Why Study Latin?

Today, many people who study Latin describe it as a hobby. For others, it is much more.

As recently as few hundred years ago, anyone in Western Europe considering a career in academia, or diplomacy, or anything else which involved constant contact with an international group of people, had to have a good grasp of Latin. They had to be able to read it, write, and speak it at least a little, and preferably more than just a little.

And therefore, anyone today who wants to read about any of those people, about Elizabeth I of England, or Wallenstein, or John Milton, or Martin Luther, is only going to get so far without needing to be able to read Latin. 

Western philosophy from Lucretius to Decartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and a not inconsiderable amount even more recently, is in Latin. Catholic theology until 1962, and a great deal of the earliest Protestant theology, is in Latin. Newton Wrote about physics in Latin, Gauss about mathematics, Linnaeus about biology. Francis Bacon, Galileo, Hobbes, all wrote in Latin.

You might object that all of the people I've named so far also wrote in other languages, and you'd be right, although just barely in the case of Spinoza. You can read works in their original form by all of the above without knowing any Latin, although only a very little work in Dutch by Spinoza. 

But go back another few hundred years, and many of the leading minds wrote only in Latin: Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Thomas Aquinas, Gerard of Cremona, Albertus Magnus.

As did the historians Gregory of Tours, Bede, Einhard, Nithard, William of Malmsbury, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Henry of Huntington, and many others, including many anonymous chroniclers, many of them good writers, many famously bad, but all of them writing in Latin.

Church records, baptisms, marriages and funerals, inscriptions on tombstones, public buildings and currency. Government archives. Compendiums of laws.

And then there is the ancient Latin which remains, relatively small in quantity but generally very high in quality, which we call the Latin Classics, read, quoted and emulated by all of the above. Especially in the Latin Renaissances of the 9th, 12th, 15th and 19th centuries. 

And I mustn't forget to mention all of the Latin poetry and plays and fiction written since the ancient era.

And is a 21st century Latin Renaissance already underway? Some seem to think so. The number of people going to the trouble of learning to speak Latin, not just to recite it but to engage in spontaneous Latin conversation, seems to be rising. 

As I said, for some, Latin is a wonderful hobby. It does nothing but make them happy. But given all of the above sorts of Latin available today to be read, it seems to me that a writer could make more than a hobby of it. A poet, an historian or a philosopher. Yes, for many different sorts of authors, the above-listed sorts of written Latin could offer more than just a hobby.

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Medieval Annals

The terms "annals," "chronicle" and "history" are to a certain extent interchangeable, as Tacitus demonstrated around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, by calling one of his major historical works the Historia, and the other one the Annales -- or perhaps it was someone else who gave the titles to Tacitus' works, I don't actually know for sure. 

While conceding, therefore, that all three terms have been applied to any and all types of historical writing, for the purpose of this blog post, I am using the term "annal" to refer only to that form of Medieval historical writing, within the Catholic/Latin sphere, in which the entries are all labelled by year, in which a typical year's entry might contain as little as a sentence or two -- a king or prince is born or dies, or the Emperor rides to Constance to celebrate Christmas, a comet is seen, famine and/or drought is suffered locally -- or a year might not be entered at all, and in which the entry for a year rarely exceed a page in a modern octavio edition. There is typically not more than one entry per year, but it is clear that sometimes the entry for a past year has later been revised or added to. The language is usually Latin. In the 12th century, French and Italian began to appear in some annals. The only early non-Latin annal of which I am aware is the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in the 9th century. But it should be kept in mind that this was just one annal among many Latin annals made in England. Medieval writing in Catholic lands was, overwhelmingly, Latin writing. 

 

If some reader happens to know the precise boundaries between annals, chronicles and histories, and wishes to assist my readers and damn my astounding ignorance upon this point, I, of course, would be delighted.

While ancient Latin and Greek histories had each been the work of one author, who signed his work, an annal could have many different contributors. Some Medieval authors wrote histories in the style of ancient authors. These were usually members of the clergy, but their works were treated differently than the annals of the monasteries. Whether they were humble monks or Popes, whether they stayed in one abbey or traveled widely, their names, in most of the cases I know, were never hidden from us: Gregory of Tours, the venerable Bede, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris and so forth.

Sometimes the authors of some parts of the annals are known to modern scholars, sometimes they have conjectures as to authorship, and often the authors are unknown. The style of the Latin prose could be quite good, and helpful in identifying its author, or it could be quite ordinary. The annal as a whole was thought of as the product of a monastery or cathedral, in England, France, or Germany, while in Italy some cities also maintained their own annals. An annal may represent as much as several centuries' worth of history recorded on behalf of a particular religious institution or city, and, unsurprisingly, events of local significance are given greater weight than they might be in histories which strive for universal relevance. On the one hand, this may seems to lend to annals a more trivial nature compared to histories. However, the modern historian, while recognizing in the famous Medieval historians forerunners in his own genre, may often make much more day-to-day use of the anonymous annalist, precisely because of the abundance of detailed local information.

