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Papers connected with Croatia in the IANLS 2015 Vienna conference

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From the rich programme of the IANLS 2015 conference we have culled abstracts of twelve papers connected with Croatia, or neighbouring regions. Members of the Croatica et Tyrolensia project are strongly represented.

Dominik Bartsch, Lonely walk at Schönbrunn, Vienna  View from Neptune's fountain to Schönbrunn Castle, Vienna.
Dominik Bartsch,
Lonely walk at Schönbrunn, Vienna
View from Neptune’s fountain to Schönbrunn Castle, Vienna.

Epigrams in Bošković’s manuscript collection at the Bancroft Library (University of California, Berkeley)

IRENA BRATIČEVIĆ (University of Zagreb)

The Ragusan Ruđer Bošković (1711-1787) was an esteemed and influential lecturer and scholar throughout Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. His treatises encompassed a broad range of disciplines, from mathematics, physics, geometry, optics, earth science, and engineering to natural philosophy and astronomy. These scholarly works together with Bošković’s efforts to communicate his scientific thought in verse (a notable instance being his epic poem De Solis ac Lunae defectibus) were written in Latin and Italian. But Bošković was also a poet of ordinary events and human relationships. This is particularly evident in the hitherto unstudied collection of his manuscript poems, for the most part autographs, held today in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The collection contains around 400 Latin epigrams. A number of these were improvised on the spot, revealing Bošković’s ingenuity and his mastery of the epigrammatic form. This presentation will consider the social occasions that prompted the epigrams, a number of which were meant to entertain. It will also consider the life of these texts after their original performance: who recorded them, when, and with what purpose in mind.

Structure of the vocabulary in macaronic Latin. A digital approach

ŠIME DEMO (University of Zagreb)

Macaronic Latin is a variety of Neo-Latin that is usually defined as a mixture of Latin with an Embedded Language (hence: EL) characterised by attaching Latin endings to EL’s stems. Additionally, such style may contain more or less pure Latin or EL words, as well as syntactical or semantical departures from the classical norm. So far, this linguistic form has not been a subject of a cross-linguistic statistical analysis. In the paper we will use an annotated digital corpus of macaronic poems from eleven languages in a close analysis of its vocabulary. By classifying various types of macaronic words and observing their relative frequencies we expect to come closer to answering the following questions: whether there are only three types of macaronic vocabulary (Latin, EL, hybrid) or the situation is more complex; what are the percentages of various wird types, including hybrid words (which define macaronics); whether it is possible to observe any values that significantly correlate with the language used as the EL, or genetical linguistic group to wich the EL belongs (Germanic, Romance, Slavic).

Baltazar Adam Krčelić’s Dissertatio ex inscriptione Sztenjevicensi de veteri Andautonio Pannoniae olim oppido

MISLAV GREGL (Croatian Institute of History)

Baltazar Adam Krčelić (1715-1778), a Catholic priest and canon of the bishopric of Zagreb, was a renowned historian and a chronicler of his own time – which was the cause of his many conflicts that were often reflected in his writings. However, some works of his vast, mostly Latin, oeuvre have remained untranslated and unprinted until today. One of these works is the Dissertatio de Andautonio. Although his basic thesis in this work has long since been obsolete (he argued that the ancient Roman settlement of Andautonia was located in the Western suburb of present-day Zagreb as opposed to the South-Eastern as it has since been established), it still represents a valuable source for an 18th century scholar’s way of thinking (and writing), as well as his knowledge of ancient history, archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics and other relevant disciplines. Therefore, Krčelić’s use of ancient, medieval and early modern sources, his influence on other authors, his discourse and language (which, among his contemporaries, was sometimes stigmatised as “monstrous”) will be analysed in this paper.

De scriptorum in Croatia et in Tyrolide numeris, saeculis, nexibus

NEVEN JOVANOVIĆ (Facultas philosophica Universitatis Zagrabiensis)

Parvae sunt partes orbis terrarum Croatia et Tyrolis; attamen in utraque vigebat paene praeter opinionem studium Latine scribendi. Quod studium erat sicut tessera cuius ope viri docti cuiuscumque nationis, maximae an minimae, divitis an pauperis, vicissim aemularentur. Notitia bibliographica docet in Croatia ab anno 976 usque ad annum 1984 auctores 1296 scripsisse opera Latina alicuius momenti 3866. In Tyrolide vero a saeculo XIII° usque ad novissima tempora plus quam 2000 auctores plus quam 7000 opera composuerant. Sed in singulis saeculis quot auctores floruerint, ut in Croatia, ita in Tyrolide? Is numerus qua ratione iunctus sit cum numero totius populi, et ea ratio progressu temporis creveritne an decreverit? Quae fuerint auctorum vicissitudines, quo modo se invicem laudaverint et sublevaverint? Quae genera litteraria quibus praeponderaverint temporibus? Opera sintne plura scripta versu an oratione soluta? Numerus operum quo nexu ligetur cum vi et momento eorum? Haec et alia nobis investiganda proposuimus indagatione litteraria et digitali, qua in re ratio nostra similis est aliquantum ei, quae iam “lectio e recessu” (distant reading) appellata est a Franco Moretti (Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, 2005). Cum possit lectio sine lectione videri, est tamen accessus ad comparationem litterarum, ut dicitur, sociologicam.

