Prescribing Ovid

Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens was a cosmopolitan Dutch physician and Latin poet of the eighteenth century. A Catholic he was in many ways an outsider on his own turf the peat country of Protestant Groningen and looked to Voltaire's Paris as much as Ovid in exile had looked to Rome. An indefatigable traveller and networker Heerkens mixed freely with philosophers physicians churchmen and antiquarians. This book reconstructs his Latin works and networks and reveals in the process a virtually unexplored corner of eighteenth-century culture the 'Latin Enlightenment'.