NEO-LATIN prose fiction enjoyed an astonishing heyday from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Short stories, romances, fictional travel narratives (utopias and dystopias), prose or “Menippean” satires (for which see Chapter 13 in this volume), and long novels flourished to such an extent that they often outshone literary work in the continent’s vernacular languages. Although France and Italy were the centers of production, outstanding works were also written by a host of superbly trained Latinists throughout Europe whose imaginations were pulled in one direction by the influence of the language and culture of their contemporaries, and in another by the Latin language and culture within which they studied and wrote. These writers imagined new worlds, addressed contemporary political and social problems, and satirized the great and the good in ways that their ancient counterparts could not have imagined. This freedom of imagination arose partly from the relative paucity of ancient models for prose fiction, and partly from the wave of discoveries in the New World, which encouraged Neo-Latin writers to set their creations in similarly exotic and unknown lands: the South Sea Islands, Peru, even a subterranean kingdom entered through a volcano.
The initial encouragement for Neo-Latin fiction came in the fifteenth century from the contemporary popularity of short stories in Italian. Indeed, the first prose Neo-Latin fictions were translations from Italian. During the next two centuries, such fiction became longer and more classical in language as the renewed humanist Latin spread throughout Europe. The last major Neo-Latin novel, Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Journey), was written in the eighteenth century by the founder of Danish-Norwegian literature. As the national languages developed their full resources, creativity in Latin declined, again first in Italy (although major works continued to be written in Rome), then in France, England, and Germany, with Scandinavia and Eastern Europe as the final actors (CNLS 1:44–49).
A few models for prose fiction came from antiquity; the most important are Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History (third or fourth century CE; Latin translation 1556), Petronius’s Satyricon (probably first century CE), and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (second century CE). Heliodorus supplied the model for an intricate plot with mystery overtones; Petronius, an episodic plot with an errant protagonist; Apuleius, magic and fairy tale elements. However, More’s Utopia and its imitators owe virtually nothing to these ancient novels. Even romances like John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), while borrowing some elements, are focused on the contemporary world, its politics and problems. Of all the fictions mentioned here, the closest to an ancient model, Prasch’s Psyche Cretica (Cretan Psyche, 1685), is nevertheless thoroughly Christianized and committed to the author’s social and educational goals. The ancient novels’ lack of influence arose partly from the fact that prose fiction was neither well developed nor respected in antiquity. Macrobius (fourth/fifth centuries CE), for example, scorned “frivolous” fiction in his commentary (1.2.6–8) on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, specifically mentioning Petronius and Apuleius. This attitude persisted into the Renaissance: Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540), the indefatigable writer of dialogues and colloquia for students, called such fiction worthless fabulae licentiosae (“licentious tales”). Petronius, Apuleius, and the authors of the Greek novels were so far out of the mainstream of high literature that there was no standard Latin name for the genre in which they wrote. Short stories were merely fabulae (“tales”); novels could be mythistoriae (“mythical history”), fictae narrationes (“invented narratives”), or fabulae romanicae (“romance tales”). For the most part, short stories and novels were considered to be teachers of immorality: at least one novel was written to denounce novels. In the Gyges Gallicus (The Gallic Gyges, 1658) of Friar Zacharie de Lisieux (who wrote under the pen name of Petrus Firmianus), the hero enters a Druid tomb and finds a ring of invisibility. Using this ring, he enters the palaces of Paris, where he confines himself to lamenting the wickedness and hypocrisy of the nobility—which he attributes to novel-reading! The friar undoubtedly had in mind the contemporary French novels of Honoré d’Urfé or Madeleine de Scudéry, but he would not have excluded from his condemnation Latin prose fictions such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus (Story of Two Lovers) or Barclay’s Argenis (CNLS 2:241–42).
To overcome such disapproval, much Neo-Latin fiction endeavored to make itself uplifting. It must be remembered that prose fiction, viewed solely as entertainment, was rare in the Renaissance. Works of what we are calling “fiction” were at the time contributions to political theory, ethics, religion, and other areas of debate. Although Piccolomini’s Historia is essentially an Italian novella written in Latin, the author presents his work as an instructive true story. More’s Utopia, followed by countless others, contains serious discussions of real contemporary problems. Political discussions form a vital part of Barclay’s Argenis and related works, which are not utopias but political romances. Satire was always a convenient method of attack, whether in short Menippean form or in longer novels such as Holberg’s Iter subterraneum, which mocks European delusions of superiority, or John Barclay’s Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (The Satire of Euphormio from Lusinia, 1605–1607), a satire on contemporary European education, religion, and politics—anything that the youthful author wished to attack.
Neo-Latin fiction began in Italy with translations of stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350). For example, Filippo Beroaldo (1453–1505), a noted scholar who wrote the first commentary on Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, praised Boccaccio’s fabulosas historias (“plot-filled tales”) and translated two of them, the story of Tito and Gisippo (Decameron 10.8) and the story of Galeso (Decameron 5.1). The first and most successful original short story in Latin was the Historia de duobus amantibus (ca. 1440) of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II. As pope, the author repudiated his own story on moral grounds (see his letter in Piccolomini 1903, 63), but it was widely read, reprinted, and translated. While atypical because of its realism, the Historia nicely illustrates two forces driving Neo-Latin literature: the classical tradition and the vernacular.
