Description
Book SynopsisFrom the Renaissance well into the eighteenth century hundreds of Latin poems, some running to tens of thousands of verses, were produced on subjects as multifarious as they were topical: meteorology and magnetism, raising chickens and children, the arts of sculpture and engraving, writing and conversation, the social and medicinal benefits of coffee and chocolate, the pious life and the urbane life. Loyola''s Bees is the first full-length study of the Latin didactic poetry of the Society of Jesus, a Catholic Reformation order whose priests were the leading exponents of the genre in the early modern period. If post-Romantic readers have, in the main, lost the taste for a ''poetry of things'', the poems in this book will command scholarly attention at least for what they reveal about early modern social, cultural, and intellectual life, Jesuit attitudes to the New World and the New Science, and the circulation of Latin literature in France and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen
Trade ReviewWhat is especially valuable to non-classicists ... is Haskell's ability to explicate the innumerable quotations, imitations, and allusions that interlace the genre. * Steven Harris, Early Science and Medicine *
An erudite, enlightening, and unique study of a body of literature historians of science have hitherto largely neglected. * Steven Harris, Early Science and Medicine *
Professor Haskell's book is as valuable a contribution to history of early modern science as it is to her home field of neo-classical literature...Her characterization of [Jesuit education] is among the most concise, insightful, and cogent I have come across. * Steven Harris, Early Science and Medicine *
...this learned and comprehensive book...is a pioneering study of neo-Latin didactic poetry, and it has broken much new ground. The author clearly knows these poems very well, and her enthusiasm and learning come across on every page. * Modern Language Review *
She has mined the rich prefatory and dedicatory material to reconstruct for the modern reader the intellectual and aesthetic ideals which underlie poetry of this type, and has brought the genre to life. The volume contains a full bibliography and a good index. * Modern Language Review *