Many of the Medieval annals, along with chronicles, histories, letters, decrees, laws, etc, etc, of Medieval Germany and surrounding countries, are collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH); Italian annals are among the works collected in the Rerum Italicorum Scriptorum; and British annals are among the Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series). And there are many more Medieval Latin annals, from Iberia, from Scandinavia, from the Catholic Slavic lands, in other collections. Still more annals from all across Latin Medieval Europe can be found in scholarly journals. And some are still only in manuscripts, still await edition and publication.

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.

Matthew Paris

Matthew Paris (ca 1200-1259), a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of St Albans from 1217 until his death, was an historian whose writings constitute one of the major sources of information of mid-13th century Europe. Although he never rose above the rank of monk, he apparently was treated as a person of great distinction, making frequent visits to the English royal court, for example, and making a journey to Norway to oversee reform of the Abbey of St Benet Holm. He had personal friendships with King Haakon IV of Norway, and, most significant for his historical writings, with King Henry III of England and the King 's brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall. 

Paris' greatest work as an historian is the Chronica Maijora. This work was, up until the year 1235, a re-working of the Flores Historiarum, the chronicle of Roger of Wendover. At that point, Matthew himself, with his personal access to royalty and thus his remarkable nearness to great events of his time, is the primary source. 

A condensation of the Chronica for the period from 1067 to 1235, with some revisions, forms Paris' other famous historical work, the Historia Minor. 

Paris' reputation as an historian has always been controversial. Some call him England's greatest Medieval historian and one of the best historians of Medieval Europe. Others opine that patriotism blinds him and that prejudice and enthusiasm greatly mar his work.

On the one hand, almost no-one would dispute that his writing style is engaging and lively. And his friendships with Henry and Richard gave him access to a range of documents relevant to the history of his own time such as no other historian of the time could match. Some have said that his prejudices greatly detract from the historical value of his writing. And it has been pointed out that Paris sometimes alters the important historical documents he quotes so voluminously in his work. Then again, whether such alterations constitute lying on Paris' part, or an honest attempt to correct mistakes in the documents, is controversial. The conventions of precise citation which are so essential to history-writing today were still unknown in the 13th century. And what looks like prejudicial blindness to some in Paris' writing, has struck others as refreshing directness and sincerity and a direct record of Paris' own convictions.

Whatever one thinks of him as an historian, Paris was more than an historian. He was also one of the most celebrated visual artists of his day. One of the greatest of the mappamundi, those Medieval world-maps with Jerusalem in the center, crammed with illustrations of the local sights and wonders of the parts of the world known to the artists, and those imagined in those parts unknown to him, was made by Matthew Paris. 

Also, many, or perhaps all, of the illuminations in the earliest manuscripts of his work were drawn and colored by him. It is not certain whether Paris singlehandedly wrote out the clean copies of his works, or whether copyists and artists aided him in this process. In any case, these manuscripts made under his care are magnificent, and we are fortunate enough that some examples have survived.

Henry Richards Luard made a highly-regarded edition of the Chronica Maijora for the Rolls Edition, in 7 volumes published from 1872 to 1880. The principal points of what was known of Paris' life is gathered in the prefaces and notes of those 7 volumes.

Latin After the Classics

I'm writing this post for very much the same reason I've written several earlier posts: because I encounter people who equate Latin with ancient Latin and seem unaware of how much Latin literature has survived which was written after the ancient era ended around AD 450, the date of the latest "pagan" Latin texts.

There are some other people, who seem to believe that ancient Latin is the only WORTHWHILE Latin ever written, the only Latin worth reading. On that subject, I would ask you to consider this: only a tiny fraction of what was written by pre-Christian Latin authors has survived to the present. What we have now, to a great extent, is what people considered to be most worth preserving. No doubt much was written in ancient Latin which was of much lower quality. Much more of the writing of lower quality has survived from the Medieval, Renaissance and more recent eras. If you compare ancient Latin to more recent Latin, it's only fair to compare the best to the best.

 

But --  must you compare? I doubt that I will be able to stop anyone who is so disposed from disparaging Latin from post-ancient eras. But perhaps I can encourage others to read what they like, without allowing snobs to ruin things for them.

So: I am not comparing the following Latin works to ancient Latin. Plenty of others do that full-time, and find the newer stuff wanting. Such comparisons don't interest me. 

Boethius wrote in the earliest post-"pagan" period. He lived from ca AD 480 to 524. His magnum opus de consolatione philosophiae is well-known. In addition to that, many of his writings on music and mathematics have survived.

Isidore of Seville, ca AD 560 to 636, is also known for one work above all, his Etymologiae. Many others of his work survive, some on physics, some theological, some historical.

Gregory of Tours, c538-594, wrote an Historia Francorum which is one of our few written sources of information about the Merovingian dynasty down to Gregory's time.

Alcuin of York, born around 735, died 804, was the chief architect of Charlemagne's massive program of educational reform. Like Charlemagne, Alcuin seems to have been very charismatic and persuasive. He would debate with Charlemagne over matters of policy, often daring to chide and contradict the Emperor. Many of his written works survive. His poems, while not always masterpieces, are very expressive and winning.

Matthew Paris, died 1259, an English Benedictine monk, besides being one of the very best of Medieval historians, was also a gifted drawers of pictures, as can be seen in some of the manuscripts of his works which he himself made, as well as in maps which are considered some of the finest of the Middle Ages. I would heartily recommend all of his historical writings, but above all the Chronica majora. 