Euryalus, a Bohemian noble in the service of Emperor Sigismund, is traveling with his master to Rome, where Sigismund is to be crowned as Holy Roman emperor. (The coronation occurred May 31, 1433; Piccolomini’s story begins the previous summer). On the way, the imperial entourage stays several months in Siena, where Euryalus falls in love with Lucretia, the beautiful wife of Menelaus, an elderly Sienese grandee. Lucretia reciprocates his love, but of course the affair does not end well. Sigismund, attended by Euryalus, must leave Siena for Rome to be crowned. Lucretia desperately writes a letter, pleading “Take me with you.” Euryalus replies that this is impossible: Lucretia’s reputation would be ruined; their secret love would be revealed to all; the emperor would remove him from his post; but he will soon be returning to Siena. Unfortunately, Euryalus falls ill in Rome, is barely able to attend the coronation, and on his way back to Bohemia with the emperor, he merely rides through Siena without stopping. Lucretia wastes away and dies of love. Euryalus thinks only of Lucretia as he travels back to Bohemia, inconsolable until the emperor gives a beautiful noblewoman to him in marriage.
Since the Historia is in Latin, Piccolomini felt free to indulge his learning. Characters derive their pseudonyms from and are compared to figures in Greco-Roman history or mythology. Lucretia fears that she might be abandoned like Medea, Ariadne, or Dido. Euryalus cites men deceived by women: Troilus, Deiphobus, Ulysses’s crew. The narrator addresses Amor as the ruler of all, one who can transform anyone, as Ovid implied when he wrote of men transformed into beasts, stones, and plants; and Virgil when he told of Circe’s lovers changed into beasts (25; the page numbers in our discussion refer to Piccolomini 1903). Piccolomini uses conventional classical metaphors: at dawn Aurora leaves the saffron bed of Tithonus; Lucretia pines away like Laodamia for Protesilaus, like Dido for Aeneas, like Portia for Brutus (51). The author refers to classical philosophy as well. He has heard that some philosophers believe that fortune has no power over the wise man who delights in virtue alone, one who can be happy when poor or sick or even locked in Phalaris’s bull—but he has not seen any such men, nor does he think any such exist. Fortune rules all (33–34).
Despite this classical veneer, the Historia is thoroughly contemporary. The action occurs in a real time and place; Euryalus could presumably be identified with one of Sigismund’s attendants—deluded translators have identified several candidates. Piccolomini testifies to the story’s veracity and utility: he prefaces the work with a letter to his friend Marianus Sozinus, in which the author claims that his story, which is an historia, not a fabula, will instruct young men not to enlist in love’s army but stick to their studies (3, 42–43). The author in his own person comments on the morality of the lovers’ actions and occasionally mentions the quirks of his Italian fellow citizens (37). He describes Euryalus’s difficulties: a Bohemian nobleman, he does not know Italian—this hinders his lovemaking—but he learns it fast under love’s impulse; he worries about his peers’ reaction if they were to recognize him sneaking away from Lucretia’s house (30). Lucretia’s initial uncertainty is well presented: reluctant at first, fearful of her reputation, she then commits herself totally, even to death. She is clever, able to deceive her suspicious husband.
The other characters in the plot play conventional roles from Italian novellas or Roman comedy: the married lady who loves a stranger, the jealous husband, women who play tricks on their husbands (examples in Decameron 7.1–9). In addition the author’s easy Latin style reminds one of the vernacular: sentences are short, non-periodic, straightforward, more medieval than classical. As in medieval Latin, many sententiae (“maxims”) are scattered throughout the text, moral sayings and proverbs derived from literature or sermons. Pars sanitatis est velle sanari (10: “Part of health is the willingness to be healed”); Heu! amor infelix qui plus fellis quam mellis habes (45 [compare 52], a reminiscence of Juvenal 6.181; “Alas, unhappy love has more bile than bliss”). Animal metaphors from popular literature abound. Euryalus in love is compared to a war horse hearing the trumpet (8). In the same paragraph Lucretia is compared to a field of dry grass, which flares up at a spark (9). All nature is subject to the fires of love: white doves join with birds of other hues; timid deer battle each other; tigers, boars, lions, and sea monsters are inflamed by love (21).
