Review Article: Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg

Abstract

Review Article by Ralph Hexter Medieval Latin. An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide. Edited by F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 774. The present volume represents a remarkable achievement and should be welcomed heartily by all students and teachers of Medieval Latin. Little of Martin McGuire's pathbreaking original Introduction to Medieval Latin Studies: A Syllabus and Bibliographical Guide (1964) or its revision by Hermigild Dressler (1977) remains except the identity of the press (Catholic University of America). Yet thanks in part to the generations of students and teachers who availed themselves of these somewhat homey concoctions, teaching and research in Medieval Latin are thriving in North America as perhaps never before, and the present volume pays a handsome tribute to McGuire and Dressler by rethinking the purpose of such a vade mecum at the tum of the millennium and giving us a greatly expanded and very professional handbook sans syllabus -how could there be one syllabus in any event?-based on the collaboration of a range of experts who as a group testify to the very health of Medieval Latin studies to which I just referred. The first section of the Introduction (A), Medieval Latin, Past and Present (A.AA-the work is divided into and cross-referenced by such alphabetic sections and subsections), concludes with recognition that while the world of Medieval Latin studies is international and polyglot and attained prestige as a university discipline at the end of the last century in Ludwig Traube's Munich, a North American blossoming of the field is clearly underway. Whether this is a real translatio studii or whether the decline perceived in some quarters in Munich is only relative (or attributable to other pressures on the German university system today), it might be interesting to interrogate why this is happening and what it means for medieval studies in North America. Does it reflect a serious revision of our culture's fixation on humanism and the elision of the medieval period, especially Medieval Latin, which dates from the Renaissance humanists themselves? Are students of Latin finally coming to their senses and realizing that there are