Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn (review)

In the Adagium 1.5.37 Erasmus discusses the proverb Sexagenarios de ponte deiicere (to dispel sexagenarians from the bridge), which suggests that they should no longer partake in voting the magistrates of the Roman Republic. Nevertheless, he does not quite agree with this proverb and counters its implications by quoting Plato, Laws VI, 755, who insists that the guardians of the laws in his Republic should be at least fifty years old and ought to be allowed to continue their task for twenty more years out of respect for their long-standing experience and their wisdom. Erasmus repeats the Greek philosopher's point of view in his Institutio Principis as well (ASD IV.1, ed. O. Herding [1974], 204). With this book Moss, now professor emerita of Durham University (GB), gives a convincing proof that Plato and Erasmus were right. Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn offers its readers an awe-inspiring grasp of a complex subject, as can only be achieved after decades of assiduous reading and painstaking research. The number of late medieval or early Renaissance Latin dictionaries, lexica, treatises, and essays the author examined is overwhelming (eight pages of "primary sources" out of sixteen-and-a-half pages of bibliography). Moreover, she also calls upon an impressive list of studies about this subject, with occasional excursions towards linguistic theories, dating from our own age.

The Latin language turn from the title refers to the shift from the Latin idiom in which late medieval intellectual inquiry was conducted to the reinvented classical idiom promoted and finally also imposed by the humanists. Hence the first part of the book, "Words," focuses on how that new instrument of language took shape step by step. First several influential dictionaries from Giovanni Balbi's medieval Catholicon (1460) to Robert Estienne's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1536) are compared; usually a specific example is given, viz., the words gratia and oratio. Next more extended collections of phrases intended to speak and write correctly and with perspicuity are examined — here Valla's Elegantiae linguae Latinae (Paris and Rome, 1471) plays an important part, as well as its reception north of the Alps in France and Germany. Finally, the chapter Composition shows how it was gradually accepted that the ideas, once formulated in pure Latin, were couched into patterns of exposition, derived from classical prose style, instead of keeping to the schematics of scholastic chapter disputation. In this chapter much attention is paid to Paolo Cortesi's In quatuor Sententiarum [Petri Lombardi] . . . disputationes (Rome, 1504), Pico della Mirandola, and John Mair (Johannes Maior).

The second and third parts of the book, respectively entitled "Arguments" and "Narration," are also divided into three chapters each. With these three major parts Moss deliberately refers to the framework of the trivium with its grammatica (the first part of the book), the dialectica, and the rhetorica. With the second, most extended part of the book, its primary thesis is developed, viz., that the choice for a different linguistic approach was also fundamental in reconfiguring the way of thinking, of formulating arguments, even of perceiving truth. For humanists truth was to be detected in the ways words are used, or rather were used by the ancients, whereas "their opponents saw truth as the correctly formulated linguistic representations of mental sentences, propositions submitted to the strict verification procedures of formal logic" (274). The reader is also warned not to underestimate the crucial part that religion played in the intellectual predicaments of that age. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss representative exchanges between classicizing humanists and adepts of the late medieval scholastics at the universities of Paris and Leipzig, either major figures or less-known names, who nevertheless played a part in the revolution charted in the book. In Paris we meet Lefèvre d'Etaples and Josse Clichtove versus Noël Béda and Pierre Cousturier and, after an excursion to Leuven with Erasmus, Vives and Dorpius, and Guillaume Bud...