Alex Tadel

Alex Tadel is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, where she is writing a dissertation on Latin epistolography by women in Quattrocento Italy. Before that, she obtained a BA in Classics and an MSt in Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures. In 2023, she held a research fellowship at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies. She has written on various aspects of Latin culture in academic and non-academic publications. Her research interests include (Neo-)Latin, classical reception, women’s literature and history, and intellectual history of the Renaissance.

“During my BA and Master’s in Classics, I had little contact with the Latin tradition beyond clasical antiquity. It was only afterwards that I came to appreciate the temporal duration, the geographical breadth, the stylistic and thematic range, the sheer variety and richness of post-classical Latin. One of the ways in which this diversity manifests itself is in the substanial corpus of post-classical Latin literature authored by women, which stands in contrast to the relatively poor survival rate of women’s texts from the classical period. Another aspect of post-classical Latin I find fascinating is the vast amount of texts still waiting to be discovered, fully appreciated and better understood. My PhD research is partly concerned with such work, as my dissertation will among other things provide the first critical edition with English translation of a neglected Latin writer, Polissena Messalto Grimaldi (c. 1402–1467).

I am interested in the uses and functions of Latin in contexts that we traditionally do not associate with it due to academic disciplinary boundaries and broader historiographical paradigms. The study of post-classical Latin in itself already represents a departure from the traditional scope of research of a Latinist. Furthermore, Latin was used by a much more diverse group of authors, who wrote in a wider variety of stylistic and thematic registers, and circulated their writings in socially, temporally and geographically more divergent environments, than still often thought. While this is not to negate the elite nature and exclusionary force Latin often assumed, research that consciously strives towards understanding the broadest possible spectrum of its uses can counter simplistic narratives that reduce the Latin tradition to either its most glorious or darkest moments. A network like RELICS that encourages and facilitates such research provides a much-needed space for holistic, multidisciplinary and collaborative inquiry into the history of Latin and its status in our own time.”