Croatian Latin Literature - Istria and Kvarner

Istria and Kvarner

Matthias Flacius (Matthias Flacius Illyricus, 1520–1575) hailed from Labin in Istria, a humanist center home (along with Koper and Piran to many Croatian Protestants. Flacius spent his life in Germany, an associate of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon. After Luther's death (when many Protestant leaders advocated compromise with Rome) Flacius founded a radical school of thought, named "Flacianism" after him. Due to his uncompromising attitude, for the rest of his life he was persecuted by the Catholic Church. His theological, philosophical, historical and philological work is vast: he left more than 300 books and papers. His major works are the Witness of Truth Catalogue (Catalogue testium veritatis, 1556.), which presented 650 witnesses, A Renegade from the Roman Church and The Key to the Scriptures (Clavis Scripturae Sacrae, 1567), an encyclopedic Hebrew dictionary which became fundamental to the Protestant interpretation of the Bible.

Franciscus Patricius (Croatian: Frane Petrić, 1529–1597), from Cres, studied mostly in Padua; although the city was a center of Aristotelianism, he was inclined toward Platonism. After traveling around the Mediterranean, Patricius returned to Rome and became a professor of philosophy. He wrote in Italian about poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, history, mathematics, geometry and medicine, but is best known as an anti-peripatetic philosopher. His work in Latin, Peripatetic Discussions (Discussiones peripateticae, 1581) emphasizes a pre-Socratic philosophy of nature and seeks to minimize the importance of Aristotle. In his New Philosophy of the General (Nova de Universis philosophia, 1591) Patricius exposes his metaphysical conception of the world, based on several sources: Plato, the Stoics and Hermes Trismegistus. Since the biblical account of Genesis was substantially different from the teachings of scholastic Aristotelianism, the work (despite the efforts of scholars to defend it, or enlighten quaedam loca obscuriora—"a dull place") was banned in 1594.