Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World

摘要

Despite its apparent antiquity, Neo-Latin is in fact a fairly recent discipline, at least as an academic specialism. Post-classical Latin has always been studied in various manifestations, usually in more specific contexts (Mediaeval Latin poetry, church Latin and the like). Neo-Latin, however, is described as the study of Latin language and literature from the time of, approximately, Petrarch (thus, the beginning of the Renaissance) to the present day. Instead of using Latin texts from the period for the study of their topics, the texts themselves now become the objects of study in their own right. "Fairly recent" in this context would seem an understatement compared with the age of the source materials. The discipline of Neo-Latin is also credited to one individual: the late Jozef Ijsewijn convened a meeting of interested scholars in 1971, to be followed in 1973 by the creation in Amsterdam of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies. That in turn led to the publication in 1977 of the first Companion to Neo-Latin Studies (Ijsewijn, 1977), with revisions in 1990 and 1998. Original texts, studies and other publications have mushroomed since then, so that now this new encyclopedia has a clear rationale. What began as a primarily literary discipline has expanded to encompass more fully Latin works in science, medicine and other areas. Now, less than a quarter of the longer sections in this work deal with literary genres.