Vernacular instances in Paulus Ritter‘s Latin verse epistles

VIOLETA MORETTI (Juraj Dobrila University of Pula)

This presentation is based on the analysis of the Latin verse epistles by Paulus Ritter (Senj 1652 – Vienna 1713). The author incorporated a number of Croatian words and (occasionally) verses, as well as a few larger parts of vernacular text, into his epistles (ca. 9000 lines). Given the fact that here we deal with a literary genre whose purpose is to convey real contents, the use of the vernacular is, expectedly, most prominent for place names and anthroponyms (the Croatian ones as well as those from other languages found in Ritter‘s surroundings, i.e. mostly Hungarian and German). Here we outline the author‘s general usage of the vernacular in the given corpora and present our conclusions about his motives for this. We attempt to define the various circumstances defining his choice between vernacular or Latinized variants of the onyms in question, especially with respect to the metrical limitations set by elegiac couplet. Finally, we explain the stylistic effects of the Croatian elements in his verses. We believe that the conclusions of this presentation could shed additional light on language and stylistic features in the Latin poetry of the Early Modern period.

Politics of the Habsburgs in the Poems of Michael Verancius (1514-1571)

GYÖRGY PALOTÁS (University of Szeged)

Michael Verancius is a humanist of the 16th century from Central Europe. He was born in Dalmatia. He studied in Padua, Cracow and Vienna. He was a loyal poet of King John I. He also had influential supporters (e.g. Piotr Tomicki) from Poland. Later, he had close contacts with the Habsburg dynasty. This century’s vicissitudinous events considerably affected his poetry. His activities can be divided into three periods. In the first period (1527-1544), he was a little known but central humanist of Zápolya‘s circle. He supported Zápolya in many poems when he was in Poland and Transylvania. He attacked the propaganda of the Court of Vienna with political poems in polemical tone. His querelae (1528) are remarkable because of their genre questions and political attitude. In the middle period (1544-1563), this radical tone decreased and he wrote rather unbiased poems in Šibenik. Having been disappointed in the confused politics, he retired from these subjects. In the last period of his life (1564-1571) in Bratislava and Vienna, a certain German orientation can be observed. I will attempt to outline this unfairly neglected but exceptionally complex and thoughtful oeuvre from the political viewpoint of Zápolya‘s faction (Hungarian) and Ferdinand‘s faction (German).

Institutiones linguae Illyricae (1604) and Thesaurus linguae Illyricae (1649) – how the authority of the Latin language provided the legitimacy to a vernacular

SANJA PERIĆ GAVRANČIĆ (Institute for Croatian Language and Linguistics)

The paper deals with the ways in which Latin and its grammatical and lexicographic heritage were involved in the first attempts to codify the Croatian language in the 17th century. Two starting points in the history of Croatian language standardization will be presented – its first grammar and first dictionary. Institutiones linguae Illyricae (1604) by Bartholomaeus Cassius, despite closely following Latin grammatical models, laid the groundwork for an autonomous grammatical tradition. Jacobus Micalia’s Thesaurus linguae Illyricae (1649), a trilingual dictionary with Croatian entries translated into Italian and Latin was intended for Latin language learning while simultaneously promoting Croatian language heritage. The authority of the Latin language assured both of these works the status of exclusivity. The excerpts from the perfaces of these works will explain the historical and cultural circumstances under which the term lingua Illyrica became a concept of a unitary literary language (lingua communis) recomended by the church authorities in Rome for the propagation of religious life (propagatio fidei Catholicae) in regions under Turkish dominion (in Turcarum regionibus).