The examples could be endless. Reading some Medieval or later Latin works will tend to lead you to others.

It seems that often, people these days read translations from the Latin without realizing that they are translations. Bacon and Hobbes wrote about as much in Latin as they did in English. As did John Milton. No, I'm not talking about Paradise Lost, that was written in English, but Milton's Defense of the English People, for example, was originally Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. Kant, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Romain Rolland all published works in Latin. Prefaces to works of classical Greek and Latin are routinely written in Latin to this day. And if you say you are studying Medieval history, and you don't read Latin, then I have to risk sounding like one of the snobs I began this essay by denouncing, and wonder exactly what you are studying.

Open Letter to Melvyn Bragg, re: the Latin Classics in the Middle Ages

Dear Mr Bragg, I'm a big fan of "In Our Time." Lately I've been listening to many episodes, often having to do with subjects in the Middle Ages. I'm writing because I have repeatedly gotten the impression that you, and consequently many of your listeners, are laboring under the impression that the "pagan," pre-Christian Latin Classics were shunned by Christian scholars in the Middle Ages, except in anomalous periods such as the Carolingian Renaissance or the 12th-century Renaissance. I keep waiting for one of your expert guests to clarify this point. And maybe one of them has in the meantime, which would make this open letter superfluous as far as you personally are concerned. But even in that case, perhaps someone else will learn something. And in any case, it's always good when something spurs me to write. 

The fact is that the Latin Classics were always read and discussed during the Middle Ages. The 9th and 12th centuries are referred to as Renaissances in reference to the Latin Classics, because a greater emphasis was put upon studying them than in other periods. Or to be more precise: education in general advanced greatly in 9th-century and again in 12th-century Catholic Europe, and, although this education was clearly Christian in its overall emphasis, Classical Latin was an essential part of the whole, and grew naturally as the whole of education grew.

 

Now, when it comes to the Greek Classics, it is true that knowledge of them was almost completely lost in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. A great part of the population of the ancient city of Rome, and of the ancient Western, Latin-speaking provinces, could read and write Greek. But in the Middle Ages, this familiarity with the Greek language dwindled to just a very few individuals in the West. Plato continued to be studied, but in Latin translation, and little else. Even Latin translations of Homer, apart from a few rather wretched abridgments, had to wait for the 15th century. When it comes to knowledge of the Greek language and the study of a broad array of the Greek Classics, "Renaissance" describes 15th-century Western Europe well.

When it comes to the Latin classics in the West, however, I am reminded of a wonderful remark made by Professor Eugen Weber in his television series from the 1980's, The Western Tradition. Debunking the notion that people were afraid that Columbus would sail off of the edge of the Earth, Weber said, "Some people in Columbus' time believed that the Earth was flat. Some people still do."

Similarly, some Medieval Christians were opposed to any study of the non-Christian Latin Classics, and some Christians still are. Some Medieval Christians were convinced that the Latin classics were evil, and some Christians still are. But at no point in time were such viewpoints prevalent enough to actually prevent the study of those Classics. 

One demonstration of this is the number of manuscripts of the classics which survive today from each of the Medieval centuries. The number swells in the 9th century, and again in the 12th, and especially in the 15th, until printing took over. Even in the 7th century, in the middle of the Dark Ages between the fall of the Western Empire and Charlemagne's new Empire, a few Classical manuscripts were made which still survive today. It's easy to find pronouncements by zealous and/or prudish Medieval Christians condemning this or that ancient Latin author, or condemning everything written in ancient Latin. Nevertheless, Cicero never ceased to be the model of Latin prose followed in the schools, or Vergil the model of Latin verse. Schoolboys have read Caesar from Caesar's time to the present, the only change being the growing number of schoolgirls who have joined them. Horace, Terence, Plautus, Ovid -- yes, Ovid -- and many others were read the whole time. A wide knowledge of the Latin Classics belonged to the well-rounded education a Pope or bishop was expected to possess. Pope Gregory the Great, in office for a long period in the late 6th and early 7th century, was no enthusiastic friend of the Classics, and may have been directly or indirectly responsible for their above-mentioned decline, but if so, he knew what it was which he opposed. And his distaste for the Classics was very unusual among Popes.

There are some Classical manuscripts which were abridged by pious and/or prudish Medieval Christians, but these are very few, very much the exception. Marginal disapproving notes in the margins of the manuscripts are only slightly more common. As with the widely-held notion that people -- a lot of people -- thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge of a flat Earth, the notion that vast areas of Medieval Europe went for long periods of time completely unlettered in the Latin Classics is simply mistaken.

