Tous vos gens à latin: le latin, langue savante, langue mondaine (XIVe-XVIIe siècles) (review)

A colloquium held at the École Normale Supérieure in 2000 produced, somewhat tardily, this collection of twenty-four essays on the use and status of Latin, predominantly in the early modern period. The editor's introduction attempts to coordinate the very diverse contributions by grouping them around large themes: Latin as the language of technical disciplines, often confronted with the problem of assimilating new areas of inquiry and new discoveries; Latin as a metalanguage for grammar and philosophy; and Latin in dialogue with vernacular languages. The colloquium deliberately eschewed neo-Latin imaginative literature, which has tended to preoccupy the attention of scholars in this field. The consequent focus on Latin in relation to the knowledge disciplines, 'savoirs', is very welcome. The plan adumbrated in the introduction is only loosely followed in the actual sequence of essays in the book, and the reader would have been helped by some orientation in the form of headed subsections for contributions on similar topics. We begin with two essays on Latin in the Middle Ages, which rehearse some useful generalities, but get side-tracked in pursuit of particularities exclusive to vernacular languages, to the detriment of the book's core subject: Latin. This is a temptation to which other contributors unfortunately succumb. The weightier essays are those that focus on Latin as a metalanguage. Pierre Lardet provides a sharp analysis of Scaliger's De causis linguae latinae and its promotion of a philosophical grammar that engages with humanist attitudes to Latin, revealed in this essay in the work's occluded dialogues with Linacre and Erasmus. Jacob Schmutz's very clear account of speculative grammar revived and reinvented in the Leptotatos of Juan Caramuel immerses us in the scholastic Latin of Catholic philosophers and theologians at the end of the seventeenth century, admittedly very restricted in its impact, but totally fascinating as a mental exercise. Somewhat easier to digest are contributions on grammatical pedagogy and the status of Latin as grammatical paradigm for vernacular languages. Claire Lecointre looks at early sixteenth-century German Latin grammars; French is the context of Bernard Colombat's account of the Port-Royal 'new method' for learning Latin and of the artificially concocted 'Frantin' that Monique Bouquet examines in an eighteenth-century manual. Surveys of dictionaries and encyclopaedias enlarge the pedagogical perspective, but take us too far from Latin. The resources and problems of Latin as a technical language are analysed in essays on documents and textbooks concerned with meteorology, nautical vocabulary, dancing, the philosophy of love (Agostino Nifo), the New World, anatomical dissection (Charles Estienne), mathematics (Fermat) and chocolate manufacture. These contributions variously involve the invention and viability of neologisms, the role of Latin as universal language, and the way its practitioners negotiated status and taxonomic exactitude with respect to vernacular usage in their areas. There are also essays on the Latin of Johann Froben, Erasmus in his biblical Paraphrases, Sepúlveda and Cardano. Perhaps the best critique of the position of Latin in this period is provided by caricature, nicely illustrated by Jocelyn Royé in an essay on comic literature.