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| Renaissance Latin | |
|---|---|
 Mural of Dante in theUffizi Gallery, byAndrea del Castagno, c. 1450. | |
| Native to | No native speakers, used by the administrations and universities of numerous countries |
| Region | Europe |
| Era | Evolved fromMedieval Latin in the 14th century; creatingNeo-Latin used until present |
Indo-European
| |
Early forms | |
| Latin alphabet | |
| Official status | |
Official language in | Most Roman Catholic countries |
| Regulated by | The community of scholars at the earliest universities |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Renaissance Latin is a name given to the distinctive form of Literary Latin style developed during the EuropeanRenaissance of the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries, particularly by theRenaissance humanism movement. This style of Latin is regarded as the first phase of the standardised and grammatically "Classical"Neo-Latin which continued through the 16th–19th centuries,[1][2][3] and was used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international (i.e., pan-European) audience.
Ad fontes ("to the sources") was the general cry of the Renaissance humanists, and as such their Latin style sought to purge Latin of themedieval Latin vocabulary and stylistic accretions that it had acquired in the centuries after thefall of the Roman Empire. They looked to golden age Latin literature, and especially toCicero inprose andVirgil inpoetry, as the arbiters of Latin style. They abandoned the use of thesequence and other accentual forms ofmetre, and sought instead to revive the Greek formats that were used inLatin poetry during the Roman period. The humanists condemned much of the large body of medieval Latin literature as "Gothic"—for them, a term of abuse—and believed instead thatancient Latin from the Roman period had to form the basis for judging what was a grammatical and accurate style of Latin.
Some 16th-century Ciceronian humanists also sought to purge written Latin of medieval developments in itsorthography. They insisted, for example, thatae be written out in full wherever it occurred in classical Latin; medieval scribes often wrotee instead ofae. They were much more zealous than medieval Latin writers thatt andc be distinguished; because the effects ofpalatalization made themhomophones, medieval scribes often wrote, for example,eciam foretiam. Their reforms even affectedhandwriting; Humanists usually wrote Latin in ahumanist minuscule script derived fromCarolingian minuscule, the ultimate ancestor of most contemporarylower-casetypefaces, avoiding theblack-letter scripts used in the Middle Ages. This sort of writing was particularly vigilant in edited works, so that international colleagues could read them more easily, while in their own handwritten documents the Latin is usually written as it is pronounced in the vernacular. Therefore, the first generations of humanists did not dedicate much care to the orthography till the late sixteenth and seventeenth century.Erasmus proposed that thethen-traditional pronunciations of Latin be abolished in favour of hisreconstructed version ofclassical Latin pronunciation, even though one can deduce from his works that he himself used the ecclesiastical pronunciation.
The humanist plan to remake Latin was largely successful, at least ineducation. Schools 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 elegantliterary language, it became much harder to write books aboutlaw,medicine,science or contemporarypolitics in Latin while achieving the higher standards of grammatical accuracy and stylistical fluency. ScholarJürgen Leonhardt noted how these high standards changed speakers' relationship with the language: "Whereas during the Middle Ages, Latin had an instrumental function in human communications and in peoples' understanding of the world, for the humanists, the act of mastering the language became a measure of human self-perfection. In the end, the most important difference between medieval and humanist Latin may well have been the time and effort to learn it."[4]
