Renaissance Latin Information & Renaissance Latin Links at HealthHaven.com
advertise
add site
services
publishers
database
health videos
Bookmark and Share

search wiki for    ?
web dir firms image gallery news pdf wiki shop video 
about
toolbar
stats
live show
health store
more stuff
JOIN/LOGIN
Featured Results:
 Renaissance Malibu - Cocaine Abuse | Cocaine Abuse Treatment Center And...
Renaissance Malibu - Cocaine Abuse | Cocaine Abuse Treatment Center And...
maliburecovery.com
 Used Mallinckrodt RENAISSANCE II - Used PB RENAISSANCE SERIES For Sale
Used Mallinckrodt RENAISSANCE II - Used PB RENAISSANCE SERIES For Sale
world-widemedical.com
 Contact Renaissance Plastic Surgery Twin Falls, Idaho 83301
Contact Renaissance Plastic Surgery Twin Falls, Idaho 83301
tylerwaymentmd.com
 Motivation - Project partnerships - Latin America
Motivation - Project partnerships - Latin America
motivation.org.uk
 
Renaissance Latin
Elizabeth I of England, skilled speaker of Renaissance Latin and Greek
Alt text
Spoken in The administrations and universities of numerous countries
Region Europe
Language extinction developed into New Latin by 16th century
Language family Indo-European
Writing system Latin alphabet
Spoken and written administrative, liturgical and literary language
Official status
Official language in Most countries
Regulated by The community of scholars at the earliest universities
Language codes
ISO 639-1 la
ISO 639-2 lat
ISO 639-3 lat
Europe in 1648 AD

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 Renaissance humanism movement.

Contents

[edit] 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.

[edit] Renaissance Latin authors

Mural of Dante in the Uffizi Gallery, by Andrea del Castagno, c. 1450.

[edit] Fourteenth century

[edit] Fifteenth century

[edit] See also

[edit] External links




Product Results (view all...)

search wiki for    ?
web dir firms image gallery news pdf wiki shop video 



↑ top of page ↑about thumbshots