The Latin Poetry of Damianus Benessa (1476-1539)

VLADO REZAR (University of Zagreb)

Damianus Benessa, a Latin poet of Dubrovnik, is generally considered to be one of the most versatile representatives of Humanism on the East coast of the Adriatic in the early 16th century. Remembered mostly for his voluminous Christian epic De morte Christi, which happened to be published from the autograph only in 2006, Benessa is the author of another surviving manuscript which contains his smaller scale poetry: three books of epigrams, a book of eclogues, two books of odes and a book of satires. The apparent humanistic concept of this poetic venture, based on the genre models of classical antiquity, has been even more emphasized by Benessa’s Latin renditions of Greek epigrams belonging to the Anthologia Planudea, and especially by Benessa’s original epigrams composed in ancient Greek. As such, this very collection is an unicum among the surviving works of Croatian humanist poets and because of that of undisputed importance for Croatian literary and cultural history. As the collection is just about to be published for the first time, the paper brings out a brief survey of its content and detects litterary patterns which influenced its author.

Paolo Giovios Elogium als Vorbild von Antun Vrančić

ERZSÉBET BORBÁLA SÖRÖS (Univ. Szeged)

Paolo Giovio wollte mit seinen zwei Büchern die antike Gattung des Elogium in der Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts wiederaufleben lassen (Elogia Doctorum Virorum, Venedig, 1546, und Elogia Virorum Bellica Virtute Illustrium, Florenz, 1551). Die Texte von Giovio sind meistens gedrängt, sie stellen auf einmal eine historische Persönlichkeit oder Zeitgenossen gemäß ihren Ämtern, Ereignissen, äußeren Eigenschaften oder einer charakteristischen Tat, die ihre Beurteilung beeinflusst, vor. In Ungarn hatte Giovio ganz früh einen Nachfolger, Antun Vrančić. Der erste Band könnte – aus chronologischen Gründen – Antun Vrančić als Vorbild dienen (ihr Briefwechsel bestätigt das), als er ein Elogium auf das Leben und den Tod seines vor kurzem verstorbenen Freundes, Orbán Batthyány (Elogium Urbani Bathiani, Manuskript, um 1548) verfasste, das mehrere historische, gattungstheoretische und interpretatorische Fragen an den Leser stellt. Diesen satirischen und enigmatischen Text hat Vrančić in einer bedrängten politischen Lage, in den 1540er Jahren am Karlsburger Hofe der Königinwitwe Izabella verfasst. Mit Unterstützung des schwer zu rekonstruierenden historischen Hintergrundes versuche ich das früher unbekannte Manuskript zu interpretieren und nachzuweisen, was für eine Beziehung es zwischen den Elogia von Giovio und Vrančić gibt, wie Vrančić diese Gattung auswertet und polysem macht, wie Giovios Nachfolger in Ungarn sie als ein Instrument der politischen Satire anwendet.

Antun Vrančić’s “Occasional” Letters in the Light of the Humanistic Treatises of Letter-Writing

DIANA SORIĆ (University of Zadar)

Croatian humanist, diplomat and Primate of Hungary, Antun Vrančić (1504-1573), in a period of 35 years, i.e. from 1538 to 1573, wrote about 800 letters, mostly in Latin, and only in a few cases in Italian and Hungarian. Most of the letters are published in the Hungarian edition Szalay-Wenzel in the series Monumenta Hungariae historica. In Vrančić’s epistolographic corpus I identified a considerable number of letters that could be called „occasional“ as they are written on some specific events or occasions, for example, letters of consolation (epistolae consolatoriae), letters of recommendation (epistolae commendaticiae), letters of petition (epistolae petitoriae), etc. These letters will be examined in the context of the rules given in the theories of letter-writing of humanistic treatises ars epistolandi (especially the treatise De conscribendis epistolis by Erasmus Rotterdamus, and the homonymous manuals of F. Niger and J. L. Vives ) in order to determine their possible influence on composition of Vrančić’s letters. In this paper I will analyze separately the structure and the content of Vrančić’s letters according to the rules that are offered in the mentioned manuals.

Reconstructing the Intellectual Network of a Croatian Curial Prelate: Nicholas of Modruš and Bessarion’s Academy

LUKA ŠPOLJARIĆ (University of Zagreb)

The paper will revisit a previously unexplored angle of the Accademia Bessarionis, the informal intellectual circle in Renaissance Rome centered around Cardinal Bessarion. It will explore the role that one Nicholas bishop of Modruš (ca. 1427-1480), a humanist prelate who did not find any mention in previous studies on this topic, played in the Academy. Nicholas of Modruš was a Croatian prelate, who, after his banishment from the Hungarian court, enjoyed a successful career at the Curia during the pontificates of Paul II and Sixtus IV. The paper will set Nicholas on the social stage of Renaissance Rome, and by drawing on documentary, literary and palaeographical evidence, reconstruct his connections to Bessarion’s circle. While it will thus contribute to the more detailed understanding of one of the most famous intellectual circles of the Italian Renaissance, it will also serve as a case study of the Croatica et Tyrolensia project: a project that seeks to map out the learned connections of the Croatian and Tyrolean early modern intelligentsia and ultimately provide parallel digital textual-prosopographical-bibliographical databases of Croatian and Tyrolean Latinists.

