"A Lost Continent of Literature"
James Hankins

Petrarch's belief in the ephemeral nature of Italian poetry seems paradoxical given his modern reputation, but it made perfect sense in the context of his time. In Petrarch's youth, after all, the vernacular languages of the Italian peninsula had been used for literary purposes for little more than a hundred years. Literary Tuscan was barely fifty years old. The Tuscan dialect, like other Italian dialects, was still highly unstable from generation to generation, lacking as it did any authoritative grammars or dictionaries. Correct usage was uncertain, and there was only one canonical figure: Dante. Moreover, the Tuscan language was well known only in an area of central Italy roughly the size of Massachusetts. Other parts of Italy had their own dialects: more than thirty major ones. Outside of Italy Tuscan was known only among scattered colonies of traders. No, if an author hoped for a fame that could spread throughout the world and outlast his own time, he would have to write in Latin. Latin had already lasted more than a thousand years. It had been the language of the most successful empire (Petrarch believed) the world had yet seen. It was the language of the Holy Church, founded by Jesus Christ and destined to last to the end of time. It was the tongue used in diplomacy, on inscriptions, and in permanent government records, and it was the medium of communication for all the learned professions: law, medicine, theology. All science and all philosophy was written in Latin. University statutes required that it be spoken in classes and official meetings. Latin's timeless classics--the writings of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Sallust, Livy, Terence, and many others--were, and had always been, the basis of literary education in Christendom. Latin stood for all that was noble and civilized. The vernacular speech, by contrast, despite Dante's attempt to "ennoble" it, was all too close to the loose, gabbling talk of ordinary people. It stank of the street and the shop. It was impossible to use with precision and elegance. Or so most people thought in Petrarch's time.

Petrarch believed he would have to write in Latin to secure immortal fame, but the times were hardly propitious for the man who wished to make a reputation as a writer of great Latin prose or poetry. The Latin-speakers in the late medieval world Petrarch inhabited--lawyers, doctors, clergy, bureaucrats--spoke an efficient but flat and graceless jargon that he hated. It was full of ugly technical terms of recent coinage; its sentences were flaccid and broken-backed. It lacked the syntactical and lexical richness that permitted one to express intimately one's mind and heart. Like many Italians, Petrarch believed that the refined and civilized speech of the Romans had been corrupted by contact with barbarians from the North such as the Gauls and the Germans. Even Italian, after centuries of barbarian invasion, had turned clumsy, distorted, opaque. Petrarch longed to master the language the ancient Romans had spoken: copious, precise, lapidary; grave and elegant by turns. Latin had once been an imperial language, a language of timeless beauty, spoken by beings of superior wisdom and virtue. It was a language bursting with potency, able to fire cold hearts and elevate base spirits. That language was now lost. If, as Petrarch and his followers hoped, the strength and civilization of the ancient Romans could have a second birth, that Renaissance would have to begin with a rebirth of the Latin language. A renewal of the ancestral language and literature of Italy was the key to the return of her ancient greatness.

Thus the man the modern world remembers as a love poet (but who in reality was much more than that) began a great literary movement which was to last for more than three centuries after his death. The movement began in Italy in the fourteenth century but spread by the sixteenth century to Northern and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Spain, and the New World. Its program was to reverse the linguistic effects of the fall of Rome, push back the borders of barbarism, and renew the noble, refined intercourse of the ancients. This program lay at the heart of the movement we call Renaissance humanism. It enlisted tens of thousands of literary men and women, and produced hundreds of thousands of literary artifacts. For three centuries it flourished alongside the developing vernacular literatures, sometime in rivalry with them, but more often in fruitful symbiosis. Indeed, the vernacular literatures of most Western countries were decisively shaped by their long cohabitation with modern Latin letters. The imitation of antiquity which is the keynote of early modern vernacular writing was always mediated by the Respublica litterarum, the living republic of Latin letters.

