Yasmin Haskell

Latin Poet‐Doctors of the Eighteenth Century: the German Lucretius (Johann Ernst Hebenstreit) Versus the Dutch Ovid (Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens)

Taylor and Francis RIHR_A_282020.sgm 10.1080/17496970701819392 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 08rnational So ety for Intellectual History 8 0 000200 Y sminH ske l y h@ rts.uwa. du.au The most productive Latin didactic, and especially scientific, poets of the early modern period were, without contest, priests of the Society of Jesus.1 From the late seventeenth century, at least, the Jesuits began to be conscious of creating their own traditions of secular didactic poetry. Giampietro Bergantini, a Theatine educated by the Jesuits, paid homage to the order’s unparalleled contribution to this genre in the introduction to his edition of Francesco Savastano’s Botanica (Venice, 1749), the flagship for a projected series of translations ‘of Latin poems pertaining to the sciences and arts by authors of the Company of Jesus’. But while the Jesuits wrote didactic poems on subjects from agriculture and mining through to astronomy and electricity, relatively few treated medicine.2 This lacuna may be explained in part by Ignatius’s direction that Jesuits should not teach medicine in their universities.3 Any gap that the Jesuits left in the medical didactic-poetic record was, however, amply filled by Latinate physicians. This fact may come as a surprise to those familiar with Petrarch’s Invective contra medicum, where the father of humanism had represented doctors as the very antithesis of poets: doctors write bad Latin, are not true philosophers, and have neither concern for history nor their immortal souls; poets write good Latin, are true philosophers, and have their sights set on eternity and posterity.4 Of course, there were venerable precedents for the exposition of medical information in Latin verse, from Quintus Serenus’s hexameter Liber medicinalis in the third century through any number of medieval medical ‘poems’, notably the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. The great German humanist, Eobanus Hessus, studied medicine before turning to poetry, and combined the two in his elegiac

Suppressed Emotions: The Heroic Tristia of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo

This article is a pilot for a larger project on the emotions of the suppression of the Society of Jesus, viewed through the prism of Latin writings by Jesuits of the period. It proposes a case study of Portuguese (ex-)Jesuit, Emanuel de Azevedo, who lived and suffered internal exile in Italy (from Rome to the Veneto) in the second half of the eighteenth century. Azevedo composed a large quantity of Latin verse during these unhappy years, from a four-book epic poem on the return of the Jesuits expelled from the American colonies to a twelve-book description of the city of Venice. The main focus here is Azevedo’s collection of Latin verse epistles, Epistolae ad heroas (Venice, 1781), loosely modeled on Ovid. Azevedo writes Latin verse both to temper his own sadness about the suppression and to console Spanish, Portuguese, and American confreres living in exile in the Papal States and in Russia under Catherine the Great.

The Vineyard of Verse: The State of Scholarship on Latin Poetry of the Old Society of Jesus

This review of scholarship on Jesuit humanistic literature and theater is Latin-oriented because the Society’s sixteenth-century code of studies, the Ratio Studiorum, in force for nearly two centuries, enjoined the study and imitation in Latin of the best classical authors. Notwithstanding this well-known fact, co-ordinated modern scholarship on the Latin poetry, poetics, and drama of the Old Society is patchy. We begin with questions of sources, reception, and style. Then recent work on epic, didactic, and dramatic poetry is considered, and finally, on a handful of “minor” genres. Some genres and regions are well studied (drama in the German-speaking lands), others less so. There is a general scarcity of bilingual editions and commentaries of many “classic” Jesuit authors which would, in the first instance, bring them to the attention of mainstream modern philologists and literary historians, and, in the longer term, provide a firmer basis for more synoptic and synthetic studies of Jesuit intertextuality and style(s). Along with the interest and value of this poetry as world literature, I suspect that the extent to which the Jesuits’ Latin labors in the vineyard of the classroom formed the hearts and minds of their pupils, including those who went on to become Jesuits, is underestimated.

Physician, Heal Thyself! Emotions and the Health of the Learned in Samuel Auguste André David Tissot (1728–1797) and Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801)

The Dutch physician and Latin poet, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1726–1801), published in Groningen in 1790 an expanded edition of his Latin didactic poem on ‘the health of men of letters’ (De valetudine literatorum), which he originally composed as a medical student in Paris some 40 years earlier and published in 1749. Heerkens’s work belongs to a long tradition of humanist theorising about the occupational health of the learned. In the years between the first and second editions, Samuel Auguste Andre David Tissot (1728–1797), Lausanne physician, professor, and public health advocate, had also published a Latin academic oration on ‘the health of men of letters’. Heerkens does not neglect to assert the priority of his own De valetudine literatorum. Tissot’s oration stigmatised as pathological precisely the sort of life of learning in which Heerkens himself was engaged. This chapter reviews Heerkens’s rather testy engagement with Tissot, his defence of the passion for learning, and his advice to the learned on moderating their passions.

Humanism and Medicine: A Match Made in Heaven?

Taylor and Francis Ltd RIHR_A_282011.sgm 10.1080/17496970701819301 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 08rnational So ety for Intellectual History 8 0 000200 Associ te Prof ssor SusanBroomh l broomhal@cy len .uwa. du.au The symposium which gave rise to roughly half the papers in this collection set out to explore the complex, sometimes troubled, relationship between humanism and medicine from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.1 The father of humanism, Francesco Petrarca, famously attacked the medical profession in his Invectives against a certain doctor (1352). Humanism spoke a new language – theoretically a natural, classical, commonsensical Latin, as opposed to the ‘barbaric’ idiom of the late medieval physicians and logicians. Of course, the cultures of humanism and medicine were to enrich one another immeasurably over the coming centuries. Medical doctors and humanists shared a professional interest in the ancient texts, from Dioscorides to Lucretius – not to mention a vested interest in preserving Latin as a professional argot. Humanism had its own healing pretensions through poetry, rhetoric and moral philosophy.2 Learned physician and humanist often co-existed in the same person: Girolamo Fracastoro, Girolamo Cardano, Girolamo Mercuriale, Conrad Gessner, Julius Caesar Scaliger, François Rabelais and Pierre Petit are only some of the more distinguished names. Nevertheless, an undercurrent of (increasingly vernacular) humanist scepticism about medicine continued from Petrarch through Agrippa, Montaigne, Robert Burton, Leonardo Di Capua and Molière.3 Our conference invited participants to attend to such fractures in the relationship between the two discourses – a relationship which a wealth of recent titles, and indeed the title of this very volume, might (sometimes inadvertently) imply was more natural and cosy than it always was.4 Certainly, the marriage of humanism and medicine in the early modern period was a fruitful one, but it was also complex, even