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Currently reading James Hankins’ brilliant Virtue Politics, and his rallying cry for the need to urgently address the vast neglect of scholarly attention of Neo-Latin texts by *specifically* Anglophone academics, and his strong criticism of Anglophone scholars’ avoidance /1
(or even reluctance) to do this in the past, has got me thinking about Neo-Latin and difficulties with provision of linguistic training in the UK. /2
Early on, Hankins writes: “Today, especially in the world of Anglophone scholarship, humanist political literature has had the reputation of being theoretically impoverished [and] consisting of dull mosaics of classical quotation deployed in the service of flattering princes.” /3
He then criticises wider tendencies in the Anglophone academic sphere to limit the range of sources (like treatises or Neo-Latin epics) due to either an inability or unwillingness to engage with Neo-Latin texts: “In the Anglophone world especially, the small group of sources /4
studied tend to be works in Italian or works that have been translated (often badly) from Latin”. The view that Anglophone scholars have willingly been committing a sort of academic Bad Faith by choosing to ignore Neo-Latin texts in their research is perhaps unfair: /5
“Many scholars have chosen to ignore that [...] Latin texts were not only far more numerous, but far more prestigious than works written in vernaculars [...] And there are whole genres of Renaissance Latin literature that have been overlooked by historians of political thought”/6
While I agree that the significance of many Neo-Latin texts haven’t been fully-appreciated, Hankins’ laying the blame at the door of individual Anglophone scholars’ reluctance to engage with Neo-Latin texts is highlighting a symptom rather than the cause for this oversight /7
An issue for Neo-Latin in the UK - I can’t speak for the US - has been that it falls between disciplines. Apart from Cambridge, there hasn’t been a single Department of Neo-Latin in a UK university. Neo-Latin as a discipline is spread out into different ones. /8
The way that academic disciplines in the A&H are structured, from undergraduate through to postgraduate courses, mostly tends to keep Classics (and Latin language training) separated from disciplines such as History, English, or Modern Languages. /9
How, then, can Anglophone scholars be expected to engage with Neo-Latin texts - texts which can be linguistically demanding and require thorough linguistic training - if their discipline hasn’t traditionally provided such training in order to do so? /10
What’s absolutely clear is the need to give Neo-Latin a clearer position in A&H departments. Short of undertaking a BA in Classics (which Hankins has), how can Anglophone students (and, thus, future Anglophone scholars) in other disciplines conduct such important research? /11
In the UK, organisations and institutions such as @NeoLatinSociety, @Warburg_News and @RenWarwick have been outstanding in providing training in the form of seminars, workshops, and language courses for students working in different branches of Renaissance Studies. /12
So, doubling down on such efforts seems to be one of the most productive ways of addressing this current issue in Anglophone scholarship that Hankins underlines. (Apologies for the long thread!)