The Carolingian Renaissance

Apart from the effect Charlemagne had on politics, education and literacy in general, art, architecture -- you must take a look at the Palace of Aachen if you're ever in the area -- and the beginnings of German literature, his impact on Classical studies was immense. Here is a list, given by LD Reynolds in the introduction to Texts and Transmission, 1983, p xxviii, of authors and anonymous works of the Latin Classics for which we possess 9th-century manuscripts:

Agrimensores, Ammianus, Apicius, Apuleius, Aratea, Ausonius, Avianus, Caelius, Aurelianus, Caesar, Celsus, Censorinus, Charisius, Cicero, Claudian, Columella, Curtius Rufus, Donatus, Eutropius, Faventius, Florus, Frontinus, Gellius, Grattius, Historia Augusta, Horace, Hyginus, Justinus, Juvenal, Livy, Lucan, Lucretius, Macrobius, Martial, Martianus Capella, Pomponius Mela, Nemesianus, Nonius Marcellus, Notitia dignitatum, Ovid, Palladius, Julius Paris, Persius, Petronius, Phaedrus, the Elder and Younger Pliny, Publius, Querolus, Quintilian, Rhetores latini minores, Rhetorica ad Herennium, Sallust, the Elder and Younger Seneca, Q Serenus, Servius, Solinus, Statius, Suetonius, Tacitus, Terence, Valerius Flaccus, Valerius Maximus, Vergil, Vibius Sequester and Vitruvius.

And, as Reynolds points out ibid, there were once even more 9th century manuscripts, which the 15th-century Humanists discovered and then lost. And it may be that still more 9th-century manuscripts have come to light since 1983, I'm not sure. Compare this with the 7th century, from which survives (ibid, p xvi) a fragment of Lucan as the solitary Classical artifact.

Some lists of manuscripts have more significance than others. The above list shows how one monarch transformed the study of Classical Latin, because almost all of the 9th-century manuscripts in that list were made in monasteries and school either newly built or rejuvenated, mostly the former, on Charlemagne's orders.

Countless Classical scholars over the past 1200 years have been immensely grateful for the Carolingian minuscule, the form of handwriting developed in Charlemagne's time which has made reading those 9th-century manuscripts so much easier than so many manuscripts written both earlier and later.

All of this makes Charlemagne's own case more poignant: although he was said to have spoken Latin, Arabic and Greek in addition to his native German -- which may seem less farfetched to you when consider that his empire bordered on Arab-controlled Spain to the south-west and Greek Byzantium to the east -- he never quite mastered writing. Einhard describes how, late in his life, he did his writing lessons in bed before going to sleep, but never did quite get the hang of it. Some people don't believe Einhard's description. To me it rings true. I suppose the question must remain unsolved for now.

Another question which can't be answered, in part because it's difficult to quantify, is, which single person has done the most to rescue the literature of ancient Rome. Some have said Cassidorius. Others have said Poggio, but we know that those people are half-educated bozos. Perhaps I'm biased, perhaps I've been taken in by by the lingering effects of some medieval legends, but to me, it's always seemed clear that it was Charlemagne.

Some of the Primary Latin Sources for the Crusades from 1095 to 1187

Eyewitness and contemporary accounts of the Crusades in the period from Pope Urban II's speech at Clermont in 1095 which launched the First Crusade, to the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, were written in many languages including Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic. The western European Crusaders themselves, and their compatriots, wrote in several languages besides Latin, most notably French, but also German and others.

In this essay I'm confining myself to a few items written in Latin, and there are many other significant Latin sources which could be named besides the ones I'll mention. To get a sense of the primary sources available for the study of the Crusades, one place to begin would be the bibliographies in the three volumes of Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades, and I repeat, that would be one place to begin. It has now been more than 65 years since Runciman published his account, and scholarship has by no means stood still in the meantime.

The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum was written by an anonymous soldier serving under Bohemond of Taranto in the First Crusade. It begins with Pope Urban's speech in Clermont and concludes shortly after the Crusaders take Jerusalem in 1099. Some of the author's contemporaries derided him as a commoner and simpleton, which didn't stop them from using his account as a basis for their own, and seldom actually improving upon it factually.

Raymond of Aguilers became the Chaplain of Raymond of Toulouse during the First Crusade, and was also present at the taking of Jerusalem. His account, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem, while filling out some details of the First Crusade, concentrates mostly on Raymond.

Fulcher of Chartres was the chaplain of Baldwin of Boulogne, who entered Jerusalem soon after it fell and became King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Fulcher published the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium in three parts, in 1101, 1006 and 1127.

Three near-contemporary historians of the First Crusade, Ekkehard of Aura, Rudolph of Caen and Albert of Aix, did not participate in in it. Ekkehard and Rudolph arrived in the East years after Jerusalem was taken, and wrote accounts which did not add much to the record. Albert never was in the in the Holy Land. Around 1130 he published his account of the First Crusade and of the first years of the Kingdom Jerusalem, Liber Christianae expeditionis pro ereptione, emundatione, et restitutione sanctae Hierosolymitanae ecclesiae, which until the modern era was much admired for its prose style and considered authoritative. Modern scholars have found that Albert, although admirably energetic in bringing together numerous sources, was not particularly critical of them.

William of Tyre was born in the East shortly before 1130, and was Archbishop of Tyre from 1175 until his death in 1186. William relies heavily of Fulcher's account for events between 1095 and 1127; from there until it ends in 1184, his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum is the most important Latin account of the events in the Holy Land, and -- by far -- the finest Latin work written by anyone who lived in the Crusader states. William has a breadth of vision, education and writing skill which rival those of any other Medieval Latin historian.