The Historia represents the state of the Latin language prior to the great manuscript discoveries of (among others) Poggio Bracciolini, whose Facetiae (Jokes, 1438–1459), the shortest of short fictions, mock priests, monks, women, and rustics, and are similar to the Historia in their vernacular plots, characterization, and attitudes. Neo-Latin fiction soon became less dependent on vernacular models and more imaginative, comprising various combinations of utopia, fantastic voyage, satire, and romance. Previous to these manuscript discoveries, Latin writers had been educated with the usual medieval textbooks and readings from a narrow range of classical authors. Afterwards, students of the humanists, having read a wide variety of texts, learned to model their Latin on Roman writers, whether the periodic style of Cicero or the flamboyant style of Apuleius—thus the “revival of learning.” Students practiced composition in prose and verse, developing the skills so visible in their literary productions (Baldwin 1944 describes humanist training in Latin). As a result, their Latin prose was more complex than that of Piccolomini; unlike him, they included a substantial amount of Latin verse in their novels.
Two generations after Piccolomini, after the spread of humanistic Latin education in Northern Europe, Sir Thomas More wrote the most influential piece of Renaissance Latin, his Utopia (1516). The book is a dialogue addressing some of the issues facing More as an under-sheriff of London and ambassador of Henry VIII in the Low Countries: the best system of justice, whether one should serve kings, private property versus social justice, are all discussed in Book 1 of Utopia. In Book 2, inspired by recent voyages of discovery and by his reading of Plato’s Republic, More describes a polity, the island of Utopia, an imaginary island that provides to some extent answers to the problems outlined in Book 1. Book 2 was in fact written first; the “practical applications” in Book 1 were written later (More 1965, xv–xxiii). The people inhabiting the island of Utopia hold all property in common and use no money. They rotate jobs—every household farming for two years, then moving to the city to practice other crafts. They exchange houses every ten years. All wear the same type of garment. In short, every law or custom aims to reduce individual pride and promote national solidarity. The nation is like one big commune.
Several features of Utopia influenced the later developments of both Latin and vernacular fiction. First, More established the genre of utopian novel, thousands of which have been written over the centuries. “Utopia” has become a political as well as a literary term, and the writers of utopias are occasionally treated as political figures. It is no accident that the name of Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), author of the utopian Civitas Solis (City of the Sun), is on a memorial obelisk in Moscow’s Red Square as a precursor of the Communist revolution of 1917. More himself has been seen as a bourgeois rebel against feudalism, preparing the way for capitalism (Kautsky 1959) or as a Catholic thinker, protesting the excesses of his own time (Sturz in More 1965). Second, More made debate about serious political and social issues a legitimate part of fiction, no longer confining these issues to philosophy (Plato) or satire (Lucian). After Utopia, novelists from John Barclay to Dostoevsky and beyond have felt free to include political debates in their novels. Third, More popularized a method of attacking vice by satirically portraying virtue. However, since satire and irony can always be misinterpreted, the author’s attitude towards his island has often been in question. Most books and articles about the concept of “utopia” view More’s novel as a straightforward vision of an ideal commonwealth (Jameson 2005). The definitive Yale edition cites More as part of the humanist Christian revival; his utopia may not be achievable, but is still an ideal (More 1965, lxiv–lxxxi). Recent work has developed Heiserman’s thesis that the island is not an ideal commonwealth, but is in fact the realm “opposite” to Europe (Heiserman 1963; Simpson 2009). This assumption that Utopia is semi-satirical, even playful, explains many odd details. The Utopians have abolished the death penalty for robbers, but have instituted it for slaves who accept money from free men. They abhor war in general, but readily begin colonial wars for Lebensraum. They practice euthanasia and slavery. More’s imaginative names, derived from the Greek, reinforce this sense of oppositeness. Utopia is “Nowhere” (ou, “no,” and topos, “place”); the narrator’s name, Hythlodaeus, means “Idle Chatterer” (hythlos, “chatter”); the Utopian poet laureate is Anemolius, “Windbag” (anemos, “wind”); the main river of Utopia is the Anydrus, “No Water” (the negation an- and hydōr, “water”); the chief city and the meeting place of the Utopian senate is Amaurotum, “Fogtown” (amauros, “dim”). Even the serious discussions of Book 1 are undercut with such names: the best system of justice is found among the Polylerites, “Much Ravers” (poly-, “much,” and lēros, “futility”); the most sensible foreign policy among the Achorians, “No Placers” (the negation a- and chōros, “land”). These names, and More’s jeu d’esprit in general, suggest that the island does not exemplify his idea of a real solution to societal problems, but is instead a satirically written contrast with contemporary Europe and a meditation on how things could be different. More even invented a Utopian language and script, including in his dedication a poem in this script with its translation.
A close friend of Erasmus, More, it goes without saying, was a capable Latinist. His Utopia exemplifies the practical Latin style characteristic of dialogue: diction is straightforward, with some heightening of style by the use of rare or non-Latin words (oligopolium “oligopoly,” scopus “goal,” morosophus “idiot savant”), rhetorical questions, and metaphor. The syntax occasionally wanders (enallage), with changes from plural to singular, or second person to third. The narrator, Hythlodaeus, sometimes strays into thickets of syntax and obscurity (More 1965, 90–96, comments on a 900-word sentence). More does not attain the smooth, classical Latin style characteristic of seventeenth-century writers, but his language is far more elaborate and polished than Piccolomini’s. More does not include any verse in his text, merely an introductory six-line poem supposedly by the Utopian poet Anemolius. More’s grimly serious narrator Hythlodaeus has no poetry in his soul and would never stoop to verse—verse that More certainly could have written for a different narrator. His many Latin epigrams show his skills as a poet.
