With the advent of the printing press throughout Europe in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the key Latin texts of Italian humanism began to be published outside Italy, most of them by a small group of printers who, in most cases, worked in close collaboration with lecturers and teachers. This study provides the first comprehensive account of the dissemination of this important literary corpus in Spain, France, the Low Countries and the German-speaking world between ca. 1470 and ca. 1540. By combining an examination of book production and consumption with attention to the educational system of Renaissance Europe, this book highlights both the historical significance of the Latin literature of Italian humanism within the school and university curriculum of the time, and the impact of such a body of texts on the rising national literary traditions, in Latin and in the vernacular, of the period. Printing and Reading Italian Latin Humanism in Renaissance Europe will appeal to scholars of classical and Renaissance literature, and to anyone interested in intellectual history and in the history of education in the Renaissance. It will be of particular interest to scholars in Hispanic studies.

In Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640, twelve scholars assemble the latest interdisciplinary research in the fields of translation and print in Britain and appraise for the first time the connection between the two. The section Translation and Early Print discusses how translation shaped the beginnings of British book production. 'Translation, Fiction and Print' examines some Italian and Spanish literary translations and their paratexts. Instruction through Translation demonstrates how translators established an international fund of knowledge. Shaping Mind and Nation through Translation focusses on translations specifically disseminating knowledge of medicine, navigation, military matters, and news. The volume constitutes a timely contribution to the ever-expanding fields of translation studies and print history but is also relevant to cultural, social and intellectual history.

A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, “A Renaissance for the ‘Spanish Renaissance’?” will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of community, philosophy and law, science, colonial empire, and historiography, it offers breath-taking scope without sacrificing attention to detail. Destined to become the standard go-to resource for non-specialists, this book also contains an extensive bibliography aimed at the serious researcher. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Edward Behrend-Martínez, Cristian Berco, Harald E. Braun, Susan Byrne, Bernardo Canteñs, Frederick A. de Armas, William Eamon, Stephanie Fink, Enrique García Santo-Tomás, J.A. Garrido Ardila, Marya T. Green-Mercado, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Hilaire Kallendorf, Henry Kamen, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Michael J. Levin, Ruth MacKay, Fabien Montcher, Ignacio Navarrete, Jeffrey Schrader, Lía Schwartz, Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry, and Elvira Vilches.

Late Latin and Early Romance presents a theory of the relationship between Latin and Romance during the period 400-1250. The central hypothesis is that what we now call 'Medieval Latin' was invented around 800 AD when Carolingian scholars standardised the pronunciation of liturgical texts, and that otherwise what was spoken was simply the local variety of Old French, Old Spanish, etc. Thus, the view generally held before the publication of this work, that 'Latin' and 'Romance' existed alongside each other in earlier centuries, is anachronistic. Before 800, Late Latin was Early Romance. This hypothesis is examined first from the viewpoint of historical linguistics, with particular attention paid to the idea of lexical diffusion (ch. 1), and then (ch. 2) through detailed study of pre-Carolingian texts. Chapter 3 deals with the impact in France of the introduction of standardised Latin by Carolingian scholars, and shows how the earliest texts written in the vernacular resulted from it. The final two chapters turn to the situation in Spain from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Ch. 4 suggests, on the evidence of a large variety of texts, that before 1080 the new Latin pronunciation (i.e. Medieval Latin) was not used; Ch. 5 charts the slow spread, as a result of Europeanising reforms, of a distinction between Latin and vernacular Romance between 1080 and 1250. There is an extensive bibliography and full indexes. Wright's controversial book presents a wide range of detailed evidence, with extensive quotation of relevant texts and documents. When it was published in 1982 it challenged established ideas in the fields of Romance linguistics and Medieval Latin. The collectively established facts are however explained better by his theory that Medieval Latin was a revolutionary innovation consequent upon liturgical reform, than by the view that it was a miraculous conservative survival that lasted unchanged for a millennium. Late Latin and Early Romance draws on philological, historical and literary evidence from the medieval period, and on historical linguistics, and is a seminal work in these areas of scholarship.

Even though humanism derived its literary, moral and educational predilections from ancient Greek and Roman models, it was never an inherently secular movement and it soon turned to religious questions. Humanists were, of course, brought up with Christian beliefs, regarded the Bible as a fundamental text, and many of them were members of the clergy, either regular or secular. While their importance as religious sources was undiminished, biblical and patristic texts came also to be read for their literary value. Renaissance authors who aspired to be poetae christianissimi naturally looked to the Latin Fathers who reconciled classical and Christian views of life, and presented them in an elegant manner. The essays offered in this volume examine the influence of Christian Latin literature, whether biblical, patristic, scholastic or humanistic, upon the Latin and vernacular letters of the Iberian Peninsula in the period 1480 to 1630. The contributions have been organized into three thematically coherent groups, dealing with transmission, adaptation, and visual representation. Contrary to most studies on the Iberian literature of the period in which practically no essays are devoted to texts other than in Spanish, this volume successfully accommodates authors writing in Portuguese and Catalan. Likewise, a significant part of the pieces presented here is concerned with literary texts written in Latin. Moreover, it shows how the interests and preoccupations of the better-known authors of the Iberian Renaissance were also shared by contemporary figures whose choice of language may have resulted in their exclusion from the canon.

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries afterward, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this "dead language" is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Juergen Leonhardt offers the story of the first "world language," from antiquity to the present.