Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of

Literary Latin Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a Literary language, literary standard language, standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed ...

style developed during the European

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ide ...

of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the

Renaissance humanism Renaissance humanism was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the term ''humanist'' ( it, umanista) referred to teache ...

movement.

Ad fontes

'' Ad fontes'' ("to the sources") was the general cry of the Renaissance humanists, and as such their Latin style sought to purge Latin of the

medieval Latin Medieval Latin was the form of Literary Latin used in Roman Catholic Western Europe during the Middle Ages. In this region it served as the primary written language, though local languages were also written to varying degrees. Latin functioned ...

vocabulary and stylistic accretions that it had acquired in the centuries after the

fall of the Roman Empire The fall of the Western Roman Empire (also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome) was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its v ...

. They looked to golden age Latin literature, and especially to

Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...

prose Prose is a form of written or spoken language that follows the natural flow of speech, uses a language's ordinary grammatical structures, or follows the conventions of formal academic writing. It differs from most traditional poetry, where the fo ...

and

Virgil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: th ...

poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meani ...

, as the arbiters of Latin style. They abandoned the use of the

sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is called ...

and other accentual forms of

metre The metre ( British spelling) or meter ( American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its pre ...

, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used in

Latin poetry The history of Latin poetry can be understood as the adaptation of Greek models. The verse comedies of Plautus, the earliest surviving examples of Latin literature, are estimated to have been composed around 205-184 BC. History Scholars conve ...

during the Roman period. The humanists condemned the large body of medieval Latin literature as "

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

"—for them, a term of abuse—and believed instead that only ancient Latin from the Roman period was "real Latin". Some 16th-century Ciceronian humanists also sought to purge written Latin of medieval developments in its

orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...

. They insisted, for example, that ''ae'' be written out in full wherever it occurred in classical Latin; medieval scribes often wrote ''e'' instead of ''ae''. They were much more zealous than medieval Latin writers that ''t'' and ''c'' be distinguished; because the effects of palatalization made them

homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (pa ...

s, medieval scribes often wrote, for example, ''eciam'' for ''etiam''. Their reforms even affected handwriting; Humanists usually wrote Latin in a

humanist minuscule Humanist minuscule is a handwriting or style of script that was invented in secular circles in Italy, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. "Few periods in Western history have produced writing of such great beauty", observes the art histo ...

script derived from

Carolingian minuscule Carolingian minuscule or Caroline minuscule is a script which developed as a calligraphic standard in the medieval European period so that the Latin alphabet of Jerome's Vulgate Bible could be easily recognized by the literate class from one reg ...

, the ultimate ancestor of most contemporary lower-case

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

s, avoiding the

black-letter Blackletter (sometimes black letter), also known as Gothic script, Gothic minuscule, or Textura, was a script used throughout Western Europe from approximately 1150 until the 17th century. It continued to be commonly used for the Danish, Norwe ...

scripts used in the Middle Ages. This sort of writing was particularly vigilant in edited works, so that international colleagues could read them more easily, while in their own handwritten documents the Latin is usually written as it is pronounced in the vernacular. Therefore, the first generations of humanists did not dedicate much care to the orthography till the late sixteenth and seventeenth century.

Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' w ...

proposed that the then-traditional pronunciations of Latin be abolished in favour of his reconstructed version of

classical Latin Classical Latin is the form of Literary Latin recognized as a literary standard by writers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. It was used from 75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin. In some later period ...

pronunciation, even though one can deduce from his works that he himself used the ecclesiastical pronunciation. The humanist plan to remake Latin was largely successful, at least in

education Education is a purposeful activity directed at achieving certain aims, such as transmitting knowledge or fostering skills and character traits. These aims may include the development of understanding, rationality, kindness, and honesty ...

. Schools taught the humanistic spellings, and encouraged the study of the texts selected by the humanists, to the large exclusion of later Latin literature. On the other hand, while humanist Latin was an elegant literary language, it became much harder to write books about law,

medicine Medicine is the science and practice of caring for a patient, managing the diagnosis, prognosis, prevention, treatment, palliation of their injury or disease, and promoting their health. Medicine encompasses a variety of health care pr ...

science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence ...

or contemporary

politics Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...

in Latin while observing all of the Humanists' norms about vocabulary purging and classical usage. Scholar Jürgen Leonhardt how these high standards changed speakers' relationship with the language: "Whereas during the Middle Ages, Latin had an instrumental function in human communications and in peoples' understanding of the world, for the humanists, the act of mastering the language became a measure of human self-perfection. In the end, the most important difference between medieval and humanist Latin may well have been the time and effort to learn it." Renaissance Latin gradually developed into the New Latin of the 16th–19th centuries, used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international (i.e., pan-European) audience.

Renaissance Latin works and authors

14th century

* 1359. '' Epistolæ familiares'' by

Petrarch Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited ...

(1304–1374) * 1360. '' Genealogia deorum gentilium'' by

Giovanni Boccaccio Giovanni Boccaccio (, , ; 16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Born in the town of Certaldo, he became so well known as a writer that he was som ...

(1313–1375)

15th century

* 1409. ''

Flos Duellatorum The Flos Duellatorum is the name given to one of the manuscript versions of Fiore dei Liberi's illuminated manuscript fight book, written in 1410 (dated to 1409 in the old reckoning). There are five other surviving recensions, under the title F ...

by Fiore dei Liberi * 1425. ''Hermaphroditus'' by Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471) * 1441. ''De elegantiis Latinæ linguæ'' by Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) * 1442. ''Historia Florentini populi'' by Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) * 1444. ''Historia de duobus amantibus'' by Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini,

Pope Pius II Pope Pius II ( la, Pius PP. II, it, Pio II), born Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini ( la, Aeneas Silvius Bartholomeus, links=no; 18 October 1405 – 14 August 1464), was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 19 Augu ...

(1405–1464) * 1452. '' De re ædificatoria'' by Leone Battista Alberti (1404–1472) * 1471. ''Contra amores'' by

Bartolomeo Platina Bartolomeo Sacchi (; 1421 – 21 September 1481), known as Platina (in Italian ''il Platina'' ) after his birthplace (Piadena), and commonly referred to in English as Bartolomeo Platina, was an Italian Renaissance humanist writer and gastro ...

(1421–1481) * 1479. ''De inventione dialectica'' by Rodolphus Agricola (1444–1485) * 1481. ''Introductiones Latinæ'' by Antonio de Nebrija (1441–1522) * 1486. ''De hominis dignitate'' by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) * 1491. ''Nutricia'' by

Poliziano Agnolo (Angelo) Ambrogini (14 July 1454 – 24 September 1494), commonly known by his nickname Poliziano (; anglicized as Politian; Latin: '' Politianus''), was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scho ...

(1454–1494) * ''Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animæ'' by

Marsilio Ficino Marsilio Ficino (; Latin name: ; 19 October 1433 – 1 October 1499) was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a revive ...

(1433–1499) *

Francesco Filelfo Francesco Filelfo ( la, Franciscus Philelphus; 25 July 1398 – 31 July 1481) was an Italian Renaissance humanist. Biography Filelfo was born at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona. He is believed to be a third cousin of Leonardo da Vinci. At t ...

(1398–1481)

References

External links