Hermes
Platform for early modern Hellenism
Welcome to Hermes! This platform is intended for spreading information about projects, calls for papers and contributions, and publications related to the ancient Greek heritage in the early modern world.
Initiative: Raf Van Rooy (KU Leuven) & Han Lamers (University of Oslo)
Editors: Adriaan Demuynck, Liese Dictus & Raf Van Rooy (all KU Leuven)
We are currently looking for contributors to the blog. English is the main working language, but we can consider contributions in other major European languages, too. Blogs are typically 1000-2000 words. You can look at previous posts for inspiration in terms of length, style, and tone. Please get in touch with adriaan.demuynck@kuleuven.be if you’re interested in writing a piece. You can find our latest three posts below.
Trojan Heroes of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648): New Ancient Greek, Liberty and Remembrance
Thijs Kersten (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) Writing to one of his pen pals on January 21, 1605, the Lowlandish scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) could not help but address the elephant in the room. However pleasant his contact with the Spaniard Francisco Quevedo (1580–1645) had been, Lipsius felt the need to mention the wars Quevedo’s king had…
A Woman Writing New Ancient Greek Poetry for a Leiden Disputation (1686)
Dries Nijs (KU Leuven) Leiden University library houses an extensive collection of printed disputationes. These broadsheets and pamphlets present the theses that university students — the respondentes — defended against opponentes, under the supervision of a professor acting as praeses. This corpus extends from shortly after the founding of Leiden University (1575) into the 20th…
Laonikos Chalkokondyles: The Last Byzantine Historian and the Dawn of Ottoman Historiography
Riccardo Stigliano (Universität Innsbruck) Should the last Byzantine historian be considered an early modern Hellenist? Yes, because he lived through the crucial years of the fall of Constantinople. After all, he started writing as soon as Constantinople fell, which was at the very beginning of the Modern Age. Yes, if we consider the literary genre…
Hermes 