Other utopian writers took More’s concept in different directions. The Englishman Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem (Another World Yet the Same, 1605; Hall 1981), a comic dystopia, continued More’s playful satire but omitted his serious political discussions. Tommaso Campanella, the hero of Red Square, wrote Civitas Solis, the blueprint for an appalling totalitarian state. This work is a bizarre combination of astrology, technology, and futurology written in bad Latin (Campanella had not received a humanist education). His model is the monastic community writ large with all property in common and its communal life regulated in extreme detail. Other utopias include Antonius Legrand’s Scydromedia (the name of the country described, 1669), a royalist utopia by a Franciscan friar working in England; and Caspar Stiblinus’s De Eudaemonensium Republica (On the Republic of the People of Eudaemon, 1555), about an aristocratic republic located on the fictional island of Macaria. There were also Christian utopias. The Lutheran theologian Johann Valentin Andreae wrote Christianopolis (The Christian City, 1619), in which the narrator is shipwrecked and driven to an island, Caphar Salama, where an ideal Christian state has been established. The most developed of these Christian utopias is Nova Solyma (New Jerusalem, 1648; Morrish 2003), a romance by Samuel Gott set in a contemporary, seventeenth-century Jerusalem refounded by Jewish converts to Christianity. Nova Solyma contains long lectures on the educational practices appropriate for a Christian commonwealth.
Related to the utopias are travel narratives. A fine example in prose is Icaria (the name of a country, 1637) by the German Jesuit Johannes Bissel, a lightly fictionalized narrative of the author’s 1632 tour of the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz) during the Thirty Years’ War. In this work, the author deplores the corruption of true religion by the Protestants, who at the time were a large part of the region’s population. The final chapters describe the terrible thunderstorm of April of 1624, which destroyed several buildings in Regensburg and which is treated as a symbol of the devastation wrought by the Swedish invasion and by religious strife (Wiegand 1997). The same author also adapted from a Spanish text his Argonautica Americana (American Argonauts Story, 1647), an adventure novel about a Jesuit’s travels in Central America.
After More’s Utopia, the best-known work of Neo-Latin fiction is John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), which added romance and adventure to politics. In language, plot, and characterization, Argenis is the apex of Neo-Latin fiction, enjoying dozens of editions in Latin and multiple translations into all the major European languages (four into English, six into French). It was the best-selling novel of the seventeenth century. Barclay’s writing is a testimony to the effectiveness of contemporary Latin education. Thoroughly classical in language, using clear, perspicuous syntax and vocabulary, his novels were models for later Neo-Latin writers and influenced the development of fiction both in Latin and in the European vernaculars (Salzman 1985, 148–76). John Barclay (1582–1621), the son of a Scottish father and a French mother, was educated in France, lived more than ten years (to 1615) in London at the court of James I, whom he knew personally, and spent the last six years of his life in Rome, where he was supported by Pope Paul V and by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII. Thus Barclay had personal knowledge of the rulers and the issues current in the early seventeenth century. Throughout his travels, he wrote constantly: verse for the court, religious controversies, and most important, his apprentice novel, Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (1605–1607), a satire on contemporary society. Like its model, Petronius’s Satyricon (the name originally meant “Satyr stories,” but was often interpreted as “satire”), Euphormio is episodic, based on the protagonist’s wandering from place to place, with prose and verse commentary on what he sees and experiences. Euphormio is important as the first major roman à clef in any language, beginning a seventeenth-century vogue for this type of novel. Its fictional characters were taken as portraits of real people, as the author presumably intended, judging from his use of anagrammatic names and transparent references. When Barclay wrote his much grander Argenis, he used a similar, though less satirical, method of character portrayal (Barclay 1973, xxix).
Argenis, set in an imaginary Greco-Roman antiquity, is a love story about the princess Argenis, daughter of King Meleander of Sicily, who is wooed by three suitors: Poliarchus, king of Gaul, the eventual victor; Archombrotus, heir to the throne of Mauretania; and Radirobanes, king of Sardinia. Poliarchus and Archombrotus, both high-spirited and noble, begin as fast friends, become hated rivals in love, then (by a plot twist) are restored to friendship when Archombrotus is discovered to be Argenis’s half-brother. Radirobanes, after successfully helping King Meleander subdue rebellious noblemen, remains in Sicily to force his attentions on the princess, who (of course) loves another. This plot in five books, which are structured according to the five acts of Roman comedy, is developed with enough twists and turns, sieges, shipwrecks, storms, acts of treason, and battles that the novel has attracted readers for centuries. The poet William Cowper called it “The most amusing romance that was ever written.” A few years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge read “this great work” closely enough to suggest an emendation in the Latin text (Barclay 2004, 38–39). Adding to the interest aroused by the plot are the many passages in which characters debate contemporary issues troubling France, England, and Spain. For example, the problems arising from a king’s love for unworthy favorites are discussed in a passage about the Overbury scandal of 1613 in London, and the murder in Paris of the favorite, Concini, by King Louis’s guards in 1617. Other debates concern the best form of government, elective versus hereditary monarchy, the treatment of religious minorities, the validity of astrology, the dangers of standing armies, and the best method of taxation, among other topics. One character raises an issue and another responds respectfully, so that the speakers arrive at a reasonable conclusion.