Today, however, the Neo-Latin literature of the Renaissance and Baroque periods has been almost entirely forgotten. It is an Atlantis, a lost continent of literature, sunken between Graeco-Roman literature and the modern vernacular literatures, largely excluded from the story of Western literature. Why this is the case is not difficult to explain. To keep alive the memory of old literatures requires scholarship and scholarly institutions, and institutions require resources. The literature of Graeco-Roman antiquity has always found a home in humanist schools and universities; the study of medieval literature has the Catholic Church for its patron; and the modern vernacular literatures have all the resources of the nation-states behind them. Neo-Latin literature has had no such support (though many in the European Union now look back to the period of Neo-Latin literature for a prototype of a common European literary culture). Moreover, Neo-Latin literature for centuries has struggled against strong modernist prejudices. The Oedipal relationship between the younger vernacular literatures and their Latin parent, long expressed in that querelle des anciens et moderns, set the stage for a damnatio memoriae of modern Latin literature in the eighteenth century. The Romantic movement, which is usually blamed for the death of classicism, only delivered the coup de grâce. The Romantics, like the Enlightenment philosophes before them, dismissed modern Latin literature as a collection of second-rate pastiche, untouched by passion or original genius. Historians of literature in the nineteenth century saw Neo-Latin texts as at best schoolroom exercises, at worst a kind of literary canker, infecting the national literatures and inhibiting their natural growth.

Only the near universal ignorance of modern Latin literature which by then prevailed concealed the absurdity of this view. Given what is today known of the career of humanistic Latin, of course, it is simply incredible that tens of thousands of educated persons, including the most gifted and ambitious writers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, would have devoted themselves at such great cost to useless and repetitive exercises. The writing of Neo-Latin literature for them, obviously, served meaningful purposes. Far from being a mere "survival," a sterile repetition of other men's ideas, Neo-Latin literature in its heyday was a lively and idealistic movement eager to spread uniform, civilized standards of speech and writing throughout the Western world. It was a movement that not only preserved the literary heritage of classical antiquity; it also produced a large and varied corpus of new literature, often of exceptional quality, and helped foster the development of the modern vernacular literatures.

To participate in this great Renaissance project meant to be convinced of the beneficent effects of studying Graeco-Roman literature, and thus the first task of the humanist was the discovery, copying, and correction of old manuscripts of the classics, and, after the invention of movable type, their printing and dissemination throughout Europe. Since the meaning of many classical texts had grown obscure over time, the publication of classical texts implied explicating them as well, "illustrating" them with commentaries and other interpretative aids. Moreover, from the fifteenth century on it was widely recognized by humanists such as Lorenzo Valla and Angelo Poliziano that Latin itself was a branch of the great tree of Hellenic literature, and that true mastery of classical Latin would not be possible without a command of Greek. The study of Greek exposed Western humanists to the rich remains of the ancient and Byzantine literary tradition--its science, technology, medicine, drama, poetry, history, biblical studies, theology, and philosophy. The citizens of the Latin West, like the Romans before them, became conscious that the Greeks still had much to teach them. Thus began a second great Renaissance project, the mighty effort to publish the surviving Greek texts and translate them into Latin. This project, which began at the beginning of the Quattrocento, was largely complete by the end of the sixteenth century.

Recovering the classics was only the beginning. Ancient Latin literature could not truly be said to be alive once more until modern writers were able to capture their own experience in that incomparable vehicle of thought and feeling that is the Latin language. To create the conditions for a modern Latin literary movement was the task of the humanist schoolmaster. Practice in Latin composition began in grammar school, with exercises in imitation of the best authors. Increased mastery led sometimes, in the case of a Poliziano or an Erasmus, to the emergence of a flexible, distinctive voice that, while still "classical" in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, was recognizably individual. More commonly it led to facility in sub-Ciceronian prose, the mandarin discourse of the time, or an ability to turn out smooth Ovidian hexameters for all occasions. In the greatest artists it led to aemulatio, the attempt to rival and even surpass the ancients in power, precision, and beauty of expression.

