Distrust Quotations in Latin

The Languages of World Literature (volume 1), edited by Achim Hölter, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 453-466., 2024

From Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Stephen King's It (1986), the Graeco-Latin Classics have appeared in Gothic literature in the form of quotations, linking two aesthetics that are seemingly opposites. These quotations go beyond mere cultural references, and sometimes even become the key to understanding the stories they are included in. As part of the main text or as part of the paratext, in their complete form or deliberately distorted, translated or in their original language, there is no doubt that quotations add very valuable contextual information that is necessary for the full comprehension of the literary work in which they appear. This article will examine the presence of Latin quotations in works by Horace Walpole, Charles Robert Maturin, Edgar Allan Poe, and M. R. James, considering a relevant selection of texts in order to outline the characteristics of this literary device, as well as to analyse in detail the different implications that the so-called dead languages have when they appear in the literature of terror.

The Oxfordian, 2017

Examines the historical context of the production and publication of the 1623 Shakespeare Folio in light of the Spanish Marriage crisis of 1621-1623. The prime movers in the folio project were anti-Hapsburg internationalists who opposed James's plan to marry Charles Stuart to the Spanish Infanta but also celebrated and honored Spanish literature and arts. An abortive run of oversized quarto editions of play, published by Jaggard and Pavier in 1619, was apparently brought to a halt by Lord Chamberlain Pembroke in his May, 1619 decree forbidding further publication of plays from the repertoire of the Kings Men. While the timeline is uncertain, the dedication of Jaggard's 1619 Archaio-ploutos, dedicated to the folio patron Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and - very conspicuously - his wife Lady Susan Vere, appears to be the publisher's response to this ban. It urges the couple to "bestow, when and where you list," providing concrete evidence for the transmission of Shakespearean MS materials through the Earl and his wife, within less than two years before the start of the folio printing project in or around April 1622.

The Oxfordian, 2018

Completes the analysis of Part. I with a detailed reading of Ben Jonson's "To the Memory of the Author" encomium of the 1623 First Folio.

Trends in Classics, 2019

This article takes as its starting point the observation that quotations in Latin prose are largely characterised by features of oral communication. It analyses four passages from Cicero, Suetonius, Gellius, and Servius so as to outline how these quotations bridge the verbal and the written, and can therefore be classified as covert intermedial representations. Specific formulae which shape text passages as quotations include both explicit markers such as ferunt (‘they say’) and dixit (‘he said’), as well as implicit hints ranging from demonstrative pronouns (illud, haec) to conjunctions (ut, sicut). These linguistic tags are read within the frameworks of ‘intermedial reference’ and ‘remediation’, thereby yielding insights on how oral and written features meld into the literary quotations of Roman prose. What is more, this chapter demonstrates the merits of its approach to Classical literature by showing that an awareness of media and medialities is conducive to original interpretations of well-studied ancient texts.

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2001

According to quotational theory, indirect ascriptions of propositional attitudes should be analyzed as direct ascriptions of attitudes towards natural-language sentences specified by quotations. A famous objection to this theory is Church's translation argument. In the literature several objections to the translation argument have been raised, which in this paper are shown to be unsuccessful. This paper offers a new objection. We argue against Church's presupposition that quoted expressions, since they are mentioned, cannot be translated. In many contexts quoted expressions are used and mentioned simultaneously, and the quotational analysis of propositional-attitude ascriptions is such a context. Hence the translation argument is unsound.

2018

According to Hamblin, Cicero did not write on fallacies and this cut them out of the subsequent rhetorical tradition. We bring evidence that the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero and Quintilian did write on fallacies, but in a way that is not always strictly Aristotelian. Yet, as Aristotle, they mainly discussed this topic when they dealt with refutation. Their wide influence on Western thought and teaching suggests an underestimated connection between the reflection on fallacies and traditional writings on rhetoric.

Eranos: Acta Philologica Suecana, 2021

This introduction sets the scene for six essays devoted to the study of the discourse of Latin. Despite the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, Latin remained the dominant code of communication in European society for a millennium. And yet in the minds of many of its most prolific users and commentators, it has experienced a continuous cycle of existential crises. After multiple reappraisals and re-fashionings of Latinity in the early and high Middle Ages, the self-conscious definition of language and its relationship to culture which arose in fourteenth-century Italy led to the bestowal of the much-controverted title of "renaissance" on the ensuing age. But, with respect to Latinity, was (and is) this label a distinction without a difference? Not only in the Quattrocento, but also in earlier and later eras, cultivating "good Latin", however this was defined, and indeed being seen to cultivate it were matters of the utmost importance, an inexhaustible wellspring of sociocultural capital. Our object here is to study the language of the language itself: the value attributed to Latin, its standing vis-à-vis other languages, the qualities linked with it, and the issues in which it was implicated. Our remit is Latinity after Antiquity, and the six essays which follow range from late antique North Africa to nineteenth-century Hungary.

Reason Papers, 2017