From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book printing and new literary and cultural dynamics. Latin also entered into a complex interplay with the rising vernacular languages. This Handbook gives an accessible survey of the main genres, contexts, and regions of Neo-Latin, as we have come to call Latin writing composed in the wake of Petrarch (1304-74). Its emphasis is on the period of Neo-Latin's greatest cultural relevance, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its chapters, written by specialists in the field, present individual methodologies and focuses while retaining an introductory character. The Handbook will be valuable to all readers wanting to orientate themselves in the immense ocean of Neo-Latin literature and culture. It will be particularly helpful for those working on early modern languages and literatures as well as to classicists working on the culture of ancient Rome, its early modern reception and the shifting characteristics of post-classical Latin language and literature. Political, social, cultural and intellectual historians will find much relevant material in the Handbook, and it will provide a rich range of material to scholars researching the history of their respective geographical areas of interest.

The best known variety of the ancient novel - sometimes identified with the ancient novel tout court - is the Greek love novel. The question of its origins has intrigued scholars for centuries and has been the focus of a great deal of research. Stefan Tilg proposes a new solution to this ancient puzzle by arguing for a personal inventor of the genre, Chariton of Aphrodisias, who wrote the first Greek (and, with that, the first European) love novel, Narratives about Callirhoe, in the mid-first century AD. Tilg's conclusion is drawn on the basis of two converging lines of argument, one from literary history, another from Chariton's poetics, and will shed fresh light upon the reception of Latin literature in the Greek world.

Die heilige Katharina von Alexandria galt wegen ihres rhetorischen Sieges gegen funfzig heidnische Philosophen seit dem Mittelalter als eine Leitfigur christlicher Bildung. Ihre Legende lieferte auch den Stoff fur zahlreiche literarische Bearbeitungen. Die hier erstmals edierten Dramen sind die Hauptzeugnisse fur die spannende Rezeption des Katharinenstoffs auf der fruhen Buhne des Jesuitentheaters. Ausgehend von der Tragoedie "Catharina" des belgischen Humanisten Gregoire de Hologne (ca. 1531-1594), stehen die Bearbeitungen von 1576 und 1577 am Beginn des jesuitischen Martyrerdramas, das in der Folgezeit die Buhne der Gesellschaft Jesu beherrschen sollte. Der enge Zusammenhang aller drei hier prasentierten Stucke war bis jetzt unbekannt, bei der zeitlichen Einordnung der Spieltexte und bei der Bestimmung ihres Verhaltnisses zueinander unterliefen zahlreiche Fehler. Dabei ergibt sich gerade aus der Abhangigkeit der spateren Texte von dem bzw. den fruheren eine bisher nicht gebotene Gelegenheit, die "Wanderung" eines Stucks durch verschiedene dramaturgische Stile und sich andernde historische Voraussetzungen zu beobachten. Dem kritisch herausgegebenen Text sind ein Similienapparat und eine metrische UEbersetzung beigegeben. Einleitung und Kommentar liefern die wesentlichen Informationen zur Einordnung und zum Verstandnis der Stucke.

This volume reveals how Apuleius' Metamorphoses - the only fully extant Roman novel and a classic of world literature - works as a piece of literature, exploring its poetics and the way in which questions of production and reception are reflected in its text. Providing a roughly linear reading of key passages, the volume develops an original idea of Apuleius as an ambitious writer led by the literary tradition, rhetoric, and Platonism, and argues that he created what we could call a seriocomic 'philosophical novel' avant la lettre. The author focuses, in particular, on the ways in which Apuleius drew attention to his achievement and introduced the Greek ass story to Roman literature. Thus, the volume also sheds new light on the forms and the literary and intellectual potential of the genre of the ancient novel.