The Medieval Latin Literature of Germany As German Literature

Abstract

In the vast body of medieval literature written in what is called the Germanic area of Europe—and in the Middle Ages that included parts of present-day France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, and Poland—there is an immense amount of writing in a non-vernacular language known as Medieval Latin, in German Mittellateinisch—a term not coined by Wilhelm Meyer in 1882, as Karl Langosch claimed. It was used as early as 1838 by Jacob Grimm in the epoch-making Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts, prepared in collaboration with Andreas Schmeller. Mittellateinisch, among other things the medium of the Roman Catholic Church, is a language apart, growing not directly out of that of Cicero and Vergil, but rather originating from the late Latinity of Antiquity in its dying stages, and under the influence of tendencies present in the vernacular tongues.