Like his Euphormio, Barclay’s Argenis is a roman à clef. The author explains his method in the novel itself. The poet Nicopompus, speaking for Barclay, is planning a “stately fable in manner of a history” which first will give advice in a pleasant, attractive, and palatable format, and second will change the novel from a source of mere entertainment into something more educational (Barclay 2004, 336). While portraying vices and virtues, not people, Nicopompus will ensure that some individuals can recognize themselves as in a mirror. Real-world characters portrayed include cardinals Maffeo Barberini and Ubaldini (both friends of Barclay in Rome), and John Calvin, whose followers, the Hyperephanii (Greek hyperēphanos, “arrogant”; the Huguenots), distress King Meleander’s realm. Places include Mergania (an anagram of “Germania”), troubled by an elective Holy Roman emperor, and Sicily (representing France), immersed in religious and political conflict. Most editions of Argenis published after Barclay’s death include keys, often fanciful and arbitrary, identifying characters with their real-world equivalents.
Barclay also introduced elements of the mystery novel into modern literature. In this he was inspired by the Greek novelist Heliodorus, whose Aethiopica (Ethiopian History), the story of two lovers’ quest, begins in medias res and ends with a startling revelation. Argenis begins in a similar manner; throughout the novel, the reader does not know who the chief characters really are. Poliarchus’s origins, the fact that he is king of Gaul (France), are not revealed until Book 3. As for Archombrotus, the truth about his birth does not appear until the very end in Book 5. Why are Poliarchus and Archombrotus in Sicily at all? How did Poliarchus and the princess fall in love? The answers all come late in the story. Things are casually mentioned in the first pages (the “clues”), but they become significant only later. The term “mystery novel” should not be confined to modern genre fiction. Many serious novels—Dickens comes to mind—have a mystery at the heart of the plot.
Almost all Neo-Latin novels are adorned with verse. Barclay was an accomplished poet and scattered several thousand lines of verse throughout his two novels, imitating the ancient Menippean satires, which are largely prose with bursts of poetry. For example, the poet Nicopompus celebrates the defeat of Radirobanes by calling down a tempest on the retreating Sardinian fleet. Barclay’s verse demonstrates a total command of classical meter, style, and metaphor; like his prose, it owes nothing to the vernacular (Barclay 2004, 618; translation by Thomas May, 1625):
Ite truces. Cuncti rapiant cava lintea venti.
Ite rates. Sic aura fidem, sic aequora praestent,
Ut vestri meruere duces. Simul ibit Enyo,
Stridebitque comis, facibusque in concita missis
Nubila, Tartareum deducet in aequora fulmen.
Go, treacherous ships; your sails all tempests drive.
Such faith to you let winds and water give
As you deserve. Enyo shall attend
With frightful hair, and kindling with her brand
The clouds, bring Stygian lightning on your fleet.
The seventeenth century was mad for romans à clef, and many contemporary novels, whether Latin or vernacular, attempted to satisfy this need. Very similar in plot to Argenis, and also showing the influence of Heliodorus, is Austriana Regina Arabiae (Austriana, Queen of Arabia, 1688) by Anton Wilhelm Ertl. Here the princess Austriana is wooed by Aurindus, the king of Arabia. Their union is delayed by their enemies Altomira and Tigrania, the latter of whom incites an attack on Austriana’s capital by the king of India—but all turns out well in the end. Although Ertl supplied no key, the characters can be identified with figures in Habsburg history: Austriana is the ruling dynasty during the sixteenth and seventeenth century; her enemies are the kings of France, Louis XIII and XIV; the king of India represents the Turks and their siege of Vienna in 1683 (Tilg 2012). An extreme example of the Latin roman à clef is found in the Peruviana (A Peruvian Tale, 1645) of Claude-Barthélemy Morisot (1592–1661), a lawyer of Dijon who had read John Barclay carefully and had written a sequel to his Euphormio. This novel’s intricate plot is set in Peru (France), whose king Manco Magnus (Henri IV) and queen Coya (Marie de Medici) have two sons, Yllapa (Louis XIII) and Puma (Gaston d’Orleans), the hero of the novel. Morisot included a four-page key, without which the novel is virtually unintelligible.
