ExLatinis
ExLatinis aims to translate every Latin work printed between 1450 and 1750, putting the intellectual world of early modern Europe within reach of anyone
ExLatinis: Recovering the Early Modern Mind
Latin carried the learned conversation of Europe for three centuries after the printing press before falling out of use. Today, very few are able to read the vast record of early modern thought. ExLatinis is an attempt to increase public access to that history, beginning with five texts that share the humanist impulse behind the project itself: ad fontes, a return to the source.
Page 91: A Parisian Theologian's Case for Numbering Enrico Noris Among the Condemned
An anonymous theologian filed a formal accusation charging that the Augustinian historian Enrico Noris taught the very doctrine of grace the Church had already condemned in Jansen, and demanded he be tried by the identical procedure. The brief bet everything on the two doctrines being one and the same; later scholarship, weighing the same passages, decided they were not.
Fracastoro's Missing Footnote: How a Wittenberg Physician Argued Plague in a Vocabulary He Never Cited
A short 1710 disputation from the Wittenberg medical faculty speaks fluent Fracastorian—the whole Italian language of contagious "seeds" and infected "tinder," the passive stuff like clothing and cargo that carries the seed—yet almost never names Girolamo Fracastoro himself, while citing the local Wittenberg corpuscularist Daniel Sennert openly. That mismatch turns a routine student exercise into a problem for historians who like their doctrines to travel in tidy lines from Italy northward.
Eden on the Moon: How a Theatine Cleric Catalogued Forbidden Astrology Without Burning a Page
A Catholic priest writing in Paris in 1668 built an entire dictionary of the mathematical sciences designed to sift genuine astronomy from the fortune-telling astrology the Church had banned. His method was not to destroy the forbidden material but to define it precisely, transcribe its condemnation into the reference entry itself, and teach the reader to recognize it.
The Cock at the Sign of the Cock: How a Parisian Scholar Emended the Church's Song Before the Reformation Closed In
A learned Catholic in the years before the Reformation opened the Church's hymnbooks and the Canon of the Mass and found them full of scribal blunders he was prepared to correct without apology. His four-book commentary treated the received Latin liturgy as a repairable text rather than an untouchable inheritance, and for three decades nobody in Paris stopped him.
The Hedge of His Calling: How a Court Physician Turned Witchcraft Into a Problem of Proof
In 1563 a physician at the court of Cleves argued that most accused witches were sick women whose confessions proved nothing, while insisting the Devil was entirely real. His decisive move was legal rather than clinical, requiring accusers to demonstrate an actual material crime—a poisoning worked by natural means—before anyone could be sent to the fire.
The Wrestler's Hip and the Sleep of Adam: How a Lutheran Anatomist Diagnosed the Diseases of Scripture Without Dissolving the Miracle
When the Copenhagen anatomist Thomas Bartholin set about diagnosing the illnesses named in the Bible, he treated the exercise as ordinary scholarship rather than as an assault on faith. His choices about when to naturalize a scriptural marvel and when to leave it standing suggest that reading Scripture through medicine was a cautious, respectable pursuit rather than a covert campaign against religion.
The Diploma of Boorishness: A Seventeenth-Century Jestbook That Wore the University's Robes to Mock Them
This anonymous Neo-Latin anthology ran a single trick through every page: it took the full apparatus of learned authority—scholastic definition, the medical thesis, the legal will, the disciplined Latin verse that marked an educated man—and applied it, grave and intact, to farts, freshmen, drunkards, and pigs.
The Long-Haired Star: How a Louvain Counsellor Talked a Comet Out of Foretelling War
In 1619 a Catholic counsellor at the court of the Spanish Netherlands published a treatise mocking the idea that the great comet then frightening Europe foretold war. The case he made was old, witty, and entirely respectable, which suggests that doubting cometary omens required no scientific revolution to license it.
The Ointment-Bearer at Ephesus: How a Sorbonne Doctor Threw Out a Saint's Tomb on a Point of Chronology
In 1643 a Sorbonne theologian took a Jesuit's defense of Mary Magdalene's Provençal tomb and dismantled it with a single rule: that no testimony holds unless a writer recorded it before the year 600. His obscure Latin quarrel over a saint's grave shows critical source-criticism working out in the open years before the great monastic scholars are usually credited with inventing it.
Pænitentia ductus: How a Borrowed Cabinet of Bronzes Governed a 1654 Argument About the Toga
Ottavio Ferrari built a treatise on ancient clothing around the principle that surviving statues and coins outrank the words of quarreling grammarians. Then a benefactor took back the bronzes and marbles Ferrari had borrowed, leaving the scholar who had championed objects with nothing but the words he distrusted.
The Bride of Sepino: A Catholic War-Printer's Treatise on Why the Evil Eye Was the Work of Demons
In 1583 a Benedictine monk in Rome published a treatise that granted every natural theory of the evil eye its strongest case before insisting the real culprit was a pact with demons. The book was printed twice in the same year by a militant Catholic press in Paris, and one copy eventually crossed the Channel into the library of an English gentleman.
The Little Loaves of Pope Julius: On Guillaume Budé's Refusal to Keep His Numbers Apart from His Verdict on the Church
A royal insider who had dined at the Pope's table set a balance and a handful of ancient coins on his desk and used them to correct the sacred texts of antiquity, then turned the same instrument against the wealth of the Church and court he served. He professed loyalty and hoped for reform from within, even as his scholarship named the veneration of authority itself a piaculum, an act of sacrilege.
Read Through the Pigs' Fairest Battles, Drinker: A Friar's P-Only War Epic and the Enemies the Letter Handed Him
A Flemish Dominican wrote an entire mock-epic in which every word begins with the letter P, and literary history has filed such stunts under harmless virtuosity. The poem argues otherwise, because the letter itself hands the poet his targets—the pigs, the prelates, and the fat that joins them—and this essay follows how the constraint does the satire's work.
The Powder in the Hamburg Library: How a Jena Physician Ran Opium Through a Court of Evidence in 1674
When a critic pointed to a patient dead after a dose of opium, Georg Wedel's 1674 defense of the drug answered not with occult virtues but with a procedure of proof: he sorted aggregated observation from the single alarming anecdote, tracked adulterated supply against the genuine article, and graded the drug's effects by scholastic category. The book shows a seventeenth-century physician already weighing clinical evidence as testimony rather than trafficking in inherited dogma.
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