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
42 articles · page 4 of 4
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.
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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 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 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 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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