A brief anonymous account entitled Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum describes how Saladin conquered Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

Latin Authors from Spain

Roman conquest of Spain began in 218 BC, as Rome battled with Carthage for dominance in the Western Mediterranean, and continued until -- when? The answer may depend partly upon one's political position. Some would say that the conquest was complete, for all intents and purposes, within a century; others, that it was never complete. From how long and to what extent earlier native languages were spoken in Spain, and in which proportions those languages were Celtic, or Basque, or unclassified Iberian, or others, I do not know.

In the first century AD, quite a number of the most prominent authors in the Latin language happened to come from Spain: Pomponius Mela (died ca AD 45), the earliest known Roman geographer; Columella (AD 4 -- 70), who wrote a lengthy work on agriculture; Lucan (30 -- 65), author of a very popular epic poem about the Roman civil war; Martial (born between 38 and 41 -- died between 102 and 104), who authored many witty epigrams; Quintilian (ca 35 -- ca 100), one of the most prominent of the Roman rhetoricians; and, most prominent of all, the Senecas, father and son. Seneca the Elder wrote memoirs and a history of Rome; Seneca the Younger wrote quite a wide variety of works: philosophy, drama, moralizing letters and satire penned by him survive to this day.

Later Spaniards who wrote and published in Latin include the Christian theologian Priscillian, sometime Bishop of Ávila (died 385); the poet Prudentius (died between ca 405 and 413); and the widely-traveled historian Orosius (c 375 -- died after 418). 4th-century Latin authors from Spain whose works have not survived to the present day, but are praised by contemporaries, include Juvencus, a poet who now cannot be dated more exactly than the 4th century[PS, 23 October 2019: I erred: A poem by Juvencus has survived, a verse rendering of the Gospel narrative about 3200 verses long, composed ca AD 330. Thank you once again, Reddit!] ; and the poet Latronianus (Died 385).

I have written elsewhere on this blog of the prolific Saint Isidore of Seville (ca 560 -- 636), beloved by Christian for many works, and by Classicists for his Etymologie, which, although it fails pretty spectacularly in the goal expressed in its title, to accurately trace the origins of words, none the less success brilliantly as an encyclopedia and as a repository of fragments of ancient works which otherwise are lost to us; and of Pope Sylvester II (ca 946 -- 1003), known earlier as Gerbert, one of the most brilliant scientists of the Middle Ages.

The Toledo School of Translators were responsible for many of the Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek which transformed the curricula of the Sorbonne and other Western universities beginning in the 13th century. Perhaps the foremost of these translator at Toledo was Gerard of Cremona, who fashioned Latin versions of many Greek and Arabic scientific works.

Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise, took over the leadership of the translation school in the 13th century (he reigned from 1252 to 1284), and, although Latin writing certainly flourished under him and for a long time afterwards in Spain, his cultivation of the Castilian vernacular is so greatly, and understandably, celebrated, that it obscures, from the feeble view of your humble scribe, many of the particulars of this Latin culture, and so, for the nonce, he must pause here.

Latin Texts From the First Crusade, Edited by Heinrich Hagenmeyer

The German Protestant minister Heinrich Hagenmeyer, 1834-1915, was also one of the most highly-respected editors of some primary texts of the Crusades. I have two volumes by Hagenmeyer: Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088-1100, a collection of letters written between AD 1088 and 1100 and pertaining to the First Crusade; and Anonymi Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymitanorum; mit Erläuterungen, an account of the First Crusade, written by an anonymous soldier who took part in it.

This is the edition of the Anonymi Gesta which I have: a reprint made by the University of Toronto Libraries:

It's a fairly well-made volume. Reprints like these, of pre-copyright books, tend to be of okay quality when made by university libraries. The ones made by fly-by-night publishers you've never heard of, with pictures on the covers which make it clear they were made by people who can't read Latin, are very much hit-and-miss, quality-wise. I got lucky with my copy of Hagenmeyer's edition of the crusade letters, made by one of those fly-by-night operations. The front cover is mostly covered by a photo of rippling water. It's a fairly pleasant photo. It has nothing to do with the subject matter of the book.

In Hagenmeyer's editions, the actual primary texts, the letters written between 1088 and 1100 and the anonymous chronicle by a crusader, take up up a very small amount of space compared to Hagenmeyer's Erlaeuterungen, his notes, written in German. In fact, each of these volumes could be considered a historical work written by Hagenmeyer, with the letters and the chronicle included among the footnotes, except that in the case of Anonymi Gesta, the anonymous chronicle, Hagenmeyer's text appears mainly in the form of footnotes. Footnotes which take up by far the greater part of most of the pages, leaving room for a few lines of the Latin text per page. In the case of the volume of letters, the actual letters cover 55 pages, and they actually cover most of those pages most of the time, but the entire volume is over 500 pages long.

That's not a complaint, because what Hagenmeyer writes is very sensible, highly informative and thoroughly scholarly in a way in which, for example, I have never matched, not even back when I was in grad school. I'm just pointing out that what you're getting, by volume, is almost all Hagenmeyer, with the primary texts also included, as opposed to mostly primary text, plus a little bit of introduction and notes, as is often, perhaps more often than not, the case with editions of ancient and Medieval and more recent Latin texts.