Latin and the various European vernaculars mutually influenced each other throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many Neo-Latinists of the period were also known for their vernacular works, including some masters of French and English who were noted Latin poets: the Latin poems of Joachim Du Bellay (Poemata, 1558) and of John Milton (Poemata, 1645) have been widely admired. One prominent bilingual novelist is the founder of Danish-Norwegian literature, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), who wrote one of the last and perhaps the most entertaining (to modern tastes) of all the Latin novels. His Nicolaii Klimii iter subterraneum (1741) blends satire with a fantastic voyage and breathes the spirit of the eighteenth century. Other than its Latin language and passages of verse and prose adapted from classical authors, this novel is entirely modern in spirit. Its description of travel to exotic lands reminds one of his near-contemporary Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), but with far more wit and humor; Holberg’s narrator remains a lively and ambitious soul throughout the novel, rather than becoming an acerbic misanthrope like Gulliver, whose travels make him hate the human race. Holberg’s notion of a hollow earth containing other habitable lands resembles Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre (Voyage to the Center of the Earth, 1864), but in a playful rather than a serious tone. Holberg’s wit and sparkling humor, also on display in his autobiographical letters, have few parallels in Latin literature.
After graduating from the university in Copenhagen, the narrator Niels Klim returns to his home in Bergen. At loose ends, he decides to explore the mountains around Bergen, and while doing so, accidentally falls down an extinct volcano into the hollow center of our planet. Inside this hollow center is another spherical world about 900 miles in circumference on which our narrator lands. He sees a bull, is frightened, and climbs a nearby tree. He suddenly hears a voice (2.3):
qualis solet esse iracundae mulieris, moxque quasi palma excussissima colaphus mihi tanta vi inflictus est, ut vertigine correptus pronus in terram caderem. Ictu hoc iam quasi fulmine percussus ac terrore animam propediem agens, murmura undique audiebam et strepitus, qualibus resonare solent macella aut mercatorum basilicae, quando maxime sunt frequentes.
… like that of an angry woman, and I got at the same time a lively slap on my ear, which propelled me headlong to the ground. Here I lay as if struck by lightning, about to give up my spirit, when I heard around me a murmuring noise, such as is heard in the shops or at the Stock Exchange when a great crowd is assembled.
It turns out that he has rudely attempted to climb the mayor’s wife. Seized by these ambulatory and clearly intelligent trees, he is taken to jail, where he is treated most humanely. He has landed on the planet Nazar near the city of Potu (“Utop-ia” backwards with the ending dropped), where he now must make his career. Because of his long legs (compared to trees’) and superior mobility, he is appointed courier to the surrounding nations, and his travels give him the opportunity of describing strange customs: as the inhabitants of Quamboia age, they become more lascivious; in Cocklecu the women rule, the men are domestic servants; the people of Mascattia are all philosophers and as a result their nation is filthy, disordered, and violent. Indeed the Mascattians plan to vivisect Klim, who manages to escape and return to Potu with his dispatches. For variety, Holberg reports words, names, and phrases in the Potuan language.
The primary object of the novel’s satire is the narrator Klim himself, who has conventional European attitudes. He is inordinately proud of his university diploma, even displaying it to ward off a giant griffin that menaces him during his descent to Nazar. He proudly informs the Potuans that his dissertation concerned the use of slippers among the Greeks and Romans. They laugh, offending Klim greatly. He considers his appointment as courier to be a shameful waste of his talents, since he is quick-witted and learns rapidly (4.19):
Nam animo continue oberravit ignobile, ad quod damnatus eram, ministerium, et indecorum ac turpe videbatur Ministerii Candidato ac Baccalaureo magni orbis vilem agere cursorem subterraneum.
The lowly office, to which I was condemned, constantly flashed before my mind, and it seemed disgraceful and shameful for a Bachelor of Arts and a Candidate for the Ministry in the larger world to act as a common courier in this subterranean world.
The Potuans, however, consider his mental quickness to be a defect and his speed of foot his only virtue. For their part, they prize slow reflection and even slower action and threaten novatores (“innovators”) with death. They name Klim Scabba, “Hasty.” Although Klim approves of some Potuan customs and laws, he nevertheless finds many practices of this subterranean world far inferior to the superior customs of our world, especially regarding the status of women. In an attempt to gain higher rank, he proposes a law making women second-class citizens. For this he is exiled to the firmamentum, the underside of our earth’s crust. There he is welcomed by the Martinians, who look like monkeys. Here Klim is viewed not as hasty, but as slow-witted, and named Kakidoran, “Slow.” The Martinians are avid for innovation, and seeing this, Klim makes his fortune by introducing wigs, which are enthusiastically adopted. Losing his position because of a false accusation, Klim lands on his feet in Quama, whose inhabitants are human beings, even if savages—although they are not cruel and barbarous like Swift’s Yahoos. Klim “civilizes” them, begins to manufacture gunpowder, and succeeds in conquering the entire firmament. He becomes the Alexander of the subterranean world, a megalomaniac who establishes a Fifth Monarchy (15.2):
Ex eo tempore novam in historiis epocham [the editions have nova … epocha] statui, et quinque Monarchiae numerari possunt, scil. Assyriaca, Persica, Graeca, Romana et Quamitica subterranea; et videtur novissima haec priores magnitudine ac potentia superare.
