Proceedings of the triannual Congress of the International Association of Neo-Latin Studies give an overview and state of the arts in this field that pervades all aspects of early modern culture. Many literary texts, but also scholarly and scientific treatises, were written in Latin. Texts in the vernacular were translated into Latin to get a broader international readership. The other way around, Latin texts were translated into vernaculars for other readers. This ubiquity makes Neo-Latin culture important, and the proceeding of the congresses of the association worth reading.
In this volume, fifty-four lectures and papers are collected, too many to mention even the names of the contributors. Inherently, the subjects and approaches are multifarious. Yet, some lines can be drawn and trends sketched. Of course, several articles deal with philology (“Apuntes sobra la transmission textual de la version Latina de la Politica de Leonardo Bruni”), literary texts or literary phenomena such as intertextuality (“Seven Types of Intertextuality”), narratology (“Autor/Erzähler und Fiktion im neulateinischen Roman”), and semantics. Some authors engage in reception studies or the classical tradition, but less so than in the past: the focus has shifted from the reception of certain authors or genres to commentaries and their functions.
Such a functionalist approach features in several contributions, such as the function of the praise of cities to criticize society (“Städtelob und Zeitkritik”) or the function of a book for another Renaissance (“La Compendiosa Historia Hispanica (1470) come fuente en el primer Renacimiento castellano”). Another way of dealing with early modern Latin texts is mirrored in translations: the transmission across languages and countries. The aspect of transnationality is also reflected in traveling scholars and circulating texts, such as the years of the Dutch scholar Bonaventura Vulcanius in Spain. The current attention on ecology is reflected in one of the keynotes (“Petrarca e la natura”) and four articles that deal with nature. Most contributions are of a high quality and contribute to our understanding of Neo-Latin studies.
What is missed in this volume is a chapter on digital Neo-Latin studies, an absence that makes clear that this developing branch still has to establish a more fixed position in the scholarly world. On the other hand, it is telling that only one contribution is written in Latin itself. The language and the literary production are kept alive more by studies and translations than by speakers—the tradition of writing and speaking Latin has diminished. In any case, the language and literature of Neo-Latin are kept alive, in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, the languages of the IANLS. The volume is well edited and nicely typeset. The times are favorable for Neo-Latin studies: at least three journals deal exclusively with Neo-Latin; over the last few years a handbook, a companion, and an encyclopedia have appeared; and that's not to mention the older but still valuable and monumental Companion to Neo-Latin Studies by Jozef IJsewijn and Dirk Sacré. Every early modern scholar now has access to the rich Neo-Latin world.
