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
89 articles · page 3 of 8
ExLatinis · 23 September 2026
Sheaves of grain on an Orsini bordure: Philipp Jakob Spener's History of Illustrious Armorial Bearings
Philipp Jakob Spener, the Lutheran pastor whose Pia desideria gave German Pietism its programme, spent the other half of his working life on coats of arms: Historia insignium illustrium, seu Operis heraldici pars specialis, printed at Frankfurt in 1680, is a Latin armorial that treats the shields and pedigrees of the Medici, the Guidi, the Piccolomini, and the Orsini as claims to be proved rather than stories to be repeated. He sets charters, imperial diplomas, and epitaphs against family tradition, discloses how his materials reached him — including from one Florentine gentleman whose name he refuses to print — and states plainly where the documents run out. The result is a book in which an eel winding across a fess and a duchy sold to the Odescalchi in 1696 belong to the same argument.
Read the article
ExLatinis · 22 September 2026
Dictating the Manichaeans: Kaspar Sagittarius's An Introduction to Ecclesiastical History and Its Several Parts
Kaspar Sagittarius, professor of history at Jena, died in March 1694 leaving behind not a narrative of the Church but an inventory of the men who wrote it: Introductio in historiam ecclesiasticam et singulas eius partes, sive Notitia scriptorum veterum atque recentium qui vel historiam ecclesiasticam universam vel regnorum aliarumque provinciarum historiam illustrant, printed in two Jena volumes in 1718 by his colleague Johann Andreas Schmidt. Every author in it is weighed — parentage, chairs, editions, continuators — and then judged genuine or forged, annalistic or fabulous, honest about his sources or silently helping himself to them. In an age when the papacy's claims stood or fell on whether a given document was authentic, a bibliography of this kind was an argument in disguise, and Sagittarius made it one by letting Catholic scholars pronounce the verdicts against Catholic forgeries.
ExLatinis · 20 September 2026
A Shield Left Blank: Silvestro Pietrasanta's Armorial Tokens According to the Laws of the Fetials
Silvestro Pietrasanta, a Roman Jesuit writing in the orbit of the Barberini court, published in 1638 a folio of some 678 pages, Tesserae gentilitiae a Silvestro Petra Sancta Romano Societatis Iesu ex legibus Fecialium descriptae, which set out to give heraldry what it did not yet possess: a Latin technical vocabulary, an account of where armorial signs came from, and rules firm enough to decide hard cases. Its most durable legacy is a printer's solution — gold shown by dots, silver by untouched paper, red by vertical lines — the monochrome code by which an engraving without colour can still name colours. At the very end of the book he left a shield complete with helm and mantling but entirely empty, for any reader whose family he had failed to include.
ExLatinis · 18 September 2026
As Many Princes as There Are Houses: Nikolaus Reusner's Five Books of Turkish Letters by Various and Diverse Authors
In 1598 the Jena jurist Nikolaus Reusner gathered five books of letters — papal, imperial, Ottoman, Mongol, and frankly forged — into Epistolarum Turcicarum variorum et diversorum authorum libri V, a Latin dossier printed at Frankfurt while imperial armies were losing Győr and Eger on the Hungarian frontier. Rather than compose a history of Ottoman power, he printed the parties' own documents and let the chanceries speak in their own voices, on the Plinian principle that what is to come mostly resembles what has already been done. The result is an archive assembled as political counsel, and its recurring verdict is that Christendom's want of a head whom all will obey is the sultan's most dependable ally.
ExLatinis · 17 September 2026
Death Without Effusion of Blood: Johannes ab Indagine's Apotelesmatic Introductions to Chiromancy, Physiognomy, Natural Astrology, Human Complexions, and the Natures of the Planets
In 1522 a parish dean from Steinheim near Hanau published at Strasbourg an illustrated Latin manual, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes, in Chyromantiam, Physiognomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas planetarum, cum periaxiomatibus, that taught readers to treat the lines of the palm, the set of a forehead, the four humoral temperaments, and the qualities of the planets as one connected system of natural signs. Johannes ab Indagine's wager was that divination from the body could be defended as physics — the planets acting through the body's own heat — and his book carried that wager into Dutch, French, and English for well over a century. Forty years later Jean Taisnier absorbed much of it into a vast Cologne folio, whose Latin lets us watch the argument, the case histories, and the theological escape hatches at full length.
ExLatinis · 16 September 2026
A Drug-Shop Lasting for Years: Georg Pictorius's The Virtues of Herbs
In March 1559 the Basel printer Heinrich Petri issued a pocket-sized Latin herbal, De herbarum virtutibus Aemilii Macri Veronensis elegantissima poësis, in which an eleventh-century hexameter poem on the powers of plants arrives wrapped in the prose notes of Georg Pictorius, physician at the imperial court at Ensisheim. Pictorius kept the poem's borrowed classical author-name while fitting it out with a table of Galenic degrees, an index, and a register of ailments running from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, converting a poem to be admired into a drug-shop to be consulted. He then closed the volume with a mock-elegy on "the herb whose name is woman," heated to a sixth degree and dried to a seventh — degrees that appear nowhere in the doctrine his own tables teach.
