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Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024

Reading and Studying Neo-Latin Authors Between ca. 1600–ca. 1950

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Publication date: 20.12.2024

Description
Cover design: Paweł Sepielak
 
The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.

Licence: CC BY  licence icon

Editorial team

Issue Editors Orcid Florian Schaffenrath, Orcid Alejandro Coroleu

Editor-in-Chief Orcid Grażyna Urban-Godziek

Assistant Editor Orcid Wojciech Ryczek

Issue content

Florian Schaffenrath, Alejandro Coroleu

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. VII-VIII

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Articles

Marta Vaculínová

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 255-269

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.015.20392

Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein (ca. 1461–1510), a Bohemian nobleman and outstanding Latin poet, is remarkable for the rich and contradictory ways in which his personality was interpreted up to the twentieth century. Although a fervent Catholic, in the sixteenth century he became a model for Czech non-Catholic humanists of Wittenberg training, for whom he represented a hero who liberated his country from barbarism. The Catholics did not “take him back” until long after the defeat of the non-Catholic Estates, and in the second half of the seventeenth century the Jesuits presented a legend of him as a poet laureate of the Pope himself. In parallel, his legacy lived on in the German Lutheran lands, where his first brief monograph was written and reprints of his works were published. The Enlightenment provided a less polarizing view of Hassenstein, though paradoxically it was a Jesuit, Ignatius Cornova, who has written the most comprehensive monograph on Hassenstein to date. Although Cornova tried to take a balanced view, even he could not avoid using psychologizing conclusions to describe Hassenstein in a way that suited his pedagogical purposes, even if in so doing he had to suppress or distort some facts. After the Enlightenment, the confessional aspect lost its urgency, and another conflicting issue arose in the presentation of Hassenstein—his belonging to a certain nation. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars argued over whether he was Czech or German. These debates faithfully mirrored contemporary political developments, and only ended after World War II, when modern editions of Hassenstein’s works and the scholarly studies by their editors, Dana Martínková and Jan Martínek, provided an objective view of Hassenstein as a humanist writer and historical figure.

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Piroska Balogh

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 271-293

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.016.20393

The culture of Hungary held Neo-Latin literature in a unique place, which was closely tied to the special status of the Latin language in the country. Latin was not only encouraged for cultural, scientific, or diplomatic purposes, but it also served as the language of public life until 1844. As a result, a significant part of Hungarian literaturę was written in Latin, even in the nineteenth century. The language of the first comprehensive works on the history of Hungarian literature—the manuals of the so-called historia litteraria tradition—was also Latin. In this paper, an exploration is made of how the Neo-Latin tradition appears in the handbooks on the history of Hungarian literature published since the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is investigated whether authors reflect on the Latinity of a particular cultural segment in Hungary, whether they consider it as part of the national literature, and if so, in what framework and with what methodology they attempt to present and process it. The first handbook examined is the first (Latin) lexicon dedicated to Hungarian literature, Specimen Hungariae Literatae, virorum eruditione clarorum natione Hungarorum, Dalmatarum, Croatarum, Slavorum atque Transylvanorum, vitas, scripta, elogia et censuras ordine alphabetico exhibens, published by Dávid Czvittinger in 1711. The latest compendium investigated is the Magyar irodalom (The Hungarian literature), edited by Tibor Gintli, published in 2010 Together with the volumes published in the intervening period, a three-hundred-year history of Hungarian Neo-Latin Studies is presented based on a review of nearly fifteen literary history manuals and five literary lexicons. The context of changes is reflected upon, such as the relationship with the development of academic disciplines, the relationship with the change in the concept of the nation, and the methodological context, including the interaction with positivist, and other research methodologies. In the view of the author, the historical overview of Hungarian Neo-Latin studies may be considered a paradigmatic example not only for Hungary but also for the Central and Eastern European region.

