Neo-Latin studies is the study of Latin and its literature from the Italian Renaissance to the present day.[1] Neo-Latin is important for understanding early modern European culture and society, including the development of literature, science, religion and vernacular languages.
The study of Neo-Latin began to gain momentum as a specific topic in the 1970s. The International Association for Neo-Latin Studies was founded in 1971, leading to a series of conferences. The first major guide to the field appeared in 1977.[2]
While the topic is reasonably easy to define, the result is a very wide topic, covering many centuries, different subject matter and a very wide geographical spread, creating significant challenges for methodology.[3] Nevertheless, the literature is often some of the most significant output of the period:
we are dealing with literature (in the wider sense of the word) that witnesses the development of ideas and knowledge in Europe for almost four hundred years, indeed, with texts that are in reality very often the chief and most important sources for the investigation of the history of learning and culture. It is remarkable that many learned scholars today are unaware of the existence of this huge treasury.[4]
Study of Neo-Latin is necessarily cross-disciplinary and requires Latinists to engage with audiences who are unfamiliar with Latin and the extent of contributions in Latin to their own fields, which are usually untranslated and untranscribed. Part of the work of the field is to make texts accessible, and translated, and another is to help non-Latinists to engage with the material and where necessary to challenge misconceptions about the nature of Latin writing in the period. Such misconceptions include the longevity of the relevance Latin, which is typically underestimated,[5] the "derivative" nature of Neo-Latin writing,[6] or that it competed, in direct opposition, with vernaculars. Neo-Latin studies help reveal subtler relationships between languages, through promotion of standardisation and cross fertilisation through introducing new models of genre, for example.
The relevance of Neo-Latin studies to other areas of enquiry can be said to decline after 1800, when Latin has become much more marginal to the production of knowledge in Europe.[7]