What is Renaissance Latin and how did it differ from medieval Latin?
Renaissance Latin is the literary style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries by the humanist movement. Humanists rejected medieval Latin vocabulary and stylistic accretions, looking instead to classical authors such as Cicero in prose and Virgil in poetry as their standards. The most important practical difference, as scholar Jurgen Leonhardt noted, may have been the far greater time and effort required to learn the humanist version.
What did ad fontes mean for Renaissance humanists?
Ad fontes, meaning "to the sources," was the general cry of the Renaissance humanists. It expressed their determination to strip away medieval Latin vocabulary and usage, returning to the Latin of the Roman golden age as the only legitimate basis for grammatically correct writing.
What role did Erasmus play in Renaissance Latin pronunciation?
Erasmus proposed abolishing all the traditional regional pronunciations of Latin in favour of his own reconstructed version of classical Latin pronunciation. Despite this advocacy, evidence in his own writings shows he himself continued to use one of the traditional ecclesiastical pronunciations.
How did Renaissance humanists change Latin handwriting and spelling?
Humanists wrote in a humanist minuscule script derived from Carolingian minuscule, deliberately avoiding the black-letter scripts of the Middle Ages. This Carolingian-derived script is the ultimate ancestor of most contemporary lower-case typefaces. On spelling, they enforced the full writing of ae where medieval scribes had substituted e, and insisted on distinguishing t and c where medieval palatalization had blurred them.
Who were the major authors of Renaissance Latin works?
Key figures included Petrarch (1304-1374), whose Epistolae familiares appeared in 1359, Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457), author of De elegantiis Latinae linguae in 1441, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), who wrote De hominis dignitate in 1486. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Antonio de Nebrija (1441-1522), and the Croatian writer Marko Marulic (1450-1524) also produced major works in this style.
What was the downside of Renaissance Latin's strict classical standards?
While the humanist programme succeeded in reforming education, it made writing about practical subjects such as law, medicine, science, and contemporary politics far harder than it had been under the more flexible medieval Latin system. The elevated grammatical and stylistic standards reduced Latin's usefulness as an everyday working language.