ExLatinis · 15 September 2026
Six Hundred Authors in the Margin: Johannes Clüver's Epitome of the Histories of the Whole World, from the First Origin of Things to the Year of Christ 1630
A Lutheran pastor of the Holstein towns, dead at forty in 1633, left behind a universal history that outlived him by decades: Johannis Cluveri Historiarum totius mundi epitome: a prima rerum origine usque ad annum Christi MDCXXX, printed at Leiden in 1631 and reset at Amsterdam as late as 1668 with its terminal date pushed forward to the Anglo-Dutch peace of 1667. Johannes Clüver's method was to keep the narrative short and put the proof in the margin, where the title boasts of more than six hundred sacred and profane authorities. What survives is less a fixed authorial statement than a working instrument of the Latin book trade — providential in architecture, philological in apparatus, and commercially durable enough to be enlarged long after its author could object.
ExLatinis · 14 September 2026
Two Rules Joined in the Form of a Cross: Riccioli's Twelve Books of Reformed Geography and Hydrography
Giovanni Battista Riccioli, the Jesuit astronomer of Bologna, spent the years after his vast Almagestum Novum building something stranger: a folio called Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim (1661), which set out to correct the whole inherited science of the earth and its seas by measurement, tabulation, and the collated testimony of working pilots. Across twelve books it fixes the length of a foot, computes the height of Mount Athos from a shadow reported by Pliny, prints a specimen sea-journal for 1 April 1645, Latinizes the toponymy of New England and New Amsterdam, and closes by guessing how many people were then alive on earth. What holds it together is a habit rarely found in encyclopedias: a willingness to say, in print and by name, exactly where the numbers stop being trustworthy.
ExLatinis · 13 September 2026
Ten Days Removed from October: Johann Clüver's Epitome of the Histories of the Whole World, from the First Origin of Things to the Seventeenth Century
Johann Clüver died at forty, but his Historiarum totius mundi epitome — a Latin history of the world carried from Creation to 1630, first printed at Leiden in 1631 — went on being reprinted, supplemented and extended for four decades after him, until its printers had pushed it to the Anglo-Dutch peace of 1667. Clüver's method was to give every institution a birth date: the Roman primacy, the popes' temporal lordship, the veneration of images, the death penalty for heresy, even the party-name Protestantes are each assigned a first moment, a named agent, and a marginal authority. The result is a universal chronology in which computing a year is itself the act of judgement.
ExLatinis · 12 September 2026
Infallible Characters of Time: Johann Heinrich Alsted's Treasury of Chronology
Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor at the Reformed Hohe Schule at Herborn, poured what he called a Herculean labour into a single instrument: the Thesaurus chronologiae of 1624, fifty numbered chronologies running from the creation of the world to eclipses, comets, and the Saturn–Jupiter conjunctions by which he proposed to check every date he had set down. It sorts the Roman pontiffs into three classes, converts Daniel's weeks into years falling around its own printing, enters the German war then raging under 1618 with a count of its dead, and closes by conceding that much of its arithmetic still calls for the sponge. Chronology, on Alsted's account, was the light and eye of history, and universality meant one ordered frame made to hold Scripture, the heavens, the annals of nations, and the history of learning together.
ExLatinis · 11 September 2026
Three Years of Three Hundred and Sixty Days: Johannes Temporarius's Chronological Demonstrations: Three Books
In 1596 the heirs of Andreas Wechel printed at Frankfurt a folio of Latin argument, Chronologicarum demonstrationum libri tres, in which the French jurist Johannes Temporarius — Jean du Temps — set out to prove, rather than merely recount, the order of time from the creation to 1580. His method was to refuse to settle disputes between texts by other texts: eclipses, equinoxes, and the era of Nabonassar were made the controls against which Greek archon lists, Roman fasti, Persian regnal years, and Daniel's seventy weeks all had to answer. The same observations that convicted Annius of Viterbo's forged Berosus and exposed "Metasthenes" as a mangled Megasthenes also produced a startling closing demand: that Europe's monarchs shorten the years 1597, 1598, and 1599 to three hundred and sixty days apiece.
ExLatinis · 10 September 2026
An Anomaly Hitherto Noticed by No One: Gerard Mercator's Chronology: That Is, a Most Exact Demonstration of Times, from the Beginning of the World to the Year of Our Lord 1568, Compiled from the Eclipses and Astronomical Observations of All Ages, from Sacred Scripture, and from the Best Authorities
Gerard Mercator, remembered for reshaping the map, spent the 1560s reckoning the whole of time instead: his Chronologia, hoc est temporum demonstratio exactissima, ab initio mundi usque ad annum Domini M.D.LXVIII (1569) sets the years of the World, of Rome, of the Seleucids, of Christ and of the Hegira in parallel columns and settles their disagreements by eclipse. Where historians contradict Scripture, or copyists have mangled a numeral, the heavens serve as the court of final appeal — and where Ptolemy, the Alfonsine tables, Copernicus and the Prutenic tables themselves disagree, the compiler takes the mean between them. The reckoning closes with his own solar eclipse observed to the minute at Duisburg in 1567, and with a quantified verdict against the Church: its nineteen-year Easter cycle had drifted two days from the sky.
Read the article