There are many highly romanticized stories of the Crusades in Western literature. If you go back and study the eyewitness accounts and contemporary letters and such -- even the ones written by Crusaders themselves, and by their countrymen. Never mind the accounts written by Orthodox Greeks and other Eastern Christians, and Muslims and Jews -- then the Crusaders suddenly appear in a much less flattering light. The excuse giving for all of these Frenchmen, Italians, Germans and other Westerners to travel east and fight wars, was that they were responding to a call for help from the Greek Emperor in Constantinople. And the leaders stopped in Constantinople on their way to the Holy Land, and swore oaths of loyalty to the Emperor. Oaths which they broke in almost every case. They swore they would turn over all the land they conquered to the Byzantine Empire. Instead, they stayed and ruled it themselves. They committed horrendous massacres of civilians and non-enemies and women and children. For example, when the soldiers of the First Crusade conquered the city of Jerusalem: they literally slaughtered almost every human being inside the city walls: not just the Muslims, against whom they had been fighting, but also all of the Jews and Eastern Christians who were there, who had not been fighting against them at all. Even the accounts written by the Westerners are horrific. And Muslims and Jews and Eastern Christians haven't forgotten, and why should they, even if the West very soon started telling itself completely unrealistic stories about the whole enterprise? We Westerners should be more careful with the term "crusade."

Monumenta Moguntina

I got this thick volume sitting before me now years ago on Amazon. It was advertised as "Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicum by Philippus Jaffe," and this cover was shown on the Amazon page:

If the publisher who had reprinted this from a download they found somewhere on the Internet, stuck it between covers and put it for sale on Amazon, had had any idea what it was, they might have added "vol 3" to the cover, or "tomus tertius," as it says between the covers, which is Latin for "vol 3," and they might even have added "Monumenta Moguntina," which is the actual title of this particular volume. Not to mention choosing a cover which had some relation to the contents of the volume.

When I got this volume I didn't know what "Moguntina" meant either. "Monumenta" in the title of a volume like this, I knew that meant historical records. So "Moguntina" must be the genitive of whatever these written records were about. Back then I bought a few volumes from Amazon without knowing what they were, just hoping that their contents would be Latin like their titles. It turns out that Mogontiacum is the original name of the German city now known as Mainz, and that Moguntina is the genitive of Mogontiacum. The Romans founded Mogontiacum as an army base in 13 or 12 BC. Many German and Austrian cities along the Rhine, Main and Danube rivers were originally Roman military bases. Those rivers were the frontier of the Roman Republic and Empire, or very close to the frontier, for a very long time. Centuries. Gradually the bases grew into towns. After the Roman Empire had ceased to exist in the region, the towns remained, and often grew into big cities like Mainz.

So, I learned after obtaining this volume, a certain Philipp Jaffe had put together a series of volumes of Medieval German writings and called it Bibliotheca Rerum Germanica, and the third of these volumes had to do with Medieval Mainz, and in particular with two 8th-century Archbishops of Mainz, St Boniface and St Lullus. Almost half of the volume, nearly 300 pages, consists of letters from and to the two sainted Archbishops. The rest of the volume, if you were to judge solely on the basis of the number of pages, would seem to consist of afterthoughts, of whatever other Medieval documents relating to the history of Medieval Mainz Philipp Jaffe could find: many letters by and from other Medieval residents of Mainz; several biographies -- hagiographies -- of St Boniface, various lives of other local saints.

Boniface was born in England around Ad 675, was a leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Franks -- that is to say, he had a lot to do with the dangerous business of trying to convert 8th-century pagan Germanic tribes to Christianity, beyond the borders of the Franks, who were already Christians -- and he was martyred in 754.

Boniface is well-known today, and takes up so much room in this volume lying before me, in part, quite simply because the volume of his surviving writing, and contemporary or near-contemporary writing about him, is unusually large, compared to the records left by other 8th-century Western Europeans, or by other residents of Mainz during the entire Medieval era. He's also of interest as a part of the rise of the Frankish Kingdom, which, a few centuries after Boniface's death, during the reign of Charlemagne, became the Medieval Western Empire. The unusual volume of writing by and about him make his life an unusually well-illuminated episode in the Dark Ages.

Juergen Leonhardt Is Alright

We can see that this kitten

is helping someone to study Latin -- possibly an Italian person.

Juergen Leonhardt in not Italian, but German. He said this:

"Although Latin still had a presence [after 1800], the future belonged to the new national languages, and the proportion of Latin texts went into steady decline. It is understandable that scholars would be more interested in the waxing of literatures in the vernaculars than in the waning of Latin. The invention of the automobile in the late nineteenth century provides us with a similar example in that the horse and buggy continued to play an important role alongside the car for more than fifty years. Nevertheless, the wider public tends to be more interested in early automobiles than late horse-drawn carriages." -- Latin. Story of a World Language, 2013. p 6.

The comparison of recent Latin to recent horse-drawn carriages sort of blew my mind. It was the first thing I've read which helped me to understand the recent decline of Latin as a result of anything other than stupidity. Leonhardt mentions other causes which I would describe as straight-up stupidity, and which he also does not describe as unadulterated genius.

