Modern academic disciplines often acknowledge that ancient Latin literature provided important inspiration for their own field of research. By contrast, Neo-Latin tends to be seen as an inconsequential episode that might have had significance in its own period but disappeared more or less without a trace. Decades of Neo-Latin and interdisciplinary research have meanwhile provided many leads to correct this picture.

This subproject aims to show on a large scale that Neo-Latin remained in the world even after its early modern heyday. After the demise of Latin as a language, ideas, forms, and practices first seen in Neo-Latin literature continued to interact with and shape the contemporary world. Examples include, e.g., literary genres such as the
utopia or the roman-à-clef, motifs such as the ‘kiss of the muse’, material and structural aspects of theatre, poetological ideas and forms such as lyric expressionism and free verse, concepts of ‘world literature’ and scientific approaches and taxonomies such as Linné’s nomenclature. The subproject starts by identifying relevant phenomena. Once the most promising avenues are identified, the usual routines of bibliographical research will be aided by DH-approaches to finding terms, concepts, and topics in large text corpora. The focus will be on the modern period since c. 1800. The geographical scope is as international as possible. In the first four years, the
material will be collected and analyzed in its interdisciplinary contexts. In the second four years, the most promising examples will be further explored and disseminated.