Classical and Medieval Latin

I've read a lot of disparaging comments about Medieval Latin lately -- "the average Dark Age scribe" this and "the average Dark Age scribe" that -- and instead of replying directly to one of these stern Ciceronians in some such snarky manner as: "Jeepers, you sure know a lot about Dark Age scribes! Could you cut and paste some especially bad examples of their bad Latin so that we may all together jeer at their ineptitude and utter disregard of vowel quantity?" I thought it might be better to express myself here, to my, hopefully somewhat better-disposed usual readership, and just to mention a few very basic things. 

 

First of all, although it's hard to imagine that any Latinists do not already know this, it may be helpful to remind ourselves that almost every single bit of the Classical Latin corpus which has survived to our time, survived because Medieval monks copied it. Medieval students were taught Latin, not just with the Vulgate (not that that would have been so terrible. Jerome could write), but also with Cicero and Caesar and Vergil, and with all of the other Classical authors. As hard as it seems to be for some to grasp, the Classical authors were copied in order to be taught. Classical Latin rotting on Medieval shelves was the exception, not the rule.

Secondly, something which seems quite obvious to me, but perhaps only because I've brooded upon the subject unusually long: the corpus of Classical Latin is very small. A few million words written by a few hundred authors. The amount of Medieval Latin preserved today is many times greater. The mediocre Classical authors have disappeared, the everyday Medieval schlubs have not. If we're going to compare Classical Latin with Medieval, we should compare like with like: the best Classical authors with the best Medieval authors. Livy with Matthew Paris. Ovid with Alcuin. Cicero with Abelard. But Paris, Alcuin and Abelard, of course, tend not to be read by those who insist that only ancient Latin is Latin at all, let along being the only Latin worth knowing about with the possible exception of a few Renaissance  Italian Ciceronians.

As far the average Medieval scribe is concerned, there is very little average ancient Latin left with which he could be compared: some scraps of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus, some graffiti on the walls of Vesuvius, some of the humbler of the ancient Latin inscriptions. Nothing which is conventionally counted in the Classical corpus.

I do hesitate to point this out, I feel I'm being a bit rude, but I feel I have little choice: those who disparage Medieval typically have not just read very little of it, and what little they have read, they have treated very unfairly by condemning it because it is different in style than Cicero. Very few people judge contemporary English, I believe, by firmly insisting that if it doesn't sound just exactly like Shakespeare, it's crap. It's also quite rare, I believe, to insist that that which is called 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, 20th or 21st-century English is not English at all, if it does not very closely resemble Shakespeare, and nevermind that Pope, Fielding, Wordsworth, Joyce and I had all read Shakespeare.

That would be to ignore the fact, if one had ever learned it all, that languages change.

I don't delude myself that I'm going to change the mind of a single Ciceronian, anti-Medievalist Latinist. And I certainly don't dispute that Classical Latin is wonderful and offers more than an entire career's worth of scope for study -- any more than any of those Medieval scribes would have disputed it, who copied it, and are the only reason we still have it. 

But perhaps I've given a smile to a Medieval Latinist or two, who, like me, grows a bit weary now and then of the way their field is denigrated by some.