A Defining Moment for Neo-Latin Studies
A Review of Milena Minkova’s Neo-Latin Anthology
Minkova, Milena, ed. Florilegium Recentioris Latinitatis. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia XLIII. Leuven University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 289. Paperback, $79.50. ISBN 978–94–6270–125–0.
[Haec est huius recensus versio Anglica; exstat etiam versio Latina. (This is an English version of this review. There is also a Latin version.)]
Milena Minkova’s new anthology of Neo-Latin literature gathers together in a single volume and makes available selections from important works that have previously been scattered and difficult to find. But it’s not only a welcome new resource for Latinists, it’s also a model for how to teach Latin, in Latin.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Minkova’s anthology is that it is in Latin. I mean, it’s entirely in Latin. The selections from the Neo-Latin authors themselves are, of course, in Latin, but so are the general preface, the prefaces to individual authors, and the notes providing help for understanding the content and language. To fully grasp how unusual it is that this text, which is meant for students, is in Latin, keep in mind that the prefaces of the Oxford Classical Texts, meant for scholars, are now generally in English. Behind this paradox lies a set of diverging trends regarding how we read Latin, and why we read it. Before I address this paradox let me say more about the edition itself and its contribution to Neo-Latin studies, but for the moment I will just add, it’s an interesting time to be a Latinist.
Minkova’s Florilegium boasts thirty-five authors, each of whom have about five to ten pages (total) excerpted from their works. These authors range from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, and their works comprise a “greatest hits” of Neo-Latin literature. Each author’s section begins with a brief biographical preface (about a page long), followed by a brief bibliography, then the Latin texts themselves. The Latin texts include footnotes that provide background information and grammatical help. As noted above, everything is in Latin.
If you’re like most Latinists, you probably haven’t run across much Neo-Latin. (As I explain in more detail elsewhere, there are interesting historical and ideological reasons for why Neo-Latin has been generally neglected). Neo-Latin has often suffered from a sense that it is not “real Latin” — that is, its authors were not native speakers of Latin, no matter how fluent they might have been. This perspective betrays a parochial and simplistic view of language. Vladimir Nobokov was not a native English speaker, but everyone would agree that Lolita is “real English.” To choose from classical examples, we’re happy to say that the speeches of Favorinus (from the Second Sophistic) are in real Greek, even though he himself noted that he was not a native speaker. In fact, there is good reason to doubt that Latin was a native language for Livius Andronicus and Ennius, the very progenitors of Latin literature. We might well also suspect that it was not a native language for Plautus and Terence. All four were born far from Rome at a time when Latin had not yet linguistically dominated the Italian peninsula (much less, in the case of Terence, North Africa). Although the above authors would have had the chance to learn from native speakers, the authors of the Sanskrit classics were not native speakers themselves and lived centuries after any native speakers had passed away.
There are, of course, excellent reasons why you might like to start reading Neo-Latin, and Minkova’s edition puts many of them at your fingertips. If you’re interested in modern history and literature, for example, there are works of fundamental importance, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly (pp. 65–70 in this edition), or Thomas More’s Utopia (pp. 92–105), or Thomas Hobbes’s On the Citizen (pp. 231–238). The best-selling novel of the seventeenth century was John Barclay’s Argenis (pp. 218–221), as Mark Riley has pointed out, and the roots of science fiction can be traced in Johannes Kepler’s Dream (pp. 212–216 — and yes, it’s the same Kepler whose laws of planetary motion you learned in high school). If you’re purely interested in Classical Latin, however, Neo-Latin literature is still a must-read. After all, Classical Latin is not only a product of the first centuries BC and AD, but of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries AD. It was the Humanists (especially Petrarch, pp. 1–13) who decided that the best Latin was that of ancient Rome, and it was the Humanists who reconstructed the rules and usage of ancient Latin (Lorenzo Valla, pp. 15–19, was especially important in this regard).
Apart from the historical importance of these works, they are simply good Latin, good literature, and a real delight to read. One of my favorite selections is a dialogue by Erasmus in which a dissolute abbot tries to criticize a woman for concerning herself with Latin literature. When he, not putting clergy in the best light, suggests that “women are safer from priests if they don’t know Latin,” the woman, knocking their Latin, responds, “No, there’s hardly a danger from that on your part.” When the abbot claims that “literature suits a woman like a saddle suits a cow,” the woman responds, “You can hardly deny that a saddle fits a cow better than a mitre fits an ass, or a pig.”
