This chapter provides an introduction to mediaeval Latin. After demonstrating the impossibility of providing any sort of meaningful survey of so extensive, varied and underexplored a literary field, I model two different ways of approaching the subject. One is through microhistory, where one looks at texts with certain generic, formal or geographic characteristics in a diachronic fashion from their classical ancestors to their Renaissance progeny always keeping in view contiguous material in other genres and in languages other than Latin. The other is the history of style, where one looks synchronically at texts produced in widely different regions and in different generic categories to obtain a broader vista of the way Latin as a literary language changed over time. One way to do this is to look at mannerism, or deliberate obscurity of style for rhetorical effect, as a persistent feature of Latin literature from late antiquity on, in a dialectic with classicism on the one hand, and biblical simplicity on the other. This leads to a revisionist view of the earliest stages of humanistic poetry in Trecento Italy, as growing organically from pre-existing mediaeval stylistic canons.

The new figure of fortuna and the new conception of the future as unknown and unknowable crystallized around the turn of the sixteenth century. This chapter examines how the conjunction of the European encounter with the Americas, the onset of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), and the gradual influence of the consequences of some ideas of Epicurean philosophy around the end of the fifteenth century helped to forge this new futurity. It traces the increasing separation between the figure of fortuna and Providence in the writings of several individuals who were participant-observers in the disruption of certainty that accompanied these events. It argues that these authors began to use the figure of fortuna to explain the contingent nature of future events in way that gave preeminence to human will, action, and even chance rather than divine ordination. It also reveals, however, the continuing persistence of multiple notions of futurity operating in Renaissance Italy in the mid-sixteenth century and so the absence of any dramatic rupture between medieval and modern conceptions of temporality.

In the late Middle Ages, Italians used the figure of fortuna understood as working in tandem with divine Providence to discuss the contingency of future events. Presiding over a relentlessly turning wheel, Fortuna provided a moral education for humanity, demonstrating the transitory and ultimately worthless nature of worldly success and possessions in the face of the promise of eternity. This chapter examines the deep foundations of this figure in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (written in the sixth century CE), tracing its continuing influence into the fifteenth century. It argues that the moral allegorical figure constructed by Boethius underwent subtle changes in the works of early Italian humanists. Through a close analysis of several texts written between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, the chapter demonstrates how the bonds that tied the figure of fortuna to Providence began to loosen, laying the foundations for new explanations for future contingency disconnected from the temporality of Christianity.

Chapter 3 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a powerful tool for both European and non-European Jesuit missionaries seeking to advance the cause of Iberianized Catholicism. To do so, it places the Jesuit spiritual conquest of the Americas within the context of the Society of Jesus’ parallel efforts in Asia. More precisely, it follows the career of a Japanese Jesuit, Hara Martinho (c. 1568–1629), from his early education in the Jesuit college at Arima in Japan, to his participation in the Tenshō Embassy to Rome and finally to the crowning achievement of his humanist career, the delivery of his Latin panegyric oration to his fellow Jesuit students at Goa. While no Jesuit sermons in Japanese survive, there are several surviving Chinese sermons, which reveal that the classical rhetorical tradition could influence public speaking in East Asian languages. When taken as a whole, the case of this Japanese Cicero shows that the classical rhetorical tradition in its Renaissance humanist garb was a valuable weapon for Jesuit missionaries seeking to expand the boundaries of Catholicism in a much more militaristic way than most recent scholarship suggests.

Chapter 1 argues that the foundations of an Iberian “Empire of Eloquence” were laid in the sixteenth century by the simultaneous expansion of humanist intellectual and educational traditions. This chapter takes the form of a case study of the Valley of Mexico placed within the context of an emerging Iberian World. As well as offering a thumbnail sketch of the Iberian World circa 1550, it makes the case for significant continuity or at least parallels across the pre-/post-Conquest divide. The colleges where classical rhetoric was taught were often built on the site of earlier indigenous institutions, while Renaissance rhetoric and oratory replaced similar indigenous forms of social ordering, most notably Nahuatl huehuetlatolli (“ceremonial speeches”).

Typological portrayals of black Christians or black proto-Christians in missionary texts from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish America acknowledge black men’s and women’s interiority and intellectual capacities, whatever their level of civility, as a means of justifying their ability to become Christians. The juxtaposition of three generic types of black subjects in this chapter demonstrates that even as racial hierarchies in the Iberian world were cohering and increasingly associating blackness with bodies direly in need of civilizing tutelage, theological discourse left open a loophole for conceiving of black intellectual capacities and spiritual virtue.