Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400-1700)

Between 1400 and 1700 the political, religious, intellectual, and even geographic landscape was profoundly changed by the Reformation, humanism, the rise of empirical science, the invention of printing technology, and the colonization of the Americas. The late medieval and early modern intellectuals felt an urgent need to respond to the changes they were involved in, and to come to a revision and reauthorization of knowledge. They embarked on a scholarly program of a quality and extent hitherto unknown in the Western world: the whole body of the literature of antiquity, including the Bible, was to be critically edited and furnished with commentaries. The Neo-Latin commentary became the most important genre of humanist scholarship. This book sheds light on the various ways in which classical authors and the Bible were commented on; the types of commentary; the commenting strategies that were used to approach different readerships; the various kinds of knowledge that were collected, created, and transmitted; and the usages and reading practices applied to commentaries.

Contributors: Karl Enenkel, Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat, Munster; Susanna de Beer, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society; Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University; Christoph Pieper, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society; Marianne Pade, Aarhus University; Valéry Berlincourt, Université de Genève; Jan Bloemendal, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands; Volkhard Wels, Berlin; Willem J. Zwalve, Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of the Law, Leiden University; Bernard H. Stolte, University of Groningen; Bernd Roling, Institut fur Griechische und Lateinische Philologie, Freie Universitat Berlin; Henk Nellen, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands; Jetze Touber, Utrecht University

Karl Enenkel is Professor of Latin Philology of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (WWU), Münster.