Clearly, Neo-Latin writers in the early modern period did not suffer from the "anxiety of influence" to the degree that post-Romantic writers are said to do. Of course they did not want to be mere "followers," pedisequentes, inky schoolboys composing themes out of phrasebooks, or even efficient manufacturers of pastiche. To belong to the Tradition (and there was only one Tradition) was more like belonging to a family with eminent forebears. A certain standard of expression was expected, but one was not dismissed as unoriginal, indeed it was thought positively meritorious, if one's writing bore a family resemblance to that of one's noble ancestors. Nor was a Latin writer necessarily thought unpatriotic for neglecting the maternal tongue. Though the Italians and the French, and later the Spanish and the English, were determined to develop the literary potential of their respective languages, most writers and most patrons of writers before the modern period, from Lorenzo deāMedici to Samuel Johnson, felt that Latin was not a threat to the vernaculars but an indispensable tool for refining and enriching them. The literary academies of early modern Europe, founded to cultivate the national languages, modeled their activities on those of classical philologists. The grammars and dictionaries; the uniform edition of canonical authors; the commentaries and the literary researches--all the scholarship the academies produced had the goal of fitting the vernacular languages and literatures into the mold of the classical languages. Latin was the model par excellence for "ennobling" the vernaculars--for making them, too, languages worthy of empire.

Many Europeans, of course, lived in areas where there was no native literary tradition to speak of, or where a native tradition developed only late. For educated persons in Holland, Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Scandinavia, Neo-Latin was often the only literary language available for an ambitious young writer, the only serious alternative to "the grunting of peasants," as J. A. Fabricius unkindly described the Dutch language. The use of Latin by such authors made them part of a literary community, the Republic of Letters, and gave them an international audience. It gave them, too, a noble and civilized tongue in which to commemorate great occasions--births, marriages, coronations, victories, deaths--and a prestigious medium of communication with persons outside their small linguistic islands. In this sense, it served the same purpose English serves today: it was an international language. Thus we read that in 1602 Stephan Kakasch, an envoy of Emperor Rudolf II to the court of the Iranian Shah Abbas, was able easily to find someone in the court to translate his Latin oration of greeting into Persian. Or we hear that the first treaty between Russia and China, the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689, was negotiated in Latin because that the was the only language shared by all the negotiators--a Pole for the Russian side, French and Portuguese Jesuits for the Chinese side (Jozef IJsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, 2nd ed. [Leuven: Peeters, 1990], pp. 42-43).

Once writers in the vernacular languages began to produce important works of literature, Neo-Latin began to serve another function. Since most vernaculars were still unfamiliar outside the area of their native use, patriotic Neo-Latinists, or sympathetic foreigners, often felt impelled to translate the new vernacular masterpieces into Latin as a way of showing honor to the vernacular author and his nation. As late as the nineteenth century, it was still felt in some quarters that turning a vernacular work into Latin made it more permanent and universal, that it exalted the work to an empyrean realm where it could be an object of contemplation for all educated men (see Edward W. Grant, "European Vernacular Works in Latin Translation," Studies in the Renaissance 1 [1954]: 120-156). Even entire genres that had originated in the vernacular were somehow nobler and better when turned into Latin.

