What Happened to Latin?

Abstract

Marc Bloch, great twentieth-century historian, Resistance fighter, and martyr, warned historians against our well-known tendency toward what he termed the idol of that is, tendency to prioritize most distant pasts over subsequent change and development. What, he asked, is this obsession with really all about? If it were simply desire to find beginnings of things, that would be acceptable even if, in most cases, impossible: identifying exact point of origin of any institution or idea is difficult to point of futility. However, he suggested that our obsession with is not so innocent: when historians ask about origins, he argued, we really mean causes, specifically causes that explain; and what is worse, all too often we are searching for causes that explain everything. Here, he said, is ambiguity; here danger.1 I fully subscribe to Bloch's observations, whether they are applied to search for in interpretation of U.S. Constitution or deriving meaning and purpose of human sexuality from God's original intent in creation. Nevertheless, I think that on occasion it can be salutary to look back at origins, at beginnings, of institutions and traditions that we have come to take for granted, not to discover their essences but better to understand forces that changed them from what they were to what they have become. I would like to take occasion of this presidential address to do just this with our organization, Medieval Academy of America, and with language for which and upon which it was founded, medieval Latin. Those of us who have bothered to look into volume 1, number 1, of our journal, curiously named Speculum, or who have read excellent article by William Courtenay on medieval studies at beginning of twentieth century,2 know myth of origins as presented by George R. Coffman, a founding figure in Academy. According to Coffman, impulse to create a new organization came from presidential address to Modern Language Association delivered by John M. Manly on December 28, 1920, at its annual meeting in Poughkeepsie,