PIONEERING IN NEO-LATIN DRAMA

Abstract

The preoccupation of scholars with the vernacular literatures of the Renaissance during the past century has not only relegated Neo-Latin literature to a position of comparative oblivioni it has tended to convince us that the vast corpus of Renaissance works written in Latin does not even existo No thoroughgoing history of Renaissance Latin literature has yet been attempted 9 simply because such an undertaking would prove well nigh limitless 0 As Father Ong has remarka d 9 it would covar all Europe and America and weave in and out of every vernacular literature from Portuguese to Hungarian, from Italian to Icelandic, and be simply the history of the Western mind0 It should be noted, however, that at the 1952 meeting of the Modern Language Association a cooperative history of modern Latin literature ( liļ 00-1600 ), under the general editorship of James R, Naidens was assigned to thirty-two scholars, each responsible for one aspect of the history. Some of these studies have already appeared. But the projectors of the venture, I feel sure, were under no illusion that the finished work would be more than a survey.