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
79 articles · page 1 of 7
Jon Cooper · July 5, 2026
ExLatinis: Recovering the Early Modern Mind
Latin carried the learned conversation of Europe for three centuries after the printing press before slowly falling out of use. Today, very few are able to read the vast record of early modern thought. ExLatinis is an attempt to increase access to that history, beginning with five texts that share the humanist impulse behind the project itself: ad fontes, a return to the source.
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ExLatinis · October 7, 2026
Whose Walls Are Ships: Giulio Ferretti's On the Law and Practice of Naval Affairs
Giulio Ferretti of Ravenna, a sixteenth-century jurist and administrator, set out to show that ships, storms and sea battles belonged to lawyers as much as to admirals. His De iure, & re nauali et de ipsius rei navalis et belli aquatici praeceptis legitimis, liber, which reached Venetian print only after his death in 1547, prices marine risk, condemns wreckers, outlaws pirates and hails Venice as a queen whose walls are ships. The result is a sustained attempt to bring the whole business of the sea, from insurance contracts to Greek fire, under learned law.
ExLatinis · October 6, 2026
Each of Us a Columbus: Celestino Sfondrati's The Knot of Predestination Untied, So Far as Is Permitted to Human Understanding
Written in the intervals of a fatal illness and printed at Rome in 1696, Cardinal Celestino Sfondrati's Nodus praedestinationis, ex sacris litteris doctrinaque SS. Augustini et Thomae, quantum homini licet, dissolutus takes on the oldest puzzle in Latin theology: how a God who chooses some for salvation can also sincerely will that all be saved and still leave them free. Sfondrati draws on Augustine, Aquinas, Roman law, painting, music and travel lore to argue that grace is offered to everyone and refused only by the human will, and he leaves what argument cannot settle, deliberately, to the secrets of God. The book drew a printed reply within two years, which shows how contentious even a moderate position on grace remained in the decades after the Jansenist condemnations.
ExLatinis · October 5, 2026
A Plank Sufficient for One: Christoph Haunold's Speculative Theology Adapted to Scholastic Lectures and Exercises, in Four Books Corresponding to Parts of St Thomas's Summa
Christoph Haunold, a Bavarian Jesuit who lectured at Ingolstadt, published his Theologiae speculativae scholasticis praelectionibus et exercitiis accommodatae libri IV, partibus Summae D. Thomae respondentes as a four-book Latin course keyed to Aquinas's Summa and built for the lecture hall and the disputation floor. In it he defends Molinist freedom, the lawfulness of acting on a probable opinion, and the authority of Trent by recasting theology in the language of law: Adam's sin becomes a pact, absolution a judicial sentence, and a doubtful papal election a defect cured by universal acceptance. The course has never been translated into a modern language, yet it shows in close detail how a seventeenth-century Catholic professor fitted the hardest doctrines to the conscience of the ordinary believer, the peasant included.
ExLatinis · October 3, 2026
Like a Certain Hectic Fever: Thomas Stapleton's A Methodical Demonstration of the Doctrinal Principles of Faith
Thomas Stapleton was the English Catholic exile who held Douai's new chair of controversies. In the Principiorum fidei doctrinalium demonstratio methodica he set out to find the one certain rule that could close every quarrel over doctrine, and he located it in the living voice of a visible, perpetual Church. Read alongside his quodlibetic orations against the Reformers, the treatise shows a sixteenth-century polemicist turning the question of who may judge Scripture into a question of method, the question that had already split England from Rome.
ExLatinis · October 2, 2026
Not Yet Dug from the Earth's Veins: Wilhelmus Lindanus's The Gospel Panoply: Five Books on the Evangelical Word of God
Writing as Wilhelmus Lindanus, the Dordrecht theologian Willem Damasus van der Lindt published Panoplia evangelica, sive de verbo Dei evangelico libri quinque at Cologne in 1559–60 as a five-book Catholic reply to the Reformation principle of Scripture alone. His claim is that the Bible cannot be identified, much less interpreted, without the apostolic teaching the Church hands down unwritten. He presses it with Greek philology, canon law, Frisian church plate and a sharp eye for his opponents' contradictions, which makes the book an early and sustained answer to how Catholics defended tradition in the years of the Council of Trent.
