Naumachica, or On Naval Warfare in Five Books

Document notes

Original title: Nicolai Parthenii Giannettasii Neapolitani E Societate Jesu Naumachica: Seu De Bello Navali Libri V A five-book Neo-Latin didactic epic in hexameters on naval warfare, printed at Naples by Bernardo Michele Raillard and dedicated to Antonio Rambaldo di Collalto, who financed the edition. Equipped with the author's own footnotes glossing classicizing coinages with vernacular seamen's terms (pyxis / La Bussola, pyria cella / Santa Barbara, ignivomae carinae / Burlotti), the poem instructs a fleet commander in the sciences and duties of his office: reading the winds and tides, use of the compass, ordering squadrons in line of battle, signalling and ciphered written orders, shipboard discipline and penalties, gunnery, and the siting of the powder magazine. Alongside this technical instruction it argues that fleets are the breath of empire and squadrons its provinces, adducing Carthage, Rome and Venice; narrates and morally judges the naval battles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Lepanto and the northern (Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch) wars; condemns the fireship as an invention traced to English schism and heresy; describes the Ottoman sultan's flagship with its celestial and terrestrial globes; and closes with meditations on shifting winds, measured haste, mortality, and praise of its patron. Its paratexts include a dedicatory dream-vision on the Sorrentine shore, a commendatory tetrastich cataloguing the author's earlier poems on cosmography, geography, navigation, fishing, the Surrentine and Herculanean seasons, land warfare, and Neapolitan history, and Jesuit, archiepiscopal, and viceregal licences dated 1714. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

• Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here
• View the original source file

Document excerpt

DE OSINI BIBLIOTHECA