Maybe Latin is dead in some ways. Leonhardt describes it not as dead but as "dead," because some of the criteria which are generally thought to indicate that a language is dead apply to Latin, while others do not. Anyway: it's a really cool book, and at the end of it Leonhardt does not speak of Latin as "dead" even in quotation marks, but urges the reader to treat it "as if it were a living language", and does not seem devoid of hope that it will revive in some ways. (p 292) So: yay.

In between pages 6 and 292, Leonhardt agrees with me (and with many of his academic colleagues who are fans of the Latin language) that Charlemagne was really cool. It seems to me that it would be hard to be a fan of the language and not think that Charlemagne was cool. Leonhardt also has a lot to say about how Latin was used as a real live living language, spoken not just by priests and poets but also by lawyers and diplomats and others who traveled a lot in Western Europe, for a good thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Christopher Columbus never had a lot of formal education, but was described as a good Latinist. He's not mentioned in Leonhardt's book but I'm just saying.) And when Leonhardt was making that comparison of Latin after 1800 and horse-drawn carriages made after cars had begun to be made, one point he was making is that there is an awful lot of Latin which was written after the Classical period. 10,000 times as much as what has survived from the Classical era, in fact (p 2), and that scholars have barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to studying Neo-Latin, which is from about 1500 to now.

In conclusion, France is a land of many contrasts.

A Few Reasons To Become Fluent In Latin

Spinoza. If you're not reading him in Latin you're reading a watered-down translation and you're missing a lot, as you are with any truly great writer whom you're not reading in the language in which he wrote. In the volume to the right of my laptop as I write this, the Tractatus theologico-politicus,



there are many quotations from the Bible, and the citations from the Old Testament are given in Hebrew along with the Vulgate Latin, and I know I am missing something because my Hebrew is still so weak and I have to lean so heavily on the Latin translation. The ever-friendly and helpful Spinoza felt for readers like me, and so he published a Compendium grammatices linguae hebraeae for those of us Latin readers who are weak in Hebrew.



Guido da Pisa. He was a contemporary of Dante and wrote an extensive Latin commentary on the Inferno, fascinating stuff for Dante fans.



Of course, of the relatively small volume of work which Dante himself published,



almost as much is in Latin as in Italian. Even Dante's famous tract in which he defends the practice of writing in Italian, is written in Latin, interrupted by only a very few verses from the most illustrious of the Italian vernacular poets.

Dante published his worked in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. From his time to the present, it may be that Italians wrote Latin less often than Europeans in general. And that may be in very large due to Dante. I don't know. The key words in the 2nd and 3rd sentences of this paragraph are "may be." When it comes to letters and official pronouncements, Popes and Italian republics continued to communicate in Latin; otherwise, there is a very great amount of Italian. And most of that Italian ain't exactly Dante if you catch my drift. So curse Dante for contributing to the decline of Latin, and with it, to the decline of civilization!

Excuse that outburst. Despite Dante, Latin was still in extremely widespread use as late as the 17th century. Besides Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz and Hobbes and Milton wrote quite a lot in Latin. Milton also wrote quite a lot in Italian. (Dante may be directly to blame for that as well.)

But as late as the 20th century many things were still written in Latin, and I don't mean only Catholic things, although Catholic clergy did write a huge amount of Latin up until the 1960's and Vatican II. There were also very many non-Catholic academic Latin texts, not only by academic Classicists (who of course still write in Latin now and then up to the very present), but also, for example, by botanists and mathematicians. The persistence of the use of Latin in those fields is reflected by things like the continued use of Latin in taxonomy and in the names of mathematical journals.

It wasn't all that long ago that educated people were expected to be able to read Latin. The decision to just let that requirement slide and dissolve and die out has only been spreading for a few centuries now. And that decision is a huge disaster, and because of it a typical 19th-century college graduate could do all sorts of things which a typical college graduate today can't do, and in that respect they were much better off back then. I keep hammering on this subject in this blog, and I'm sure I'm boring some of you, but the thing is, I'm right.

If you're paying close attention, you've noticed that I don't come out and say "I'm right" all that often with no if's or but's. You may also have noticed that this is the only way in which I say that there were good old days: knowledge of Latin, and that's all. Other than that I mock and deride nostalgia. So don't confuse me with the conservatives with whom I have in common an enthusiasm for Latin and a wish to see its study restored, and absolutely nothing else.

HJR Murray's History Of Chess Is Humongously Splendiferous

It was published in 1913 and is still widely regarded as the standard work on the subject.

Well -- okay, let's get more specific about what "the subject" is: some people looking for a history of chess want something going from the beginnings of the modern game in the 15th century, when the rules first resembled the rules chess is played by today, and going until the present. A book published in 1913 obviously has a 102-year handicap on that last part, and of its 900 pages, the part dealing with the modern game goes from page 776 to page 890. 891 to 900 is the index, and a lot of the index, obviously, covers the parts of the book before page 776.

What's in those 775 pages? Well, it's the history of chess in India, beginning in the 6th century; in the Malay lands, Further India, China, Corea, Japan, Persia, the Eastern Empire, in Muslim lands, in Central and Northern Asia and Russia, and in Medieval Europe. That's how Murray, writing in England in 1913, referred to those regions. What he called the Malay lands, we refer to as Malaysia and Indonesia; instead of Further India we say Myanmar and Southeast Asia; he spelled Corea with a c and we spell Korea with a k; his Persia is our Iran; and what he called the Eastern Empire, some people still call the Eastern Empire or Eastern Roman Empire, and others call Byzantium.

