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.
Easter Term 2025
Thursday, 15th May, Faculty of English SR/24, 12pm
Andrew Taylor (Cambridge)
'John Christopherson and the making of the Trinity Philo (MS B.9.6)'
This paper’s primary concern is with the manuscript of the works of Philo of Alexandria (Philo Judaeus, c. 20 BCE–c. 50 CE) produced c. 1550 for the Catholic humanist John Christopherson (d. 1558) during an extended period of leave from Trinity College, Cambridge which took him to the Low Countries, then Venice in the Edwardian period. It sets Christopherson’s investment in Philo in context before exploring the nature and sources of the contamination and annotation of the text of Philonic works in Trinity College, MS B.9.6 – modern textual scholarship has never quite been able to ignore the manuscript completely. In offering an account of the manuscripts involved and the scribal hands preserved in this monumental copy, a sharper sense emerges of Christopherson’s motivations and achievements in this Venetian milieu, how he benefited from those scholars and sponsors he soon thanked in his Latin versions of four of Philo’s works published in 1553, and his editorial approach to translating not only Philo, but also the Greek ecclesiastical histories of Eusebius and his continuators, which were published posthumously. The paper finally considers B.9.6’s relationship to other Greek manuscripts at Trinity that might have been associated with Christopherson, its Marian Master.This will be a lunchtime seminar, please feel free to bring your lunch.
Friday 30th May, Faculty of English, SR/24, 2-5:30pm
'Scientific Poetics and Neo-Latin: A Roundtable'Scientific Poetics and Neo-Latin: A Roundtable Friday, 30 May 2025, 2-5:30pm Faculty of English (University of Cambridge), SR/24
This roundtable is a collaboration between the Cambridge Neo-Latin Seminar and the AHRC/DFG project Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, dedicated to the relationship between Neo-Latin and vernacular scientific poetry. It asks what early modern writers thought poetry could express above and beyond what prose could do and how this question is inflected by their choice of language. We will explore whether poetry’s varied resources of genre – epic, didactic, pastoral, epistle, satire, elegy, lyric, epigram – could say things unavailable to prose. The kind of detail and difficulty of such poetry will be considered, and if there is a distinctive poetics generated out of difficulty. We will probe writers’ reasons for choosing Neo-Latin or the vernacular, and the implications for their negotiation of poetic style. Is the literary yield of scientific poetry different in Neo-Latin from the vernaculars? How are the terms ‘scientific’ and ‘poetics’ to be brought together in relation to Latinity during the period under investigation?
Short papers, on topics ranging from the transit of Venus and the life of fish to the physiology of inspiration and the Stinkhorn mushroom, will stimulate roundtable discussion involving all present.
Papers:
Dominik Berrens (Mainz), Zhiyu Chen (Cambridge), Tania Demetriou (Cambridge), Kevin Killeen (York), Johanna Luggin (Innsbruck), Emma Perkins (Cambridge), Caroline Spearing (Exeter), Liba Taub (Cambridge), Irina Tautschnig (York)
Discussants:
Kate Allan (Anglia Ruskin), Jacob Currie (Cambridge), Cassie Gorman (Anglia Ruskin), Philip Hardie (Cambridge), Anna-Maria Hartmann (Cambridge), Sophie Read (Cambridge), Andrew Taylor (Cambridge)
A programme is found here. This will be a hybrid event. To register, please email: td227@cam.ac.uk or irina.tautschnig@york.ac.uk by 25th May 2025.
For further information about the seminar, please contact Andrew Taylor (awt24@cam.ac.uk), Tania Demetriou (td227@cam.ac.uk), Anna-Maria Hartmann (amrh3@cam.ac.uk) or Jacob Currie (jmrc2@cam.ac.uk)
