Neo Latin - News and Events Archive

CSNLS 2004-06

2006 Lent term seminars

My talk will be concerned with what might be described as the passing of the Erasmian moment, and I hope in the process to give some definition to that slippery term. The two dates in my title relate to writings that illustrate my argument, Erasmus' De sarcienda ecclesiae Concordia of 1533 and Florens Wilson's De animi tranquillitate dialogus of 1543. As I shall endeavour to show, the two works are connected. In the first part of the talk I will look at Erasmus' strategy of reform as 'reanimation' his insistence on subjective response (affectus) as a necessary validation of religious acts, a consequence of his humanist assumptions. One result of this is the adoption of doctrinal formulations with more concern for their affective force than for their precise theological burden. Justification by faith, taken from one perspective as the corollary of human depravity, might alternatively be seen as the persuasive expression of God's loving initiative.

As confessional boundaries harden in the 1530s the ambivalence of such subjective handling of religious themes is increasingly vulnerable. In the second part of my paper I will use the career of Florens Wilson - linking, as it does, London with Paris, Lyons and Lucca - to examine the fate of those in his circle (or circles) who hoped to accommodate the personal urgency of reform within a framework of received tradition. Finally, I will introduce some excerpts from his Commentatio Theologica (1539) and the De animi tranquillitate both published in Lyons by Gryphius and comment on their reception and afterlife.

Thursday 16 February 2006
Douglas Paine (Trinity), 'Votum Tragoedia: Politics and Patronage in Christopherson's Jephthah (c. 1544)'

John Christopherson's Jephthah (c. 1544) is an unusual play in several respects, not least because it is written in Greek. It is also a notable example of the 'Christian Euripides' tradition, an attempt to partner the language and form of Athenian tragedy with an explicitly Christian moral frame. This paper assesses Christopherson's aims and success in that marriage, particularly in relation to his position as a young humanist fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, and evidence from the surviving manuscripts which suggests that the play was used in a bid for the Regius Chair of Greek. However, I also consider the appeal of the Jephthah episode: why Christopherson should have chosen a story about a rash vow and a sacrificed daughter, and what his play may tell us about oppositional writing, as expressed in university drama of the period.

2005 Michaelmas term seminars

CSNLS 2005 Symposium on the Pastoral
Thirkill Room in Old Court, Clare College at 5.30 pm
Thursday 20 October 2005
Jacqueline Glomski (King's College, London), 'Self-Representation in Neo-Latin Writing: Rudolf Agricola Junior's Letters to Joachim Vadian (1511-21)'

How did someone go about promoting his academic career in the first third of the sixteenth century? How was his career advancement challenged if he was a follower of the new learning coming from Italy? What was the experience of young scholars with humanist leanings who found themselves on the eastern fringes of Latin Europe? This paper draws on the correspondence of an aspiring poeta with a more established scholar in order to investigate the strategies that the younger man, in his search for stable employment, used in representing himself to his mentor. The paper demonstrates that Rudolf Agricola Junior, a typical wandering poet-scholar of central Europe, was conscious of his occupational identity and of the behaviour required by the patronage system to which his occupation belonged.

Thursday 17 November 2005
Seminar: 'The Development of Humanist Latin: Responses to Ann Moss's Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn'

Philip Ford and Andrew Taylor will introduce a discussion of Ann Moss's recent work, focusing initially on the Introduction and Chapter 4, 'Composition'.

All are welcome. Wine will be served during the discussion.

2005 Easter term seminars

The history of reading and scholarship as socio-intellectual activities has become a burgeoning field of study. For France in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the Wars of Religion tore the country apart, scholarship, reading and the writing associated with it, have been construed, in the most general of terms, as reactions to religious conflict and social turmoil (e.g. by A. Grafton). The present paper proposes to test and concretize this view of reading, writing, and book-collecting as irenist pursuits: it will point to the emergence of an irenist discourse, and analyse the contemporary portrayal of these activities by figures such as Jacques-Auguste de Thou (Jacobus Augustus Thuanus), Florent Chrestien (Florens Christianus) or Theodorus Marcilius. As such the paper seeks to counterbalance a trend in criticism that has underlined (albeit not unreasonably) the outcries of injustice, bloodshed and violence, and to complement, from the perspective of the study of intellectual culture, current work in progress by historians who seek to understand the political peace processes of the French Wars of Religion.

5.30pm on Thursday 9 June 2005
Latimer Room, E Old Court, Clare College
Tania Demetriou (Trinity College, Cambridge), Spenser's Homers

Spenser's awareness of the Homeric poems is usually dismissed as vague or at second hand. After a brief sketch of how Spenser may have read his Homer, this paper explores some examples of Spenser's reading of Homer through secondary sources (Roman poetry, Italian epic, mythographical handbooks, proverbial ideas) and argues that Spenser's is possibly the first sustained attempt in Renaissance England to penetrate through this body of ideas to Homer's text --from 'Homer Prince of Poets' to Homer the poet.

2005 Lent term seminars

2004 Michaelmas term seminars