Deities in Big Numbers. A Digital Analysis of the Mythological Apparatus in Three Croatian Neo-Latin Epics

GORANA STEPANIĆ (Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Department of Humanities)

It is well known that Neo-Latin epic, including Christian epic, widely employs the ancient mythological apparatus. The phenomenon has been studied as one of the prominent and most obvious characteristics which the epic genre ‘owes’ to Antiquity, usually on the basis of individual texts. In this paper I am going to present the results of a digital experiment performed on three chronologically distant Christian epics by Croatian Neo-Latin authors (Jacobus Bonus from Dubrovnik, De uita et gestis Christi, 1526; Caietanus Vicich from Rijeka, Jesseidos libri XII, 1700; Josephus Ciobarnich from Makarska, Dioclias, ms. ante 1846, ed. 1881). The experiment consisted in isolating and analyzing all proper names of classical origin from the total of 26000 verses. Working on large amounts of text and with big numbers, I am trying to gain an ‘objective’ insight into the status of the mythological apparatus in the three poems and draw conclusions on how it was used, in which contexts, how its relative frequency reflects the doctrinal rigor of their authors or the ideological or aesthetic preferences of their respective periods.

Orationes sollennes die Sancti Ladislai habitae et discipuli Hungari Universitatis Viennensis

LÁSZLÓ SZÖRÉNYI (Institute for Literary Studies of the Research Centre for the Humanities of Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

In Universitate Viennensi Natio Hungarica ex discipulis Hungaris, Croatis atque Slavonis constabat, eius regula anno 1414 est edita. Articulus primus praescripsit, ut die Sancti Ladislai, eiusdem Nationis patroni annuatim festa celebrarentur. In universum 109 orationes notae sunt, quarum 82 nomen quidem oratoris, 52 textum ipsum nobis praebet. Anthologia quoque earum typographice expressa est, quae orationes excellentissimas continuit. Saepissime professores rhetoricae illa opuscula conscripserunt, et ingeniosissimi discipulorum ea perdiscere et recitare debebant, nonnunquam autem tam eruditi atque ambitiosi fuerunt, ut ipsi orationes concinnarent. Oratores semper ex nobilissimis ac ditissimis iuvenibus electi sunt, quoniam eorum fuit pro festo convivioque pecuniam solvere. Aliquando etiam magnates imperii, immo imperator in celebratione interfuerunt. His orationibus veluti fontibus uti possumus, qui ad quaestiones politicas vel historico- philosophicas Regni Hungariae et regis eius temporis pertinent, nec non ad necessitudinem inter nationem Hungaricam et familiam Habsburg, quae post annum 1527 semper mutationes patiebatur. Auctor orationis clarissimae Nicolaus Zrínyi vocatur, qui postea non solum “banus Croatiae” creatus est, sed etiam maximus poetarum Hungarorum aetatis “baroque” vocatae existimatur, praeterea tractatus historicos, militares et politicos conscripsit. Sed operae pretium est alios quoque oratores observare, quamvis hactenus satis neglecti fuerint.

Centers of Humanist Networks in Hungary

ENIKÖ BÉKÉS (Budapest, HAS, Institute for Literary Studies)
PÉTER KASZA (University of Szeged, Faculty of Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies)

The aim of this paper is to present the network system of two key figures of Hungarian Humanism, that of Janus Pannonius and Stephanus Brodericus. Therefore we will not focus primarily on the literary analysis of their works, but rather on the function and nature of their artistic and political relationships. With this approach we would like to offer two case studies that would serve as models of the Hungarian side of the Central and East European prosopography project. Janus Pannonius’ literary activity is well known also for the international scholarship, consequently this paper will outline his most important connections with Italian humanists and to demonstrate the role of this network in the formulation of Hungarian Humanism and in the art patronage and cultural politics of King Matthias Corvinus. The second part of the paper will discuss Stephanus Brodericus (ca. 1480-1539), one of the most famous humanists of the Hungarian Kingdom in the 16th century. The critical edition of his Europe-wide correspondence was published in 2012. This edition makes it possible to sketch up the network of this important humanist-diplomat on a wider basis. The lecture is going to demonstrate the types of Brodericus’ connections, which were not restricted only to fellow-humanists, but thanks to his diplomatic activity comprised many rulers and leading politicians of his time as well.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Neven Jovanović (June 25, 2015). Papers connected with Croatia in the IANLS 2015 Vienna conference. Croatica et Tyrolensia. Retrieved April 26, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ne7r