Prescribing Ovid The Latin Works and Networks of the Enlightened Dr Heerkens

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, as 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'.

Yasmin Haskell has been Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the University of Western Australia since 2003. She is a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council's new Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. She is the author of Loyola's Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry and winner of the British Academy Postdoctoral Monographs Competition.

List of figuresAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Cultivating the Two Apollos I. Finding his Feet: Six or Five?II. Stepping Out: Healing the Republic of Letters III. Tomi Calling: Letters to/from Italy IV. Writing Home: Lessons from Italy V. Patriots in Portraits: From National to Natural History VI. Inscriptions and Prescriptions: The Art of Healing in Long and ShortConclusion: Notes from the MarginsAppendix: Published Works of Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens Bibliography Index