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Translated and introduced by Nigel Harris and Sharon van Dijk
The 183 letters which Huldrych Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius exchanged between 1522 and 1531 are a major resource for students of the Swiss Reformation. They have, however, been largely neglected because they have hitherto been available only in the original Latin. This volume translates them all into modern English, along with explanatory notes and a substantial introduction. The book as a whole proposes and initiates a significant re-assessment of several aspects of early Reformation history, such as the extent of Oecolampadius’s contribution, the precise nature of his relationship with Zwingli, and the strong connections that existed between the reformers of Zürich, Basel and Strasbourg.
Translated and introduced by Nigel Harris and Sharon van Dijk
The 183 letters which Huldrych Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius exchanged between 1522 and 1531 are a major resource for students of the Swiss Reformation. They have, however, been largely neglected because they have hitherto been available only in the original Latin. This volume translates them all into modern English, along with explanatory notes and a substantial introduction. The book as a whole proposes and initiates a significant re-assessment of several aspects of early Reformation history, such as the extent of Oecolampadius’s contribution, the precise nature of his relationship with Zwingli, and the strong connections that existed between the reformers of Zürich, Basel and Strasbourg.
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This contribution focuses on a Neo-Latin hexameter poem written by a Jesuit priest around the year 1700 as an example of a poetic reaction to a natural philosophical polemic in prose of the seventeenth century: the debate over the doctrines of René Descartes. It will offer a telling instance of polemic and dissent against one famous and notoriously combative, but at the time already deceased figure of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Introducing the poem Mundus Cartesii and reflecting upon its Neo-Latin and vernacular background, several peculiar reactions to Cartesius’ opinions from the Society of Jesus will show how polemic could take an imaginative, satirical, playful form and bring forth literary compositions which defy traditional formal standards.
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Daphnis
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This article investigates Michael Maier’s (1569–1622) strategic use of invectives in his self-fashioning as an expert in the marketplace of entrepreneurial alchemy. Maier’s insults not only represent performances of expertise but also defend aurum potabile as a medical strategy. Building upon the adage that “the best defense is a good offense”, this study explores how chymists utilized the pervasive notion of alchemical fraud to their advantage. To that end, it examines Maier’s works Coelidonia (1609), De Circulo Physico Quadrato (1616), Jocus Severus (1617), and Examen Fucorum Pseudo-Chymicorum (1617) as well as his English friend Francis Anthony’s Apologia (1616), to which he contributed material.
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Daphnis
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The dispute between Poggio Bracciolini and Lorenzo Valla (1452–1453) was the intellectual contest par excellence of the Italian Quattrocento, and the scholarly confrontation among them stood out especially in the first two orationes in Vallam of the ‘Florentine’, and in the first Antidotum in Pogium of the Roman. In these examples, an intense mutual criticism of the opponent’s linguistic skills, grammatical method, and teaching of Latin appears. This contribution focuses on the subsequent development of the dispute, i.e., on Poggio’s oratio tertia and quarta in Vallam and Valla’s Apologus. In these cases, the mutual metamorphosis of the opponent from a real enemy to a dramatis persona (as character of a ‘tale’) will be investigated. With this literary mechanism, the conventional norms of the invectiva are transformed into a different approach characterised by a sort of theatrical performance, with an higher content of fantasy, literary freedom, and humour.
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Daphnis
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This issue of Daphnis will examine the use of invective between scholars in the early modern period. The introduction places the findings of the individual contributions in a broader context.
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Daphnis
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This article offers a revisionist interpretation of the early modern Republic of Letters by offering a contextual analysis of explicit mentions of the term by scholars across Europe in the period. The current historiography on the Republic of Letters tends to present it as the place of friendly, solidary and democratic cooperation across national and religious boundaries. This article argues, instead, that members of the Republic of Letters conceptualised it as a battlefield of permanent warfare. Early modern scholars often compared themselves to soldiers of a hierarchically organised army or to fighters in a civil war. It is claimed that a militarised conceptualisation of the Republic of Letters offers the opportunity to re-engage with Reinhart Koselleck’s influential Kritik und Krise. Evidence is presented from fifteenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century Hungary.
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Daphnis