Renaissance Latin

Infobox Language
name=Renaissance Latin
familycolor=Indo-European
region=Europe
extinct=developed into New Latin by 16th century
familycolor=Indo-European
fam2=Italic
fam3=Latino-Faliscan
iso1=la|iso2=lat|iso3=lat

Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by the humanist movement.

Ad fontes

"Ad fontes" was the general cry of the humanists, and as such their Latin style sought to purge Latin of the medieval Latin vocabulary and stylistic accretions that it had acquired in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire. They looked to golden age Latin literature, and especially to Cicero in prose and Virgil in poetry, as the arbiters of Latin style. They abandoned the use of the sequence and other accentual forms of metre, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used in Latin poetry during the Roman period. The humanists condemned the large body of medieval Latin literature as "gothic" — for them, a term of abuse — and believed instead that only ancient Latin from the Roman period was "real Latin".

The humanists also sought to purge written Latin of medieval developments in its orthography. 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 homophones, medieval scribes often wrote, for example, "eciam" for "etiam". Their reforms even affected handwriting; Humanists usually wrote Latin in a script derived from Carolingian minuscule, the ultimate ancestor of most contemporary lower-case typefaces, avoiding the black-letter scripts used in the Middle Ages. Erasmus even proposed that the then-traditional pronunciations of Latin be abolished in favour of his reconstructed version of classical Latin pronunciation.

The humanist plan to remake Latin was largely successful, at least in education. Schools now 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, science or contemporary politics in Latin while observing all of the Humanists' norms about vocabulary purging and classical usage.

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 authors

Fourteenth century

*Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
*William of Ockham (c. 1288-c. 1348)
*Jean Buridan (1300-1358)
*Petrarch (1304-1374)
*Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)

Fifteenth century

*Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444)
*Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471)
*Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481)
*Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472)
*Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II (1405-1464)
*Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457)
*Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481)
*Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
*Rodolphus Agricola (1444-1485)
*Poliziano (1454-1494)
*Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)

ee also

*Classical Latin
*Latin

External links

* [http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography/index.htm An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Titles] — Bibliography of Renaissance Latin and Neo-Latin literature on the web.
* [http://www.digitalbookindex.com/_search/search010literatureneolatina.asp Neo-Latin Humanist Texts] from DigitalBookIndex
* René Hoven, "Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance. Dictionary of Renaissance Latin from prose sources", with the collaboration of [http://alor.univ-montp3.fr/cercam/article.php3?id_article=468 Laurent Grailet] , Leiden, Brill, 2006 (2nd edition), 683 p.