This handsome and erudite volume travels under slightly misleading colors. The fruit of a project entitled Cultural Encounter as a Precondition for European Identity, housed at Danish Academy of Rome and Aarhus University and supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, it is the successor volume to a special issue of Renæssanceforum (11: 2016) entitled The Metadiscourse of Renaissance Humanism. Unsurprisingly, given their origin, both volumes focus more specifically on relations between Italian and Northern Germanic humanism than their titles would indicate. While the volume under review ventures slightly further afield, its essays concentrate particularly upon Danish (and more generally Northern European) assimilation and transformation of Italian humanist learning, attitudes, and methods, across a range of disciplines including philology, rhetoric, biblical commentary, and art history. The volume’s focus upon Danish humanism opens an illuminating window on an area of Neo-Latin studies that deserves to be better known in the anglophone world.
Within this general area of scrutiny, the volume offers a satisfying range of topics and disciplinary approaches. Although the authors range from eminent senior scholars to more junior researchers, the standards of scholarship and interpretation are consistently elevated. The first and longest of the book’s three sections, “Translatio studii,” addresses humanist textual practice, with a particular focus on how humanist texts reflect upon their own assumptions and methods. Particularly noteworthy are Marianne Pade’s analysis of how Melanchthon’s translations of Thucydides depart both from Greek syntax and from the translations of Italian humanists based on their anticipated readerships, and Trine Arlund Haas’s subtle exposition of Hans Lauridsen Amerinus’s 1573 Ecloga de pacis foedere and its carefully constructed relation to Virgil’s Eclogues. A fuller version of the latter article would be welcome. Annet den Haan’s fine-grained analysis of humanists’ continued use of the Glossa Ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra’s Postils despite humanist polemics against medieval commentators, and Susanna de Beer’s essay on Conrad Celtis’s nuanced reading of Rome as a model for German humanism, complete the section’s treatment of textual relations. Per Sigurd T. Styve then examines the depiction of multiple temporalities within single painted works, and Lerke Maria Andersen Funder offers a meditation on early museum catalogues, focusing on the antiquarian Ole Wurm.
The volume’s second section, on humanist Latin, offers two chapters on grammar books: Clementina Marsico compares Castilian, French, and English grammars of Latin, while Morton Fink-Jensen interprets the sequence of Danish Latin grammars of the earlier sixteenth century as reflections of the shifting landscape of politics and confession in Denmark. In a more philological mode, Johann Ramminger examines how confessional allegiance influenced the choice of Latin endings in naming professions, while Camilla Plesner Horster reads patterns of the use of indirect discourse and sequence of tense in relation to the development of distinctly northern humanist versions of Neo-Latin. Finally, in the volume’s third section, entitled “Competing Nations,” Marc Laureys examines the reception of Biondo Flavio’s historical geography in the Low Countries, while Karen Skovgaard Petersen parses the historiographic framing of Stephanus Johannis Stephanius’s 1645 commentary on Saxo Grammaticus’s Historia Danica. Rounding out the volume, Peter Zeeberg charts how collections of inscriptions from a Holsatian milieu extend and develop a humanist genre, while Outi Merisalo detects humanist models behind two eighteenth-century Latin descriptions of towns in the Duchy of Finland.
A number of the essays invoke “the metadiscourse of Renaissance humanism,” a framing device obviously inherited from the conference that gave birth to the volume. Since the academic authors each subtly and acutely address the particular self-framing gestures of object texts, the assertion of a singular “metadiscourse” tends to obscure the force and specificity of the authors’ actual analysis. Happily, most such references occupy brief and discrete sections of chapters. Second, it is a pity that the publishers were not uniformly generous in allotting space to images: while the reproduction of woodcuts and engravings is more than adequate, several images of paintings are reproduced in too small a format for detail to be visible. These minor faults, however, should not distract from an overwhelmingly learned, handsome, and engaging volume.
