Dialogues Sacrés/Dialogi Sacri (Premier Livre) (review)

Sébastien Castellion is best known for his disputes with Calvin. Calvin forced him out of Geneva after he had held the position of Principal of the Collège de la Rive for only four years, whereupon Castellion transferred to Basel, there to continue his work as a teacher and editor, translator of the Bible into Latin and French, and implacable opponent of Calvinist orthodoxy. The first three books of his Dialogi were published in Geneva in 1543, the fourth as the final part of an edition of the complete work printed at Basel in 1545. The edition under review is of the first book only, but there is a good reason to isolate it for special focus. It is the only one of the four books to contain a translation of the Latin text of the dialogues into French. For pedagogical reasons Castellion did not provide a French version of his Latin in the remaining books, and it disappeared altogether once publication of the work moved outside francophone territory. The present edition prints the Latin and French texts on facing pages.

Castellion's dialogues are dramatized versions of episodes in the Bible — here, in his first book, beginning in the Garden of Eden and ending with scenes from Judges and Ruth. Little Latin playlets of this kind feature frequently in the programs designed by humanists to inculcate good Latin in the grammar class, normally at a level of language acquisition just past the elementary. The aim was to provide accessible models of spoken Latin in an environment more familiar to the young pupil than that of the plays of Terence and Plautus, and certainly better suited to their moral education. Castellion is working within a pedagogicaltradition inhabited by the colloquies of Erasmus and Mathurin Cordier, as well as numerous little volumes designed for very local use. He was original in taking scenes from the Bible, not from everyday life (though he takes every opportunity to deploy the vocabulary of familiar conversation and domestic behavior). Religious knowledge is added to the good Latin and good morals every humanist schoolmaster claimed to teach.

This first annotated edition of the work is a model of its kind. The introduction explains its context, describes its publication history, and reviews the salient features of Castellion's Latin and French with exemplary efficiency. His Latinity is further analyzed in the footnotes, which, together with an ample glossary, also elucidate his sometimes very colloquial French. There is an excellent bibliography; it will provide support and stimulus for various avenues of research. One would certainly be an analysis of Castellion's original Latin translation of the Old Testament narratives, here and in his Latin Bible of 1551. The Latin of this version, however, including the dramatic extensions to the narratives, has an ulterior motive: not just to transmit the sense of the biblical text, but also to introduce the Latin learner to a variety of classical syntax and toenlarge his vocabulary. Moreover, Castellion's adaptations are not only a vehicle for language acquisition. They also give the student first lessons in how to vary phraseology, amplify commonplaces, and construct rhetorical set pieces (as in the extended lamentations of Moses's mother). One may infer from the introduction that the four sets of dialogues are to some extent graded for difficulty. The most interesting linguistic feature of this first set is that its Latin replicates the ordo naturalis (the sense order) of the French. It is only in the next books, where there is no French version, that the Latin starts to become truly "elegant," exemplifying the highly flexible ordo artificialis of classical written Latin. The editors are aware that their author is operating a pedagogical technique for pupils at a transition stage, but are somewhat hampered in seeing exactly how it works because they want him to be as interested in promoting the power...