Neo-Latin Studies in Catalonia (ca. 1830–ca. 1960)

As with other parts of Europe, in Catalonia attention to Neo-Latin literature has increased exponentially in the last five decades. Research groups related to the field are proliferating, the discipline has been incorporated into undergraduate and postgraduate curricula, and in recent years new translations of key Neo-Latin texts have also been appearing in a steady stream, aimed both at a scholarly audience and a broader readership. This interest has an important precedent in the period from 1830 to 1960, when several studies on Catalan Neo-Latin were produced and a considerable numer of Catalan versions of local, Italian and northern European Neo-Latin poets and prose writers were published. In this essay the author attempts to demonstrate that interest in Neo-Latin literature during those one hundred and thirty years had a broader significance and that attention to the Catalan Neo-Latin corpus as well as translations of, and studies on, Petrarch, Poggio Bracciolini, Johannes Secundus, Erasmus, Thomas More and Juan Luis Vives issued at the time should be regarded as a further contribution, however modest, to the construction of cultural identity in modern Catalonia. This is a little-studied topic which has gone unnoticed to scholars of both Neo-Latin studies and modern Catalan literature.