English, in some ways an unusual language, is the most over-studied language in the history of the world. But English itself was highly influenced by Romance languages, and Romance languages account for a vast swath of the world’s most influential literature. Research into the cognitively modern human mind and its communicative possibilities cannot do better than focusing on Latin. This volume is the first major book-length effort in that direction. This volume is equally indispensable for students of Latin, Romance philologists and cognitive linguistics.

- Mark Turner, Case Western University,

Although closely linked to recent developments in embodied semantics, the essays in Embodiment in Latin Semantics are exploratory rather than doctrinaire. They should be of great interest to students of Latin language and of literature, religion, kinship, and culture more generally in the Latin-speaking world. The editor has done an impressive job of assembling an intellectually diverse group of scholars with a shared outlook on the relationship between language and embodiment.

- Thomas Habinek, University of Southern California,

This collection of essays breaks new ground in the application of cutting-edge cognitive science to the semantic structures of classical Latin. The volume’s international cast of contributors are pioneers in a field that promises to revolutionise not just Latin linguistics but the study of Latin literature in general. Their emphasis on embodiment in the ways that Latin and the authors who use it construct meaning goes beyond existing studies of (e.g.) cognitive metaphor in Latin and Greek to deploy a wider and more systematic range of cognitive linguistic concepts, providing a theoretically sophisticated perspective on the way that individual authors deploy the conceptual patterns that are embedded in the Latin language and in Roman life and thought.

- Douglas Cairns, University of Edinburgh,