Abstract
An article by Jerome Moran entitled ‘Spoken Latin in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance’ was published in the Journal of Classics Teaching in the autumn of 2019 (Moran, 2019). The author of the article contends that ‘actual real-life conversations in Latin about everyday matters’ never, or almost never took place among educated people in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. A long-standing familiarity with quite a few primary sources for the Latin culture of Renaissance and early modern period leads us to a rather different conclusion. The present essay, therefore, revisits the main topics treated by Moran.
Highlights
After about the sixth century Latin was no longer the native speech of any people or nation
The knowledge and use of Latin was retained, partly because most of the Germanic peoples, who settled in the regions that once belonged to the western Roman empire, lacked cultures based on writing
Thanks to recent historical scholarship, we know quite a lot about how Latin was taught to children in different regions throughout the medieval and early modern periods
Summary
Even for a noble educated in the liberal arts, if he lived far removed from church, academic life, or scholarly contubernium, conversational Latin would have been a rare event. It does not follow from these assumptions that there were no venues in which Latin was really used for extempore spoken conversation and communication. If we pay attention to the primary materials, we learn that Latin in the Renaissance and early modern age was quite often (in certain social groups and in certain geographical regions) a vehicle for spoken and extempore communication and there were widely differing degrees of proficiency in this spoken use
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