Prescribing Ovid

Download or read book Prescribing Ovid written by Yasmin Haskell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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'.