Gian Vittorio Rossi S Eudemiae Libri Decem

Gian Vittorio Rossi (1577–1647) was an active participant in the intellectual and artistic community in Rome orbiting around Pope Urban VIII and the powerful Barberini family. His prolific literary output encompassed letters, dialogues, orations, biographies, poetry, and fiction. A superlative Latinist, Rossi unleashed his biting wit and deep knowledge of Classical literature against perceived societal wrongs. Set on the fictional island of Eudemia in the first century CE, Eudemiae libri decem is a satirical novel that criticizes Rossi's own society for its system of patronage and favors that he saw as rewarding wealth and opulence over skill and hard work. An understudied figure, Rossi's involvement with one of Rome's premier literary academies and his relationships with intellectuals in Italy and throughout Europe provide a unique insider view of seventeenth-century Rome.

Gian Vittorio Rossi (1577–1647) was an active participant in the intellectual and artistic community in Rome orbiting around Pope Urban VIII and the powerful Barberini family. His prolific literary output encompassed letters, dialogues, orations, biographies, poetry, and fiction. A superlative Latinist, Rossi unleashed his biting wit and deep knowledge of Classical literature against perceived societal wrongs. Set on the fictional island of Eudemia in the first century CE, Eudemiae libri decem is a satirical novel that criticizes Rossi's own society for its system of patronage and favors that he saw as rewarding wealth and opulence over skill and hard work. An understudied figure, Rossi's involvement with one of Rome's premier literary academies and his relationships with intellectuals in Italy and throughout Europe provide a unique insider view of seventeenth-century Rome.

This book investigates the role of the Latin language as a vehicle for science and learning from several angles. First, the question what was understood as ‘science’ through time and how it is named in different languages, especially the Classical ones, is approached. Criteria for what did pass as scientific are found that point to ‘science’ as a kind of Greek Denkstil based on pattern-finding and their unbiased checking. In a second part, a brief diachronic panorama introduces schools of thought and authors who wrote in Latin from antiquity to the present. Latin’s heydays in this function are clearly the time between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. Some niches where it was used longer are examined and reasons sought why Latin finally lost this lead-role. A third part seeks to define the peculiar characteristics of scientific Latin using corpus linguistic approaches. As a result, several types of scientific writing can be identified. The question of how to transfer science from one linguistic medium to another is never far: Latin inherited this role from Greek and is in turn the ancestor of science done in the modern vernaculars. At the end of the study, the importance of Latin science for modern science in English becomes evident.

A reassessment of how the legacy of ancient philosophy functioned in early modern Europe In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle affirms that despite his friendship with Plato, he was a better friend of the truth. With this statement, he rejected his teacher's authority, implying that the pursuit of philosophy does not entail any such obedience. Yet over the centuries Aristotle himself became the authority par excellence in the Western world, and even notorious anti-Aristotelians such as Galileo Galilei preferred to keep him as a friend rather than to contradict him openly. In Early Modern Aristotle, Eva Del Soldato contends that because the authority of Aristotle—like that of any other ancient, including Plato—was a construct, it could be tailored and customized to serve agendas that were often in direct contrast to one another, at times even in open conflict with the very tenets of Peripatetic philosophy. Arguing that recourse to the principle of authority was not merely an instrument for inculcating minds with an immutable body of knowledge, Del Soldato investigates the ways in which the authority of Aristotle was exploited in a variety of contexts. The stories the five chapters tell often develop along the same chronological lines, and reveal consistent diachronic and synchronic patterns. Each focuses on strategies of negotiation, integration and rejection of Aristotle, considering both macro-phenomena, such as the philosophical genre of the comparatio (that is, a comparison of Aristotle and Plato's lives and doctrines), and smaller-scale receptions, such as the circulation of legends, anecdotes, fictions, and rhetorical tropes ("if Aristotle were alive . . ."), all featuring Aristotle as their protagonist. Through the analysis of surprisingly neglected episodes in intellectual history, Early Modern Aristotle traces how the authority of the ancient philosopher—constantly manipulated and negotiated—shaped philosophical and scientific debate in Europe from the fifteenth century until the dawn of the Enlightenment.