Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign

by Françoise Waquet, John Howe (Translator)

For almost three centuries, Latin dominated the civic and sacred worlds of Europe and, arguably, the entire western world. From the moment in the sixteenth century when it was adopted by the Humanists as the official language for schools and by the Catholic Church as the common liturgical language, it was the way in which millions of children were taught, people prayed to God, and scholars were educated. Francoise Waquet’s history of Latin between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries is a highly original and accessible exploration of the institutional contexts in which the language was adopted. It goes on to consider what this conferring of power and influence on Latin meant in practice. Among the questions Waquet investigates are: What privileges were, and are still, accorded to those who claim to have studied Latin? Can Latin as a subject for study be anything more than purely linguistic or does it reveal a far more complex heritage? Has Latin’s deeply embedded cultural legacy already given way to a nostalgic exoticism? Latin: A Symbol’s Empire is a valuable work of reference, but also an important piece of cultural history: the story of a language that became a symbol with its own, highly significant empire.

Genres: History, Language, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great account of the history of the post-Renaissance survival of Latin in Europe (with a few references to the rest of the world). A bit dry, but brilliant, if depressing.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

One often hears that Latin was, for centuries, the common language of scholarship, and a sign of unity in the Catholic liturgy. Yet, how true was this? This book explores how Latin became a sign of unity in early modernity, but it gradually lost its force as the centuries passed. Very few, even among the educated and clerical classes, spoke and wrote Latin well enough to be truly fluent in its usage. The author cites the fact that the First Vatican Council employed translators, because the various speakers attending put their own national accent on Latin such that the Council proceedings were more Babel than unity.

The book is an interesting cultural history, especially in the ongoing culture wars.

[Clement Ying · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to European cultural history and linguistic history.

Of interests are two:

1. Latin syllabus in middle age schools;
2. Conflict of Latin empire with Chinese Empire. In opposition of each other, one sees the very nature itself.

[Rebecca Hicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am currently reading this; it is a fascinating book; fascinating, at least, for anyone in love with the Latin language and the rich cultural and historical heritage connected with that language.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't quite what I expected—I didn't realize it was only on Modern (post-Renaissance) Latin and thus didn't discuss the Medieval world at all—but it was still an extremely interesting, if slightly dispiriting, history of its topic.

I was surprised by how long Latin dominated secondary (i.e. middle and high school) education in the US and much of Europe, with students spending half their time learning Latin well into the Twentieth Century in many cases but also a little surprised at the low quality of the Latin this actually produced. I had known that the First and Second Vatican Councils were conducted in Latin, and was not surprised to learn that the Second Vatican Council required translators because many of the participants did not know Latin well enough—or did not speak it well enough, or with consistent-enough accents—for the proceedings to occur without them, but it was a bit startling that the same was true for the First Vatican Council.

It seems that Latin during the period Françoise Waquet covers (roughly 1500 to 1950) was living a sort of half-life of decline. Although the "Republic of Letters" was traditionally conducted in Latin, scholarly publications in Latin largely died out during the 1700's, and Latin largely died as a language of diplomacy except in the Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires during the same period. Even though it clung to life longer in schools and the Catholic Church, its use in schools seems to have been more about establishing class barriers between those who had studied Latin and those who had not than about actually producing adults who could write or speak the language, or even read or understand it well. And, in the Catholic Church, even priests tended to not know much more than was needed to recite the formulas of the liturgy, and the laity's resistance to the conversion of the Mass to the vernacular after Vatican II had more to do with an attachment to the idea of a mystical significance of sequences of sounds than to any actual understanding of what was being said.

I admit to being a bit horrified at how ineffective 19th and 20th Century Latin instruction seems to have been: perhaps worse, given the amount of time invested relative to the results than modern American teaching of foreign living languages. I'm not sure, and Françoise Waquet doesn't really make a clear argument on the matter, how much of this was due to poor choices of teaching techniques and how much was due to the fact that it was a dead language that was used for little other than translating classical Roman texts, which everyone involved knew had essentially no relevance to their lives after school ended.

The book did leave me rather wanting to read a comparison between the role of Latin in Renaissance Europe and that of Classical Chinese in Qing-era China, which seems to have persisted much more strongly, if likely to the detriment of the education system as a whole.

[Q · Rating 3 out of 5]

The down to earth Latin application in real life.