ExLatinis · October 1, 2026
A Nose of Wax: Albert Pighius's The Assertion of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy
Albert Pighius, provost of St John's at Utrecht, printed his Hierarchiae ecclesiasticae assertio at Cologne in 1538. It is a six-book Latin defence of papal authority, dedicated to Paul III and aimed at Luther, at the conciliarists, and at Henry VIII's new headship of the English Church. Its argument is that Scripture alone, a wax nose that bends to every reader, cannot settle religious quarrels, and that truth must be guarded by a living, ordered Church under one visible head; written before Trent fixed Catholic teaching, it shows a combative humanist theologian rebuilding the case for Rome from consensus, antiquity, and succession.
ExLatinis · September 30, 2026
Irrefragable Engine: Johannes Driedo's On the Scriptures and Dogmas of the Church, in Four Books
Johannes Driedo's De ecclesiasticis scripturis et dogmatibus libri quatuor, printed at Leuven in 1533, answered the Lutheran appeal to Scripture alone with three questions: how the Church knows which books are divine, which Latin text binds, and what binds beyond the written page. His answer is that the Church witnesses to Scripture rather than authoring it. That position lets him call the Latin Old Testament "mixed and not pure" while still defending the Vulgate's thousand years of reception. Thirteen years before the Council of Trent took up the same questions, a Leuven theologian had already worked through the distinctions on which Catholics and Protestants would argue over Bible and tradition.
ExLatinis · September 29, 2026
Even While the Workmen Sleep: Paolo Casati's Eight Books of Mechanics
Paolo Casati, a Jesuit mathematician from Piacenza who taught at the Collegio Romano, published Mechanicorum libri octo at Lyon in 1684. The eight-hundred-page Latin treatise promises to explain every machine by the lever, then spends much of its length showing why the lever cannot carry that burden. What it offers instead is a strict account of exchange, in which a machine creates no force and only trades speed, space, and time against weight in what Casati calls a "perpetual justice," which makes the book an unusually candid witness to how mechanics was turning into a unified science before Newton.
ExLatinis · September 28, 2026
Weights in Place of Lines: Giovanni Ceva's On Straight Lines Intersecting One Another: A Construction by Statics
In 1678 the Milanese mathematician Giovanni Ceva published De lineis rectis se invicem secantibus statica constructio, a slim Latin quarto that untangles knots of mutually intersecting lines by hanging imaginary weights on them and reading off their centres of gravity. It gave modern geometry the triangle result still called Ceva's theorem. Its larger interest lies in its method: a disciplined raid on mechanics, made under ducal patronage, that ends by auditing the very infinitesimal techniques that set it in motion.
ExLatinis · September 27, 2026
Lightly Stained with Ink: Giovanni Ceva's Mathematical Essays on Oblique Forces, Pendulums, Vessels, and Rivers
In 1682 the Milanese geometer Giovanni Ceva published Opuscula mathematica de potentiis obliquis, de pendulis, de vasis et de fluminibus, four compact Latin treatises that apply one method of proof to the balance, the pendulum, the draining cask and the flowing river. Ceva tests each mechanical claim against geometry, contradicts Galileo on the pendulum, and closes by designing an instrument to gauge the speed of a river. The book shows an Italian mathematician trying to move the science of water from rule of thumb to demonstration, at a time when rivers were a matter of state.
ExLatinis · September 26, 2026
Some Columbus: Gaspar Schott's Curious Technics, or the Marvels of Art
Gaspar Schott's Technica curiosa, sive Mirabilia artis, libris XII comprehensa (1664) is a thousand-page Latin compendium of air-pumps, diving bells, clocks, secret scripts and perpetual-motion machines, assembled by a Jesuit from letters and printed reports sent from across Europe. Beyond its machines, it records a scholastically trained natural philosopher weighing Otto von Guericke's and Robert Boyle's vacuum experiments against Aristotle, publicly changing his mind about the pressure of the air, and still declining to give up the fear of the void. It shows how the seventeenth century decided which wonders of human art deserved belief, and who was allowed to read about them.
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