If you don't like footnotes, you won't like this. Murray wrote A Short History of Chess of chess for people like you. I'm not recommending the shorter version for you, I don't understand people like you, I don't know if you'd like it or not.

Us people who love lots and lots of footnotes and lengthy appendices, with lots of lengthy quotations from Latin texts in both once we get to Medieval Europe on page 392 -- Murray wrote his book for us. He was one of us. He studied Arabic specifically to prepare for his research into Muslim chess, which he calls Shatranj, and which occupies pages 186 through 365.

Throughout the book, Murray presents us with absolutely meticulous consideration of both primary texts and secondary works. He not only tells us why he thinks this or that early text does or does not refer to chess, and why he agrees or disagrees with this and that secondary work of scholarship on this and that point -- he tells us why he thinks as he does, and he does so convincingly. He's one of us.

There are diagrams showing board positions in the Indian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other games. There are a very great number of problems shown in both Shatranj and Medieval chess. And just a few modern chess problems, but I don't care because modern chess problems are easy to get, and where except this book do you get Shatranj or Medieval chess problems? The fact that the book was published in 1913 doesn't bother me all that much, for the same reason: it's pretty easy to find historical accounts of chess from Pillsbury, the last player mentioned by Murray, up to the present.

Murray is thorough, thorough, thorough, tracing and explaining the changes in the game from region to region and over time, going exhaustively into regional variations and lore and literature. Latin is quoted more than any other non-English language, but there's also a fair amount of Medieval English and French and Spanish and German and Icelandic.

If you're into chess but not so much into history or comparative literature, but will put up the latter two for the sake of your curiosity about chess, this book is for you. If you're into history but not so much into chess or comparative literaure, or comparative literature but not so much into chess or history, you might still like this book a lot.

If you're a nice sensible scholarly type like me who's interested in chess and history and comparative literature, especially Latin but you've got nothing against those other European languages, than for you this book will be Christmas every day. About the only thing which could've made it even better would have been more untranslated passages from texts in Greek and non-European languages -- but don't get me wrong, there's a little bit of that, too, just a little bit, although those texts are mostly just cited in translation.

The Vulgate Isn't Called The Vulgate Because Its Style Is Vulgar

Its style isn't vulgar at all, it's perfectly fine, it's great. There are at least two translations of the bible worth reading for the quality of their prose: the King James Bible, and Jerome's Vulgate.

It's called the Vulgate because it's in Latin and not Greek or Hebrew. That's the only reason it's called the Vulgate.

It's sometimes mistakenly said that the Romance languages, Portugese, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal, French, Romansch, Italian, Romanian, etc, developed out of Medieval Latin, which, it is said, is "vulgar." Wrong on two counts.

First of all: some Medieval Latin is badly-written. So is some ancient Latin and some Renaissance Latin and some more recent Latin. And some Medieval Latin is very well-written. But it's all Latin, and it's all the one major written language of Western Europe until well into the Medieval period, and one of its main languages for a long time after that. Latin of all periods is perfectly comprehensible to everyone who has learned the Latin of any period.

And in all periods, it's a written language. The Romance languages developed from the speech of groups of people who didn't read or write at all for centuries. Latin has kept its form because the people who use it have never stopped reading ancient authors such as Cicero and Livy and Vergil and Horace and Ovid. And even the few fanatical Medieval writers who completely avoided all of them and thought they were evil pagans -- even they all still read the Vulgate. Which, whatever you think of the content of the Bible, stylistically is still top-notch Latin.

English developed out of the speech of people who didn't write their speech for about 3 centuries: after the Norman Conquest in 1066, most of the writing done in England was in Latin, and virtually all of the rest was in the Normans' native French. When written English appears in the 14th century in the form we call Middle English, with the writing of people like Chaucer, although the language was handed down generation to generation from the people who wrote Anglo-Saxon such as we find in Beowulf, it is very different from that Anglo-Saxon language. A native speaker of English today, with no training in Middle English, can read Chaucer. He or she might have to look up every fifth word, but the text will be comprehensible. And that's because there has been written English language continuously from Chaucer's time to ours.

A native speaker of English today with no training in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, as the language of Beowulf is sometimes called, will not be able to read Beowulf at all. The language is foreign, no if's and's or but's. And for that reason I prefer to call it Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English.

The Romance languages went through similar centuries of change when they were only spoken. Again, Spanish, French, Portugese, Italian and the other Romance languages didn't come from poorly-written Latin. These beautiful languages didn't come from written language at all. On the contrary: they became what they are because of extended periods of being only spoken languages.

And anyone who tries to tell you that Medieval Latin is just awful, horribly poorly written, is unfamiliar with the work of authors such as Boethius, Corippus, Alcuin, Scotus Eriugena, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris, Dante, Roger Bacon, William of Occam and Jean Buridan, to name just a few. And if you don't think that a very popular ancient Roman author ever wrote stuff which was just terrible, certainly far, far inferior to the work of all of the Medieval authors I've mentioned, just check out Nepos.