Neo-Latin as Scientific Language and the Importance of Naming

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Neo-Latin as a scientific language. By the mid-fifteenth century, Latin had been the Western European lingua franca of science and learning for more than a millennium. However, the stylistic preferences of humanist authors, who tried to imitate classical texts, especially their vocabulary, presented a challenge in many areas, but above all in the sciences, where a new-found wealth of knowledge required an equal number of new names. Important debates on how far nonclassical words were to be tolerated and the hierarchy of res and verba are also analysed in this chapter.