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
33 articles · page 3 of 3
ExLatinis · July 24, 2026
The Set Square at the Gate: Girolamo Vitale's Lexicon Mathematicum Astronomicum Geometricum
A Theatine cleric of Capua named Girolamo Vitale spent years compiling a single alphabetical dictionary, the Lexicon Mathematicum Astronomicum Geometricum (Paris, 1668), meant to hold the entire technical vocabulary of the seventeenth-century mathematical arts — arithmetic, geometry, optics, astronomy, and all their kin — within one Catholic reference apparatus. His governing aim was neither purely scholarly nor purely devotional: to prove that the whole of mathesis could be transmitted intact, without hazard to faith or morals, provided every term was admitted, glossed, and, where dangerous, quarantined one entry at a time. The result is an unusually clear record of how a sophisticated cleric-mathematician drew the boundary between licit astronomy and condemned judicial astrology, between natural sympathy and forbidden magic, in the deliberately undramatic medium of the lexical definition.
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ExLatinis · July 24, 2026
The Sacred Anchor and Charon's Skiff: Georg Wolfgang Wedel's Opiologia, or A Treatise on Opium Drawn Up According to the Mind of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum
Georg Wolfgang Wedel, a Jena physician writing in 1674, confronted the paradox at the heart of learned medicine's dealings with opium: the drug was at once the most potent remedy in the physician's store and a substance the schools had long feared as a poison. His Opiologia ad mentem Academiae Naturae Curiosorum refuses to dissolve that paradox and instead disciplines it, asking how a physician might rightly know, prepare, and administer a drug whose power and whose danger are one and the same. Grounded in a tally of more than four hundred cured dysenteries, the interrogation of opium at the chemical furnace, and a signature doctrine that the drug can act only when the blood holds a proportioned serum, the book captures a discipline mid-transition, holding Galenic and chymical frameworks together under the pressure of a single consequential simple.
ExLatinis · July 24, 2026
The File and the Furnace: Josse Clichtove's An Ecclesiastical Elucidation of the Matters Pertaining to the Office of the Church, in Four Books
In late 1515 or early 1516, Henri Estienne's Paris press issued the Elucidatorium ecclesiasticum, the Flemish theologian Josse Clichtove's four-book manual for the whole Divine Office and the Mass, built on a single conviction: that the Church sings its daily hymns, canticles, and prayers without understanding them. Against corrupted texts and forgotten authors Clichtove trained the full apparatus of Christian humanism — textual emendation, metrical scansion, and Hebrew-Greek-Latin philology — always in the service of a sharper orthodoxy. It is the principal liturgical monument of the circle around Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, and the constructive programme whose arguments Clichtove would later turn against Luther.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Sign of the Olive: Leonardo Vairo's Three Books on Fascination: On the Evil Eye, its Species and Causes
In the winter of 1583 a Benedictine bishop-to-be published a three-book Latin treatise arguing that the evil eye is real but that nothing in nature — not the imagination, not the radiating eye, not touch, voice, or the stars — can cause it, so that its true efficient cause must be a demon operating through a pact. Leonardo Vairo's De fascino libri tres accepts the folkloric and medical lore of the fascinum only to reassign its causation to the demonic, folding a topic of medical curiosity into the post-Tridentine theological program against superstition. It matters because it is one of the earliest systematic Latin treatments of the demonic pact in the Counter-Reformation, a work in which philology, faculty psychology, philosophy of language, medicine, and theology are marshalled toward a single demonstrative end.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Hairy Star and the King of the Parthians: Erycius Puteanus's On the Comet of the Year 1618, a New Spectacle of the World: Two Books of Paradox-Discourse
When a bright comet crossed the skies of Europe in November 1618, most who wrote about it saw a warning of war, plague, and the death of kings; the Louvain humanist Erycius Puteanus—successor to Justus Lipsius in the chair of Latin eloquence—wrote instead to argue the fear itself into absurdity. His two-book Neo-Latin treatise, printed in 1619 as De cometa anni 1618. Novo mundi spectaculo, libri duo. Paradoxologia and dedicated to the Habsburg sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands, reclassifies the comet as a citizen of heaven rather than a portent, and relocates the only true prodigies from the sky to the human soul. Composed on the eve of the Thirty Years' War, when the claim that a comet foretold conflict carried immediate confessional and dynastic weight, it turns natural philosophy, forensic polemic, and moral theology to a single end: stripping the heavens of their power to terrify.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Closed and Round Garment: Ottavio Ferrari's Seven Books on the Vestiary Art of the Ancients
In 1654, at the Paduan press of Paolo Frambotto, the Milanese classicist Ottavio Ferrari (1607–1682) issued Octavii Ferrarii de re vestiaria libri septem, a seven-book reconstruction of how the ancient Greeks and Romans dressed and what their garments meant. Ferrari, who held the chairs of Latin and Greek Humanity at Padua and ran its University Library, argued that statues and coins outrank grammarians in settling questions of antique costume, and that a garment is never inert cloth but a legible claim about its wearer's status, virtue, and citizenship. Illustrated with thirty-two engraved plates drawn from Cassiano dal Pozzo's paper museum, the volume matters both as a document of seventeenth-century material philology and as a foundation stone of the history of dress as a scholarly field.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
Nobody's Shop, Everywhere: The Anonymous Nugae Venales, or, Saleable Trifles, A Treasury for Laughing and Joking
A seventeenth-century Latin jestbook that sells itself at Nobody's shop, Nugae venales, sive Thesaurus ridendi & jocandi trains the entire apparatus of scholastic learning — syllogism, legal testament, medical diagnosis, etymology — upon flatulence, cuckoldry, and the latrine, and does so without ever once dropping the grave face of the schools. Assembled anonymously and issued under a false imprint through the Latin university culture of Northern Europe, its earliest surviving issue is dated 1642, with reissues running to the enlarged 1720 Editio ultima. It is a book that begins by refusing to exist, and it rewards attention precisely because its impersonation of serious method never breaks character.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Baker Summoned to the Study: Guillaume Budé's On the As and Its Parts: Five Books on Roman Coinage, Weights, and Measures
In 1515 the royal librarian to Francis I published a folio on the Roman as — the humble copper penny of antiquity — and turned it into a weapon. Guillaume Budé's De asse et partibus eius libri quinque weighs surviving coins, measures cubic vessels, and interrogates a Parisian baker on his grain, all to prove that a single misread inflection in Pliny had inflated the scale of Roman public finance a hundredfold; from that correction it widens into an assault on debased coinage, clerical avarice, and the warlike pontificate of Julius II. It matters because it founded the historical study of ancient coinage and metrology as a discipline governed by evidence rather than deference, and because it dared to enthrone the numen of Truth above every ancient and ecclesiastical authority alike.
ExLatinis · July 23, 2026
The Waldsassen Compounder and the Diseased Brain: Johann Weyer's On the Tricks of Demons and on Enchantments and Poisonings, in Five Books
In 1563 a physician to the Duke of Cleves published, in learned Latin, one of the sixteenth century's boldest arguments against burning witches. Johann Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri V holds that the old woman who confesses to night-flight and coupling with demons is not a criminal but a sick and deluded patient — a melancholic whose corrupted imagination Satan has invaded — and that the executioner's proper business is only the poisoner who truly harms the body by material means. It matters because it relocated the accused witch from the courtroom to the clinic, set the terms of the century's fiercest debate over witch prosecution, and drew both Jean Bodin's furious rejoinder and Reginald Scot's sympathetic English extension.
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