Böcker av Yasmin Haskell

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''.

Explores the intellectual and identity politics of Latin language use in the Enlightenment 'Republic of Letters' via the figure of Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens (1728-1801), a Dutch physician and Latin poet, disenchanted disciple of Voltaire, and lifelong devotee of Ovid.