In 1967 Jozef IJsewijn started the Seminarium Philologiae Humanisticae or Seminar for Neo-Latin Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Thanks to the founder’s indefatigable efforts, the Seminar has become one of the leading conferences in the field of Humanism and Modern Latin. In 1997, the tenth International Congress for Neo-Latin Studies was held; the first of the series was organised some 25 years ago by professor IJsewijn and his team, and led to the founding of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, of which IJsewijn became the first president. Also in 1997, Jozef IJsewijn celebrated his 65th birthday. For all these reasons, his colleagues considered it appropriate to honour this eminent scholar with a collection of (19) essays on Neo-Latin literature.
The articles in this volume reflect the wide interest of the scholar IJsewijn. They cover a period of almost 300 years, from an early fifteenth-century commentary on Cicero’s speeches to the oratorical deliveries in the eighteenth-century Amsterdam Athenaeum of P. Francius.