Nevertheless, the principal activity of Neo-Latinists in the Republic of Letters remained the cultivation of the traditional genres of Graeco-Roman literature. Cultivation did not of course mean mechanical repetition or stagnation. Most of the literary genres identified by classical critics showed the marks of natural growth during the early modern period, splitting into subgenres or cross-fertilizing across genres. There was also the work of reconstruction to be undertaken. Humanist scholars were well aware of the catastrophic losses of ancient books that had occurred during the late ancient and medieval periods. They sighed over famous books whose titles they knew but which had seemingly vanished from the libraries of Christendom. They saw themselves in their own writings as making up in part for the losses of the Dark Ages--sometimes by the questionable procedure of forgery, but more often through fresh productions under their own names. Sometimes the mere suggestion by an ancient author of a gap to be filled was enough to launch an avalanche of modern Latin writings. Virgil, for example, had famously remarked in his Georgics that a treatment of gardens would have been appropriate to his subject, but he lacked time and space to deal with them. Already in antiquity, Columella had tried to repair Virgil's defect. But in the Neo-Latin period, dozens of Neo-Latin authors took up the task of contributing a treatment of gardens to the genre of didactic poetry.

Even when described in an eternal language, the world did not stand still, of course. Neo-Latin writers, however traditional in their outlook, recognized that if Latin were to remain a living language it would need to adapt itself to the extraordinary changes occurring everywhere in the early modern world. This might mean describing new crops and agricultural processes in new georgic poetry so as to reflect the realities of plantation life in the New World. Or it might mean turning classical treatises on cosmology, geography, and zoology into open-ended omnium gatherums for collecting the new scientific information that poured into early modern Europe from the telescopic examination of the heavens or from the explorations of the globe. It might even mean creating a whole new genre--the theatrum or picture-book--to take advantage of the new technologies of printing and engraving. Thanks to continuing technological advance, the ars or handbook, confined in classical times within a narrow range, saw an extraordinary development, expanding to cover such subjects as the art of swimming, shooting, surveying, chess-playing, coffee-making, sport-fishing, and traveling.

The greatest challenge Neo-Latin writers faced, however, came in the realm of religion. From the beginning of its career as a literary movement, Renaissance humanism was troubled by the consciousness that the Graeco-Roman writers it most admired shared one grave defect: they were not Christians. One could excuse them for that--most of them, of course, had not had the opportunity of hearing the Christian gospel--but the fact remained that, however admirable their virtue and eloquence, the pagan authors still revealed tell-tale signs of superstition and moral decay. A good number of Neo-Latinists, to be sure, were seemingly indifferent to religion and were relatively unconcerned with such problems, while on the other side there were a few extremists like Savonarola who objected to teaching any pagan literature at all to children. Yet even mainstream educated opinion was deeply divided on the question of how to deal with the paganism of the great authors. Some thought the pagan authors should be carefully selected and pruned of objectionable material before putting them in the hands of boys. Others believed that Christians needed to create their own, new Christian classics that would have all the literary power of the pagan authors with none of their embarrassing superstition. One ingenious, though perhaps eccentric, solution was to cut up pagan writers into small linguistic bits and rearrange them so as to tell Christian stories. This fashion for centoni (as they were called) of the classics was begun in the fourth century by the female Christian poet Proba, but she was widely imitated in the early modern period.

In the end, Neo-Latin authors created an enormous body of Christian Latin literature, some of it of unquestioned greatness. Yet the successful Christianization of Latin letters, paradoxically, may well have been a leading cause of its eventual downfall. In the course of the eighteenth century, a number of Enlightenment philosophes like D'Alembert-- thanks in part to the great prominence of Jesuit Neo-Latinists--came to see modern Latin literature as an instrument of the dogmatic Christianity they opposed. One chief source of Neo-Latin's vitality was always its strong position in the public schools and Jesuit colleges of Western countries, which came to be regarded by modernizers as bastions of cultural conservatism. Though the revolutionary era admired the Roman republic and Roman virtue, the Romantics associated Latin and the classical world in general with the stale rationalism of the ancien regime. With the emergence of the nation-state and the maturing of national literatures, most of the old functions of Latin within European culture became obsolete. Marxists and other socialists identified the knowledge of Latin as a "class barrier," constricting entry into elites. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Latin requirements disappeared from most schools and universities, and with Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) even the Roman Catholic Church abandoned its regular use. The great continent of Latin literature slipped beneath the sea, never to be seen again.