Neo-Latin Literature in Early Modern Germany

Summary

Premises and Dimensions

Reaching back to Antiquity and Rejecting “barbarian” medieval Latin, Neo-Latin literature represents the third and final phase of the Latin culture of Old Europe. Supplanting the Latin that once served as the medium of scholastic-dialectical discourse, the new literary-rhetorical Latin, Neo-Latin, cultivated especially for its stylistic elegance, became the vehicle of a general education from the middle of the fifteenth century to well into the eighteenth. Mastery of Neo-Latin fundamentally affected the very conditions, the habitus, of reasoning in language, especially in the moral, political, and anthropological discourses, and guaranteed access to the modern academic culture of knowledge. In the higher disciplines of theology and law, as well as in the natural sciences, the terminological precision and international usefulness of Neo-Latin ensured that it would flourish for at least another century; only toward the end of the seventeenth century did the number of German-language publications begin to equal that of Latin-language titles. The affinity of Neo-Latin for the intellectual pluralism of classical Latin, and its new stylistic taste modeled on the great classical rhetoricians, made its practitioners natural antagonists of scholastic theologians, who continued to think and write in the allegedly more ponderous categories of medieval church Latin. Despite efforts to harmonize the two traditions, a secular view predominated in Neo-Latin culture: the reflexive activity of the modern subject reveals itself in diverse mental attitudes, moral positions, political models, and literary forms. Notwithstanding the massive changes in social and philosophical conditions and assumptions that gave rise to early modern Europe, the production and reception of Neo-Latin literature that accompanied that development constitutes an overarching cultural- historical unity. Coherent traditions bind the varieties of styles, forms, and purposes of Neo-Latin literature practiced between the mid-fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Even prior to the Reformation, oral and written command of Latin had been the key to acquiring knowledge. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, it became instrumental in training a new class of experts to meet the technological and governing needs of modern society. The new education was driven equally by a moral vision contained in literature.