Neo-Latin in the Modern World

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Stefan Tilg
• Subject Area: Greek and Latin Philology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 552278848

Latin literature from Petrarch to the 18th century is frequently treated as a historically interesting but closed episode without any significant consequences. For classicists the boundaries between reception studies (perceived as the continuity of the classical tradition), and Neo-Latin studies (perceived as the reception of the classical tradition) have often been fluid or even non-existent, with Neo-Latin studies regarded as a subset of classical reception studies. Modern language scholars were long interested in Neo-Latin mainly as an historical ‘precursor’ to vernacular literatures and cultures. While contemporary scholarship has been readier to deal with Neo-Latin literature in its own right, it may be seen as the last prejudice of the old approaches of classics and modern language studies that Neo-Latin literature is denied its own reception history after the early modern period. Although many decades of Neo-Latin and interdisciplinary research have in fact provided a considerable number of individual and isolated leads to such a reception history, no larger effort to address the issue directly and more comprehensively has been made. This subproject proposes to write the first large-scale study of the reception of Neo-Latin literature and culture in modernity. Its fundamental hypothesis is that even after the decline and eventual marginalization of Latin as a language, Neo-Latin forms and contents stay in the world and keep shaping it in more ways than many would expect. The subproject is thus concerned with what may be variously called ‘Nachleben’, ‘reception’, ‘transformation’, ‘tradition’, or ‘heritage’ of Neo-Latin literature. ‘Literature’ is here understood as including also all specialized literature, the sciences, and literary culture more broadly. The focus of investigation is not the early modern but the modern period of the 19th to the 21st century. A specifically ‘Neo-Latin’ Nachleben is defined as the reception of forms or contents which first emerged in the Latin literature of the early modern period or were best known from the early modern Latin tradition. The subproject thus provides a kind of epilogue to the Special Research Area’s individual subprojects, which provides closure and added value. Relevance in its own time, explored by the other subprojects, rarely goes with complete irrelevance in a further Nachleben, and this subproject shows how a Neo-Latin Nachleben may be conceived of.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Florian Schaffenrath