Alejandro Coroleu
Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. VII-VIII
Alejandro Coroleu
Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 363-379
https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.021.20398As with other parts of Europe, in Catalonia attention to Neo-Latin literature has increased exponentially in the last five decades. Research groups related to the field are proliferating, the discipline has been incorporated into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, and in recent years new translations of key Neo-Latin texts have also been appearing in a steady stream, aimed both at a scholarly audience and a broader readership. This interest has an important precedent in the period from 1830 to 1960, when several studies on Catalan Neo-Latin were produced and a considerable numer of Catalan versions of local, Italian and northern European Neo-Latin poets and prose writers were published. In this essay the author attempts to demonstrate that interest in Neo-Latin literature during those one hundred and thirty years had a broader significance and that attention to the Catalan Neo-Latin corpus as well as translations of, and studies on, Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, Johannes Secundus, Erasmus, Thomas More and Juan Luis Vives issued at the time should be regarded as a further contribution, however modest, to the construction of cultural identity in modern Catalonia. This is a little-studied topic which has gone unnoticed to scholars of both Neo-Latin studies and modern Catalan literature.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1286-2508
Alejandro Coroleu is ICREA Research Professor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He has written extensively on Neo-Latin literature, including the books Printing and Reading Italian Latin Humanism in Renaissance Europe (2014) and Latin Political Propaganda in the War of the Spanish Succession and its Aftermath, 1700–1740 (2024), co-authored the volume The Classical Tradition in Medieval Catalan, 1300–1500 (2018), and published Catalan and Spanish translations of Lorenzo Valla and Leon Battista Alberti. He is currently Vice-President of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies.
