Renaissance Latin

• 1. Introduction

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  Renaissance Latin is the literary style that humanist scholars forged from roughly the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, insisting that the centuries of accumulated medieval usage had corrupted the tongue of the Romans. Their rallying cry was two Latin words: ad fontes, meaning "to the sources." The questions that follow from that cry are genuinely strange ones. Why would educated people tear apart a working language and try to rebuild it from scratch? What happened when they succeeded? And what did they lose in the bargain? The scholar Jurgen Leonhardt put the transformation sharply: for humanist writers, "the act of mastering the language became a measure of human self-perfection." That shift, from Latin as a tool to Latin as a monument, would shape European learning for centuries.

• 2. War on Medieval Latin

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  Cicero in prose and Virgil in poetry became the twin standards against which every Renaissance humanist measured their writing. The target of their reform was what they called "Gothic" Latin, a term they used as an insult, meaning the vocabulary and stylistic habits that Latin had picked up in the centuries after the fall of Rome. Humanists condemned the large body of medieval Latin literature as a debasement of the classical tongue. They abandoned the sequence and other accentual verse forms that medieval writers had favoured, reaching back instead to the Greek metrical formats that Roman poets had used during the classical period. The crusade extended even to individual letters: sixteenth-century Ciceronian humanists insisted that ae be spelled out in full wherever classical Latin required it, rather than allowing the medieval scribal habit of writing a plain e. The distinction between t and c also became a point of principle. Palatalization had made the two sounds homophones in spoken medieval Latin, so scribes had routinely written eciam where classical Latin demanded etiam. Humanists would not tolerate that kind of drift.

• 3. Handwriting and the Printed Page

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  Humanist minuscule script was the handwriting style humanists devised to match their reformed Latin, and it was derived from the much older Carolingian minuscule. That choice was deliberate: by going back to a script associated with an earlier period, they were rejecting the black-letter scripts of the medieval era as surely as they rejected medieval vocabulary. The Carolingian minuscule they revived is, notably, the ultimate ancestor of most contemporary lower-case typefaces, meaning that every time a reader opens a modern printed book they are looking at a visual inheritance from this humanist campaign. In practice, humanists applied their orthographic standards most strictly in edited works intended for international circulation, because those texts needed to be readable by colleagues across Europe. In their own private handwritten documents, the Latin tended to follow local vernacular pronunciation instead.

• 4. Erasmus and Pronunciation

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  Erasmus proposed abolishing all the traditional regional pronunciations of Latin then in use across Europe, replacing them with his own reconstructed version of how he believed classical Latin had actually sounded. The proposal was bold, but Erasmus himself undermined it. One can deduce from his own writings that he used one of the traditional ecclesiastical pronunciations in practice, not the reconstructed classical one he advocated. The first generations of humanists, it turned out, did not devote much attention to questions of orthography until the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. The urgency that later reformers felt about spelling had not yet gripped the movement's founders.

• 5. Cost of Perfection

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  The humanist programme succeeded in schools, where the new humanistic spellings were taught and the texts the humanists approved became the curriculum, largely to the exclusion of later Latin literature. That success carried a hidden price. Writing books about law, medicine, science, or contemporary politics in Latin while meeting the strict humanist standards of grammatical accuracy and stylistic fluency became far harder than it had been under the more flexible medieval system. Jurgen Leonhardt framed the underlying change this way: during the Middle Ages, Latin had an instrumental function in human communication and in people's understanding of the world. For the humanists, that instrumental quality was not enough. The most important difference between medieval and humanist Latin may well have been, as Leonhardt observed, the time and effort now required to learn it.

• 6. The Writers Who Built It

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  Petrarch, born in 1304 and one of the movement's founding figures, published his Epistolae familiares in 1359, and Giovanni Boccaccio followed the year after with his Genealogia deorum gentilium. Lorenzo Valla's De elegantiis Latinae linguae appeared in 1441 and became one of the definitive humanist statements on what correct Latin looked like. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who would later become Pope Pius II, contributed his Historia de duobus amantibus in 1444. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, born in 1463, produced his De hominis dignitate in 1486, a text that became a landmark of Renaissance thought. Marsilio Ficino, born in 1433, wrote his Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae, and Antonio de Nebrija's Introductiones Latinae of 1481 carried the humanist Latin project as far as the Iberian Peninsula. The Croatian writer Marko Marulić, born in 1450, published his Davidiad in 1517, demonstrating how far the movement's reach had extended by the sixteenth century.