From this time I established a new period in history; now five Monarchies can be listed: the Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires, and the Subterranean-Quamitic monarchy, this latter unquestionably exceeds them all in magnificence and power.
His subjects eventually rebel, he flees, and in his flight he falls through the same volcanic hole by which he had entered the subterranean world, thus returning to Norway twelve years after his original departure. He meets an old friend and tells him the strange story. Since Klim now needs to earn living, his friend arranges for Klim to become an aedituus, a sacristan or custodian of the local church. From emperor to custodian in a few days! But, nothing daunted, Klim re-enters conventional life, marries happily, and has three sons—unlike Gulliver, who, after his travels and contact with Yahoos, cannot endure to sit at the same table with his wife.
Holberg was a true cosmopolitan, living for several years in Holland, England, France, and Italy. Returning to Copenhagen, he became famous as a writer of poems and comic dramas in Danish with the strong satirical streak that appears in his Latin works. He introduced themes from European literature into the then-insular Danish culture, and his comedies were popular. He used Latin for his entertaining autobiographical letters as well as for the internationally known Iter subterraneum. He also composed hundreds of Latin epigrams. His Latin is clear and easy to read, with short, non-periodic sentences. His vocabulary is large, well adapted for any description. He is fond of classical reminiscences. On visiting Cocklecu, where women rule, his narrator exclaims: O terque quaterque beatam Europam nostram! (“Thrice and four times happy is our Europe,” adapting o terque quaterque beati from Virgil’s Aeneid 1.94). The narrator often quotes verses from Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, and Holberg’s own epigrams, slightly adapting them to the context.
Other bilingual authors include Johann Ludwig Prasch (1637–1690), a prominent citizen who served as mayor of Regensburg in Germany. Prasch first wrote poetry, a history of the German language, and educational materials in Latin, but later turned his attention to the development and promotion of poetry in German. He attempted to reform the romance genre (typified by Argenis) in order to make it Christian. His wife, Susanna (1661–after 1693), had criticized novels as a corrupting influence on their readers, who learned from them only malice and vanity, and she had suggested that someone should write an uplifting story about the love between Christ and his bride, the faithful Christian soul (Morrish 2009). Her husband obliged with his novella-length Psyche Cretica (1685), one of the last major Latin fictions written in Germany. This work transforms Apuleius’s narrative of Cupid and Psyche into a Christian story of devotion, temptation, and final salvation.
In Eastern Europe, the Hungarian author András Dugonics (1740–1818), a Piarist, prolific writer, and university professor of mathematics, wrote the first best-seller in Hungarian, the historical romance Etelka, and helped establish Hungarian as a literary language. But before Etelka and influenced by Barclay’s Argenis, which Dugonics considered a masterpiece, he had written an immense novel (754 pages), Argonautica (Argonauts Story, 1778), retelling the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts (Tilg 2013). Portraying the Scythians as ancestors of the Magyars, Dugonics added episodes and characters such as the Scythian king Almus (Hungarian Álmos) to the Argonaut legend; these characters have been interpreted as representing Magyar national traits (Szörenyi 2006 164, 167). Like Holberg and Prasch, Dugonics applied what he had learned in his classical studies to his vernacular work, thus enriching his national language.
Holberg’s Iter is the last significant Latin novel. Others have been published, even into the twenty-first century. Stephen Berard’s Capti (Captives, 2011) is the most recent known to me. Translations from the vernacular continue to be published. Alexander Lenard’s version of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh (Winnie Ille Pu, 1960) was the only Latin book—and perhaps the only book in any foreign language—ever to become a New York Times best-seller, remaining on the list for 20 weeks. The same author translated Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (Tristitia Salve[Hello Sadness], 1963). More recently Peter Needham has translated two Harry Potter novels: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis, 2003) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harrius Potter et Camera Secretorum, 2006). But it cannot be expected that the fires of Latin creativity will burn as brightly today as they did in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
SUGGESTED READING
Many Neo-Latin works are now available online, thanks to digitization, including most of those discussed in this chapter. The literature on Utopia is immense, covering literary, political, and psychological topics. On the latter two, see Mannheim (1949). Surtz and Hexter’s Yale edition (More 1965) with its thorough introduction is definitive, but the best English translation is by Clarence Miller (More 2001). A good general discussion can be found in Davis (1981). The only good English translation of Campanella is Campanella (1981), from the original Italian, which is not always identical to the Latin text. Recommended editions and translations of other authors discussed are Piccolomini (1903), Hall (1981), Barclay (1973 and 2004), Begley (1902, who identified John Milton instead of Samuel Gott as the author of the anonymously published Nova Solyma), Prasch (1968), and Holberg (1970 and 1960). Holberg’s letters and epigrams are in his Opuscula Latina of 1737. There are no published English translations of Prasch (the best study is Dachs 1957; an eighteenth-century German translation exists), Ertl (the only useful discussion is Tilg 2012), Morisot, or Dugonics. Work on the latter is in Hungarian except Szörényi (2006), Berényi-Révész (1962), and Tilg (2013). Recent literary and historical scholarship on the Neo-Latin novel (with particular emphasis on Barclay and Holberg) can be found in Tilg and Walser (2013).
