It has been a real pleasure to work with Michael Fontaine and William Short on our new volume of academic articles on ambiguity (ambiguitas) in Latin literature, and I’m delighted to announce that it’s now available from The Paideia Institute Press. Paideia’s new publishing arm is really exciting: they publish works according to rigorous scholarly standards (including standard peer review practices) while also striving to maintain affordable prices and encouraging readable prose to improve the accessibility of classical scholarship.

This first volume is being published in honor of Reginald Foster, whose influence on an entire generation of Latinists is difficult to overstate:

For forty years, American priest and friar Reginald Foster, O.C.D., worked in the Latin Letters office of the Roman Curia’s Secretary of State in Vatican City. As Latinist of four popes, he soon emerged as an internationally recognized authority on the Latin language—some have said, the internationally recognized authority, consulted by scholars, priests, and laymen worldwide. In 1986, he began teaching an annual summer Latin course that attracted advanced students and professors from around the globe. This volume gathers contributions from some of his many students in honor of his enduring influence and achievements. Its chapters explore a wide range of linguistic and literary evidence from antiquity to the present day in a variety of theoretical perspectives. If the motivation for putting together this collection has been to reflect (and reflect upon) Foster’s influences on Latin scholarship and pedagogy, its title alludes—via the medieval folk etymology of the word labyrinthus (“quasi labor intus”)—to its theme: ambiguity in Latin literature.

You can find our book on Amazon and (soon!) in your academic institution’s library.

There’s a lot about Canada in the news this week, but bizarre feuds about dairy tariffs are crowding out more joyous stories out of our neighbor to the north. Earlier this month, the Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt received the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Canadian Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards, and in May, she was interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio’s Julie Amacher about her latest recordings and accolades. When Amacher asked how she felt about the Lifetime Achievement Award, here’s what Hewitt had to say:

Well, I don’t quite feel old enough for that. But it’s a huge honor, of course, a huge honor to be selected for this award in the company of such people as Geneviève Bujold, the actress. So many notable Canadians have received this award. When I do think back and think of all the repertoire I have done over the years, and the recordings, and the concerts, and everything—I haven’t wasted my life, that’s for sure. I haven’t wasted one minute of my life.

When I wrote some tips earlier this year about setting up personalized RSS feeds from PhilPapers to follow academic journals, I also suggested that people look at The Philosophy Paperboy, an aggregator of philosophy journal articles. It’s a great service that catalogs new publications from a huge selection of journals, and it features a keyword search to help sift out pertinent research.

The team behind PhilPaperboy recently got in touch with me about upcoming features, including more granular feeds of new publications and access to RSS feeds. Scope out their Patreon page for details.