Prescribing Ovid: The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens

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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'.

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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, Heerkenss 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. -- Floris Verhaart * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
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. -- Piotr Urbanski * Journal of Jesuit Studies *
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 Haskells book, then, moves appealingly into this literary wasteland. -- Dirk van Miert * Neulateinisches Jahrbuch *
It's difficult not to admire the thoroughness of a piece of research that connects so many diverse areas and which has obliged the author to engage with all the European countries traversed by her hero ... An excellent and complete model of intellectual biography. -- Giuseppe Ricuperati * Rivista Storica Italiana *

Author Bio

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 Councils Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. She is the author of Loyolas Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry, winner of the British Academy Postdoctoral Monographs Competition.