Other original novels were written. These include a sequel to Barclay’s Argenis by Gabriel Bugnot (1669) and Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Eudemia (~ Land of the Good People, 1637), a satire on seventeenth-century Rome written in beautiful Latin. Short fictions include the Menippean satires, discussed in Chapter 13 of this volume, and the Somnia (“Dreams”), short stories addressing various issues: the Somnia of Juan Luis Vives (1520–1521) and Justus Lipsius (1581) concern the editing of ancient texts; the Somnium of Johannes Kepler (1634) tells of a rocket trip from the Earth to the Moon. Many collections of Facetiae exist; a theory of humor with many sample jokes can be found in Giovanni Pontano’s De sermone (On Conversation, 1509).
REFERENCES
Baldwin, William. 1944. William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek. 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Barclay, John. 2004. Argenis. Edited by Mark Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber. 2 vols. Assen: Royal van Gorcum.
_____. 1973. Euphormionis Lusinini Satyricon (Euphormio’s Satyricon) 1605–1607. Edited by David Fleming. Nieuwkoop: de Graaf.
Begley, Walter, trans. 1902. Nova Solyma, The Ideal City; or, Jerusalem Regained: An Anonymous Romance Written in the Time of Charles I, Now First Drawn from Obscurity, and Attributed to the Illustrious John Milton. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Berényi-Révész, Maria. 1962. “Humanistische Anregungen bei den Anfängen des ungarischen Romans.” In Renaissance und Humanismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa: Eine Sammlung von Materialien, edited by Johannes Irmscher, 95–103. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
Campanella, Tommaso. 1981. La città del sole: Dialogo poetico—The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue. Translated by Daniel Donno. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Dachs, Karl. 1957. “Leben und Dichtung des Johann Ludwig Prasch (1637–1690).” Verhandlungen des Historischen Vereins für Oberpfalz und Regensburg 98:5–219.
Davis, James C. 1981. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, Joseph. 1981. Another World and Yet the Same: Bishop Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem. Translated by John Millar Wands. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heiserman, Arthur R. 1963. “Satire in the Utopia.” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 78:163–74.
Holberg, Ludvig. 1737. Opuscula quaedam Latina: Epistola I, epistola II, quinque libri epigrammatum. Leipzig: Paulli Vidua.
_____. 1960. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. Edited by James I. McNelis, Jr. Westport: Greenwood Press.
_____. 1970. Niels Klims underjordiske Rejse, 1741–1745. Edited and translated (Danish) by Aage Kragelund. 3 vols. Copenhagen: Gad.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London and New York: Verso.
Kautsky, Karl. 1959. Thomas More and His Utopia. New York: Russell & Russell.
Mannheim, Karl. 1949. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.
More, Thomas. 1965. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More. Vol. 4, Utopia. Edited by Edward Surtz and Jack H. Hexter. New Haven: Yale University Press.
_____. 2001. Utopia. Translated by Clarence Miller. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morrish, Jennifer. 2003. “Virtue and Genre in Samuel Gott’s Nova Solyma.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 52:237–317.
_____. 2009. “Susanna Elisabeth Prasch, Neo-Latin Novels, and Female Characters in Psyche Cretica.” In Women and the Divine in Literature Before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, edited by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, 167–83 and 252–56. Victoria: University of Victoria Press.
Piccolomini, Enea S. 1903. De duobus amantibus historia. Edited by Joseph Dévay. Budapest: Heisler.
Prasch, Johann L. 1968. Psyche Cretica. Edited by Marie-José Desmet-Goethals in Humanistica Lovaniensia 17:117–56.
Salzman, Paul. 1985. English Prose Fiction 1558–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Simpson, James. 2009. “Rhetoric, Conscience, and the Playful Positions of Sir Thomas More.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, edited by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, 121–36. New York: Oxford University Press.
Szörényi, László. 2006. “Dugonics’ Argonautica.” Camoenae Hungaricae 3:161–68.
Tilg, Stefan. 2012. “Anton Wilhem Ertl’s Austriana Regina Arabiae (1687): A Little Known Latin Novel.” In ACNL, 1109–18.
_____. 2013. “The Neo-Latin Novel’s Last Stand: András Dugonics’ Argonautica (1778).” In Tilg and Walser, 161–71.
Tilg, Stefan, and Isabella Walser. 2013. Der neulateinische Roman als Medium seiner Zeit: The Neo-Latin Novel in Its Time. Tübingen: Narr.
Wiegand, Hermann. 1997. “Die Oberpfalz im konfessionellen Umbruch: Eine jesuitische Reisesatire aus dem Jahr 1632.” In Der Pfälzer Löwe in Bayern: Zur Geschichte der Oberpfalz in der kurpfälzischen Epoche, edited by Hans-Jürgen Becker, 130–56. Regensburg: Universitätsverlag Regensburg.