Prescribing Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens
Author(s): Yasmin Haskell (Author)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date: 28 Mar. 2013
Edition: Illustrated
Language: English
Print length: 280 pages
ISBN-10: 0715637231
ISBN-13: 9780715637234
Book Description
Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens was a cosmopolitan Dutch physician and Latin poet of the eighteenth century. A Catholic, he was in many ways an outsider on his own turf, the peat country of Protestant Groningen, and looked to Voltaire’s Paris, much as Ovid, in exile, had looked to Rome. An indefatigable traveller and networker, Heerkens mixed freely with philosophers, physicians, churchmen and antiquarians. This book reconstructs his Latin works and networks, and reveals in the process a virtually unexplored corner of eighteenth-century culture, the ‘Latin Enlightenment’.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Prescribing Ovid will be particularly useful for those interested in the position of Latin in the 18th-century and the Enlightenment. It is also a valuable case study about the ways in which the Republic of Letters was put to practical use during this period. Finally, Heerkens’s self-presentation as an 18th-century Ovid is a fascinating case for those working on self-fashioning both in literature in general and in the works of early modern (Neo-Latin) authors in particular. –Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Floris Verhaart
It required great courage to devote a sizeable monograph to a person who is unfamiliar even to neo-Latin scholars. The book therefore serves as a model to anyone who intends to study one of the hundreds of neglected writers who devoted themselves to Latin literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries . . . This book is truly fascinating. It presents Heerkens as a man from the provinces who, thanks to his literary activity and travels, encountered many people from the mainstream Enlightenment movement and the cultural, intellectual, and religious life of his times. –Journal of Jesuit Studies, Piotr Urbanski
As the history of learning moves towards the study of reception and circulation of knowledge, a study of the use of Latin in the eighteenth century has long been overdue. Latin journals, for example, are largely overlooked in favour of vernacular journals … Haskell’s book, then, moves appealingly into this literary wasteland. –Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, Dirk van Miert
About the Author
Yasmin Haskell has been Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia since 2003. She is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. She is the author of Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry, winner of the British Academy Postdoctoral Monographs Competition.
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