The Neo-Latin Reader: Selections from Petrarch to Rimbaud

This is a good collection, and I agree with Dana Sutton's quirky presentation above: Riley's introductions and commentaries are very useful, though unlike Sutton, I would have preferred more notes and vocabulary. I was hesitating and thinking of giving four stars, but that would have been unfair on the book. It is quite readable with the online "Latin Word Study Tool" at hand for those who are not used to Latin texts as a light daily read.This book is for advanced Latin readers.

Fine selection, good notes.

This book purports to be a "Neo-Latin Reader" but it includes one woman, with the erroneous statement that "Weston was the only published female Latin poet before the 20th century." It would be regrettable, but understandable, if this was not already disproven over a decade earlier by Jane Stevenson's extensively researched, mammoth "Women Latin Poets" along with numerous publications about published writers such as Marta Marchina (in the very encyclopedia Riley mentions as important to read!), Anna Memorata, Anna Maria Van Schurman, Jeanne Othon and countless others. A simple google search or visit to a single research library would have revealed this long tradition. Furthermore, all three of the resources Riley recommends in his intro include information about published Neo-Latin writers. We need to make sure personal identities and political views don't pollute the path to true, objective scholarship. I'd recommend Brill's Neo-Latin encyclopedia and Women Latin Poets for those who actually want to know the history of Latin poetry publication.

I am a novice in latin, with a couple of semesters of university grade latin under my belt, this is a little more advanced than I can handle but its helping me gradually make progress, after studying the dictionary I can use this book to help me see what words I recognize, and I'm beginning to understand some sentences more easily.

This is a treasure of a book, with a wide variety of Neo-Latin writing, including an entertaining mix of poetry and prose, letters, travelogues, history,science and fiction. Some of the material I had come across before, such as Erasmus' letter about the gunpowder explosion at Basel, but most of the selections were new to me and they aren't easily accessible elsewhere. Mark Riley's introductory notes for each piece, and the footnotes, are very helpful in setting the context and understanding obscure words. On a personal note, I found Piccolomini's "Travels to Scotland" particularly interesting, especially his account of a night spent in a village on the border between England and Scotland. Does he really say that the men of the village, fearing a raid by Scottish brigands, spent the night in a fortified tower, leaving their womenfolk defenceless in the village? Apparently the village priest explained that the worst the brigands could do was rape the women and the villagers did not consider rape a "harm"! Poor old Piccolomini, as a foreigner, was refused entry to the tower and spent a wretched night in the stables. That was England in the 1430s. Amazing! Then later you read extracts from Thomas More's "Utopia" and that gets even more amazing.....