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.

(Past Neo-Latin events) Neo-Latin Seminar, Lent Term 2026

Thursday 29th January, 12pm, Board Room

Malika Bastin-Hammou (Grenoble-Alpes)

'To put it in a nutshell': Writing Neo-Latin Argumenta to Greek Drama -- The case of Aristophanes’ Clouds

When scholars in the Latin West rediscovered Greek theatre during the Renaissance, they struggled to understand the texts. They therefore used the Alexandrian and Byzantines paratexts accompanying tragedies and comedies in manuscripts. When the time came to transmit these works, some passed on those paratexts, while others chose to compose new paratexts, in Latin, for an audience of scholars, students, and literate amateurs, including playwrights seeking new ideas for a renewed theatre. In this talk, I propose to analyse a selection of Neo-Latin argumenta composed by humanists, focusing on those for Aristophanes’ Clouds, the comedy with the greatest number of hypotheseis. My aim is to determine to what extent these humanist argumenta reflect the hypotheseis found in the manuscripts, and to what extent these scholars took liberties with them, and for what purposes. I intend to show that, if we analyse them carefully, these texts, which are in fact very diverse, serve not only as summaries of the plot of the comedy, but also as records of the readings and interpretations made by the humanists, and that they have shaped understanding of the plays for a long time – and continue to do so today.

Thursday 26th February, 12pm, Board Room

Maria Czepiel (Warwick)

Hebrew Truth in Latin Song: Poetry and Exegesis in the Biblical Lyric of Benito Arias Montano

In this paper, I give a brief overview of Arias Montano’s Hebraist scholarship and its Spanish context, as well as of the early modern vogue for psalm paraphrase in Horatian metres. I then study how these two facets – Hebraist scholarship and classicizing paraphrase – appear in his Latin poetry. I will look in particular at Davidis regis … psalmi (1573), a collection of psalm paraphrases, and at the third book of Hymni et secula (1593), a late collection of odes on biblical themes. Rather than consider Arias Montano’s psalm paraphrases as mere rhetorical exercises, I will highlight his philological method and attention to poetic language. In the case of Secula III, I will demonstrate how he privileges Jewish sources which shed light on Israelite ceremonial ritual over typological interpretations. More broadly, I hope to nuance claims that Arias Montano was a crypto-Jew or unorthodox. On the other hand, his poetry was ground-breaking in its use of Hebraist erudition in defiance of the contemporary atmosphere of suspicion.

And coming up later in the year:

Easter Term 2026

Thursday 7th May, 12pm, Faculty of English, Board Room

Giacomo Comiati (University of Padua)

'An Unusual Direction: Early-Modern Latin Translations of Petrarch’s Poems'

This paper investigates the multifaceted and complex phenomenon of early-modern Latin translations of Petrarch’s Italian poems. Focusing on translations produced by Italian authors between the late fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, this paper centres on three case studies, each devoted to different Latin translations of three Petrarchan texts: the song to the Vaucluse fountain (Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta 126), the sonnet on the true nature of love (no. 132), and one of the anti-papal sonnets (no. 136). The paper examines the diverse motivations that led various authors to translate individual poems from Petrarch’s oeuvre into Latin, as well as the literary, rhetorical, and poetic choices they made in their reworkings. These analyses will be situated within the broader context of the literary phenomenon to which such translations belong.

Thursday 21st May, 12pm, Faculty of English, Board Room

Andrew Laird (Brown University) 'Neo-Latin Literature and the Problem of Value'

Can early modern Latin literature constitute significant literature, if it is only accessible to readers who have acquired Latin artificially as a second language? Humanist compositions in Latin seldom possess the versatility, originality and salience of contemporaneous vernacular works, or of classical texts. Nonetheless, specialists in Neo-Latin literature routinely make claims for its value – but in what does that value consist? Consideration of the actual nature of early modern Latin writing in relation to the emergence of ‘Neo-Latin’ as a field is especially pertinent to these questions. A challenge to some assumptions which have been fundamental to the institution of Neo-Latin studies will clear the ground for consideration of how humanist Latin writing might be conceived of and judged as literature – even if criteria of evaluation for literature in general will always be contested. (Some passages by Petrarch, Rapin, Carrara and other authors will be reviewed to illustrate this discussion.)

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)