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Alfonso Lombana Sánchez

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 295-309

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.017.20394

Count Sámuel Teleki (1739–1822) was, by all accounts, a “Neo-Latinist”. His love for the written word went beyond his book collection, which is now preserved in the Teleki Library in Târgu Mureș / Marosvásárhely. He is also one of the most important editors of the Hungarian Neo-Latin writer Janus Pannonius; after twenty years of preliminary work, Teleki prepared the first editio of the poet’s opera omnia. This text, which was published in Utrecht in 1784, contributed to the revival of Janus and has been constantly used by researchers over the years—nearly up until modern times. The editio exhibits some excellent philological achievements. Not only is Teleki responsible for the first collatio of some very important manuscripts and editions of Janus, but he also completed the edition with a biography and a collection of valuable historical testimonies. My proposal thus aims both to present both the work of Sámuel Teleki and analyse his editio of Janus.

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Margherita Sciancalepore

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 311-323

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.018.20395

In the history of the tradition and fortune of Giovanni Pontano’s many and varied works, a still little-studied area concerns the first translations, carried out as early as the fifteenth century, and the translations subsequently made to confirm the humanist’s fame. Interesting are those of De principe and De fortitudine published in Naples in the eighteenth century by Michelangelo Grisolia, abbot and professor of ethics and politics at the Reale Convitto Ferdinandiano alla Nunziatella. Between 1784 and 1787, in fact, he printed I doveri del principe, Il principe eroe and L’eroe domestico, respectively dedicated to Queen Maria Carolina of Austria, King Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, and the heir Francis, the future Francis I. These publications present various points of interest not only for their historical and cultural context, namely the most turbulent years of the Italian Southern Enlightenment, but also for the ideological purpose behind the choice of both the two ethical-political treatises and their illustrious addressees. The paper investigates how these works were read, interpreted, and re-proposed by Grisolia for the education of members of the royal family, confirming the universality of Pontano’s teaching ad institutionem principis, whose validity has spanned the centuries, proving capable of addressing past generations of sovereigns as well as modern ones.

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Claudia Corfiati

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 325-339

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.019.20396

The 1950s gave an important impulse to the birth of Medieval and Humanistic Philology and in general to Neo-Latin studies: however, there are still few contributions dedicated to the intellectuals of that period, and investigations about their approach and objectives. The aim of this paper is to propose a critical reflection on the first monograph dedicated to Tristano Caracciolo by Mario Santoro in 1957, and on the method with which the scholar approached the reading of the works of the Neapolitan humanist. After analyzing the way in which Caracciolo’s works are cited and the quality of the quotations, particular attention has been paid to the historical and cultural context in which Santoro’s interests in humanistic literature were born, a period that we can define of great change and crisis of traditional values. The pedagogical meaning of Caracciolo’s thought is emphasized to the point that Santoro builds a singular parallelism between the Neapolitan culture of the early sixteenth century and that of the 1950s.

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Joaquín Pascual Barea

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 341-361

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.020.20397

During his lifetime, Antonio de Lebrija forged his own image as restorer of Latin in Spain. Of the many facets that he developed as a humanist, it was his work as Latin grammarian and philologist that prevailed until the eighteenth century, when critics became especially interested in Lebrija’s contribution to the study of the Spanish language in his Gramática and his Reglas de Ortografía, as well as his dictionaries (Latin to Spanish and Spanish to Latin). In the subsequent centuries, Lebrija’s status as historian was also valued, as well as his contribution to other disciplines, especially his commentaries on religious texts, his pedagogical works and his poetry. Lebrija’s figure has also been used politically, both from the nationalist and conservative position of traditional Catholicism, founded on his patriotism and services to the Spanish crown and his dedication to sacred letters, and from a liberal and progressive ideology, which highlighted his firm defence of freedom of expression and reason against the principle of authority.

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Alejandro Coroleu

Terminus, Volume 26, Issue 3-4 (72-73) 2024, 2024, pp. 363-379

https://doi.org/10.4467/20843844TE.24.021.20398

As 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.

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Funding information

The publication of this volume was financed by the Jagiellonian University in Kraków – Faculty of Polish Studies.