Among Latinists

Abstract

SummaryIn the history of 20th-century Latin linguistics, the Catholic Dutch professors Joseph Schrijnen (1869–1938) and Christine Mohrmann (1903–1988) are known as the key figures of the ‘Nijmegen School’. They developed the disputable and indeed strongly debated hypothesis that the kind of Latin used by early Christians was aSonderspracheorlangue spéciale(laterGruppenspracheorlangue de groupe) characterized by different types of ‘christianisms’. The aim of this article is to contribute to a critical historiography of the Nijmegen School by looking into the reception of its ideas among contemporary Latin linguists. In particular, it tries to reconstruct the evolving appraisals by Alfred Ernout (1879–1973) and Einar Löfstedt (1880–1955), on the basis of (a) the former’s reviews of studies published by the Nijmegen School (in contrast to reviews by other contemporary linguists), (b) studies published on neighbouring or overlapping subjects by Einar Löfstedt, and (c) a letter to Mohrmann from each of them, both of which are preserved in the archives of the Katholiek Documentatie Centrum in Nijmegen. In the case of Ernout, it is argued that he was probably always sceptical about theSondersprachehypothesis, but that in his reviews of the 1930s this scepticism was mitigated to a ‘reticent’ attitude, possibly for reasons to do with the politics of science. In the case of Löfstedt, it is shown that he initially approved of the hypothesis and even integrated it into his own works, but that he gradually diverged from the Nijmegen School, partly on account of (Schrijnen and) Mohrmann’s polemical misrepresentation of his comments ongentesandpaganibeing semanticUmprägungenrather thanNeuprägungen.