In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Latin gradually lost its dominant position as a literary
language in Europe. The normativity of the Classics was increasingly questioned in the literary
field, and cultural processes such as the boom of translation and the rise of journals opened up
literature to a broader public. Nonetheless, key players in intellectual Europe continued to
produce collected epigrams in Latin. Despite its omnipresence, the epigrammatic genre is almost
exclusively studied in vernacular languages and has received next to no attention in Neo-Latin
studies after the Renaissance.
The present project hypothesizes that the Latin epigram contributed significantly to the cultivation
of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ‘Republic of Letters’, a self-aware and transnational
network of intellectuals. On the one hand, the epigram was a tool for self-fashioning. It helped
writers to consciously build their image within a particular socio-historical context. On the other
hand, the genre attests to the increasingly multilingual status of the Republic of Letters. Features
of the Latin epigram were negotiated in dialogue with contemporary, vernacular traditions of
epigrams and other forms of short poetry. By turning to a body of texts that is often overlooked,
the project aims to enhance our understanding of the transnational dynamics fundamentally
shaping a period in European literary history marked by crucial changes.