Renaissance Latin

Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Literary Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the Renaissance humanism movement. This style of Latin is regarded as the first phase of the standardised and grammatically "Classical" Neo-Latin which continued through the 16th–19th centuries, and was used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international (i.e., pan-European) audience.

Renaissance Latin
Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450.
Native to	No native speakers, used by the administrations and universities of numerous countries
Region	Europe
Era	Evolved from Medieval Latin in the 14th century; creating Neo-Latin used until present
Language family	Indo-European Italic Latino-Faliscan Latin Renaissance Latin
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Italic Proto-Latino-Faliscan Old Latin Classical Latin Late Latin Medieval Latin
Writing system	Latin alphabet
Official status
Official language in	Most Roman Catholic countries
Regulated by	The community of scholars at the earliest universities
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None

Ad fontes

Ad fontes ("to the sources") was the general cry of the Renaissance humanists, and as such their Latin style sought to purge Latin of the medieval Latin vocabulary and stylistic accretions that it had acquired in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. They looked to golden age Latin literature, and especially to Cicero in prose and Virgil in poetry, as the arbiters of Latin style. They abandoned the use of the sequence and other accentual forms of metre, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used in Latin poetry during the Roman period. The humanists condemned much of the large body of medieval Latin literature as "Gothic"—for them, a term of abuse—and believed instead that ancient Latin from the Roman period had to form the basis for judging what was a grammatical and accurate style of Latin.

Some 16th-century Ciceronian humanists also sought to purge written Latin of medieval developments in its orthography. They insisted, for example, that ae be written out in full wherever it occurred in classical Latin; medieval scribes often wrote e instead of ae. They were much more zealous than medieval Latin writers that t and c be distinguished; because the effects of palatalization made them homophones, medieval scribes often wrote, for example, eciam for etiam. Their reforms even affected handwriting; Humanists usually wrote Latin in a humanist minuscule script derived from Carolingian minuscule, the ultimate ancestor of most contemporary lower-case typefaces, avoiding the black-letter scripts used in the Middle Ages. This sort of writing was particularly vigilant in edited works, so that international colleagues could read them more easily, while in their own handwritten documents the Latin is usually written as it is pronounced in the vernacular. Therefore, the first generations of humanists did not dedicate much care to the orthography till the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. Erasmus proposed that the then-traditional pronunciations of Latin be abolished in favour of his reconstructed version of classical Latin pronunciation, even though one can deduce from his works that he himself used the ecclesiastical pronunciation.

The humanist plan to remake Latin was largely successful, at least in education. Schools taught the humanistic spellings, and encouraged the study of the texts selected by the humanists, to the large exclusion of later Latin literature. On the other hand, while humanist Latin was an elegant literary language, it became much harder to write books about law, medicine, science or contemporary politics in Latin while achieving the higher standards of grammatical accuracy and stylistical fluency. Scholar Jürgen Leonhardt noted how these high standards changed speakers' relationship with the language: "Whereas during the Middle Ages, Latin had an instrumental function in human communications and in peoples' understanding of the world, for the humanists, the act of mastering the language became a measure of human self-perfection. In the end, the most important difference between medieval and humanist Latin may well have been the time and effort to learn it."

Renaissance Latin works and authors

14th century

For 14th-century works and authors that are still medieval in outlook (practically all non-Italians), see Medieval Latin.

• 1359. Epistolæ familiares by Petrarch (1304–1374)
• 1360. Genealogia deorum gentilium by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)

15th century

Incunables by language. Latin dominated printed book production in the 15th century by a wide margin.

• 1409. Flos Duellatorum by Fiore dei Liberi
• 1425. Hermaphroditus by Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471)
• 1441. De elegantiis Latinæ linguæ by Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457)
• 1442. Historia Florentini populi by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444)
• 1444. Historia de duobus amantibus by Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II (1405–1464)
• 1452. De re ædificatoria by Leone Battista Alberti (1404–1472)
• 1471. Contra amores by Bartolomeo Platina (1421–1481)
• 1479. De inventione dialectica by Rodolphus Agricola (1444–1485)
• 1481. Introductiones Latinæ by Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522)
• 1486. De hominis dignitate by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494)
• 1491. Nutricia by Poliziano (1454–1494)
• Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animæ by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499)
• Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481)

16th-century

• 1517. Marko Marulić (1450-1524) Davidiad, Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae

Further reading

• Cranz, F. Edward, Virginia Brown, and Paul Oslar Kristeller, eds. 1960–2003. Catalogus translationum et commentariorum: Medieval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries; Annotated Lists and Guides. 8 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
• D’Amico, John F. 1984. “The Progress of Renaissance Latin Prose: The Case of Apuleianism.” Renaissance Quarterly 37: 351–92.
• Deitz, Luc. 2005. "The Tools of the Trade: A Few Remarks on Editing Renaissance Latin Texts." Humanistica Lovaniensia 54: 345-58.
• Hardie, Philip. 2013. “Shepherds’ Songs: Generic Variation in Renaissance Latin Epic.” In Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations. Edited by Theodore D. Paphanghelis, Stephen J. Harrison, and Stavros Frangoulidis, 193–204. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Houghton, L. B. T. 2013. “Renaissance Latin Love Elegy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Edited by Thea S. Thorsen, 290–305. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
• Lohr, C. H. 1974. “Renaissance Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors A–B.” Studies in the Renaissance 21: 228–89.
• McFarlane, I. D., ed. and trans. 1980. Renaissance Latin Poetry. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
• Parker, Holt. 2012. “Renaissance Latin Elegy.” In A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. Edited by Barbara K. Gold, 476–90. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Perosa, Alessandro, and John Sparrow, eds. 1979. Renaissance Latin Verse: An Anthology. London: Duckworth.

History of Latin

• Ostler, Nicholas (2009). Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. HarperPress. ISBN 978-0007343065.
• Churchill, Laurie J., Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, eds. 2002. Women Writing in Latin: From Roman Antiquity to Early Modern Europe. Vol. 3, Early Modern Women Writing Latin. New York: Routledge.
• Tore, Janson (2007). A Natural History of Latin. Translated by Merethe Damsgaard Sorensen; Nigel Vincent. Oxford University Press.
• Leonhardt, Jürgen (2009). Latin: story of a World Language. Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg. Harvard. ISBN 9780674659964. OL 35499574M.

Neo-Latin overviews

• Butterfield, David (2011). "Neo-Latin". In Clackson, James (ed.). A Blackwell Companion to the Latin Language. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 303–18.
• IJsewijn, Jozef with Dirk Sacré. Companion to Neo-Latin Studies. Two vols. Leuven University Press, 1990–1998.
• Knight, Sarah; Tilg, Stefan, eds. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190886998. OL 28648475M.
• Ford, Philip, Jan Bloemendal, and Charles Fantazzi, eds. 2014. Brill's Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World. Two vols. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Moul, Victoria, ed. (2017). A Guide to Neo-Latin Literature. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108820066. OL 29875053M.
• Waquet, Françoise (2001). Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries. Translated by John Howe. Verso. ISBN 1-85984-402-2.

See also

• Neo-Latin studies
• List of Neo-Latin authors

External links

• An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Titles (also Renaissance Latin).
• Neo-Latin Humanist Texts at DigitalBookIndex.
• René Hoven, Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance. Dictionary of Renaissance Latin from prose sources, with the collaboration of Laurent Grailet, Leiden, Brill, 2006 (2nd edition), 683 p.
• The Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, focusing on Irish Renaissance Latin.