ac.uk)
