Author Description

This volume centers on selected readings of Neo-Latin dissertations, satires and other texts written during the period between 1500 and 1800. Neo-Latin texts offer highly significant, in their own time widely influential and today little studied documentation for European scholarship and literary cultures. The printed dissertation was the predominant form of academic publication in seventeenth-century Germany. Generally masters dissertations of this period were conventional pieces of scholarship that summarised traditional knowledge and scientific discussion of their day. Dissertations were rather short, that is, from twenty to sixty pages, but they were also later bound in larger collective volumes. The dissertations were not intended to demonstrate novelty as much as they sought to display the extensive learnedness of the respondent or the presider who had written the dissertation. The professor who acted as praeses supervised the dissertation and chaired the disputation in which the respondens (the student) defended his arguments. As Neil Kenny notes, the contribution of the professor could be anything from actual authorship to a quick glance over the text.