Minkova’s Florilegium is a book that has been sorely needed, and it is a rich addition to a field almost destitute of teaching resources. After all, the field of Neo-Latin is still in its infancy. The main professional organization for Neo-Latin scholars, for instance, was only founded in 1973. (This is the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies, or IANLS). Compare that to the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), which was founded in 1869. That’s not to say that the field of Neo-Latin didn’t exist before the IANLS, but it was even more marginal and undisciplined than it is now. These days, the field has actually reached something of a critical mass, and the scholarly resources have been rapidly increasing.
Yet Neo-Latin works are still largely excluded from the Latin classroom. One reason is that, at least in the United States, Classics departments have a monopoly on the teaching of Latin, and Neo-Latinists have tended to be housed in History or English departments. Yet even though it’s still rare for Classics departments to house Neo-Latinists, it is increasingly common for individual classicists to have Neo-Latin interests, especially related to the authors or topics that they study. A scholar of epic, for instance, might also work on Petrarch’s Africa. (I myself am a classicist by training, and I came to be interested in Neo-Latin when I was studying ancient libraries and encountered the De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius.) Such scholars might have an interest in teaching a Neo-Latin course, but they face another problem: an almost complete lack of pedagogical materials.
Teachers accustomed to the wealth of materials for classical authors would be shocked by the dearth of materials for Neo-Latin authors. There is no equivalent series to the Cambridge green-and-yellows, or the Bristol blue student editions of Latin authors, which typically include grammatical help and historical background. A few such editions have been published independently, but I would be surprised if these numbered over a dozen. The I Tatti series (equivalent to Loebs) offer Latin/English editions of an ever-increasing number of authors. (The series has 88 volumes, at last count.) The I Tatti has done marvels for making Neo-Latin texts more broadly available, but many teachers (and students!) find it counter-productive to be looking at an English translation as they read a Latin text. Finally, there are several anthologies of Neo-Latin works, though these too usually lack notes, and they are usually focused on specific genres or periods, like Gragg’s Latin Writings of the Italian Humanists. These anthologies are also, for the most part, out of print.
Two other new Neo-Latin anthologies do deserve mention along with the Florilegium Recentioris Latinitatis. There is The Neo-Latin Reader (ed. Mark Riley, corrected edition 2017), which is similar in conception to Minova’s Florilegium, but with the prefaces and notes in English. The Neo-Latin Reader is a print-on-demand book, with the consequent advantage of being inexpensive ($12.95) but the disadvantage of lacking professional editorial work. There is also the free online Neo-Latin Anthology published by the Society of Neo-Latin Studies (SNLS). The Neo-Latin Anthology provides introductory prefaces and notes in English, as well as English translations. The passages selected are rather short, usually 20–40 lines, with the goal of offering a text that can be covered in a typical class period. The Neo-Latin Anthology tends to feature more obscure authors, and it is currently rather small scale (seventeen authors), but it is expected to continue growing. All three anthologies are useful in different ways, but Minkova’s Florilegium, with its high editorial standards and wide range of important Neo-Latin authors, will be the primary resource for anyone teaching a Neo-Latin survey.
To return to the paradox with which I began this review: What to make of the fact that this edition is entirely in Latin, while the OCT prefaces are now mostly in English? The answer has much to do with how we read Latin, and what we read it for.
If you’re like the majority of Latin teachers, it’s a laborious task for your students to get through even a small bit of text. In order to read a short passage (say, the length of a printed page), a student may need hours of toil with a dictionary and a grammar, all while muttering “Is that an ablative of splitting hairs, or could it be a dative of obscure employment?” Such a student might reasonably ask, “Why on earth should I spend my precious time laboring over Minkova’s Latin prefaces instead of spending my time on the actual Latin works?” Such a student might also be daunted at seeing the explanatory notes in Latin. If notes are helpful because reading Latin is difficult, then having the notes in Latin might seem to pile insult on top of injury. Implicit in these sentiments is a sense that reading Latin is a stressful chore demanding perfection, rather than an enjoyable pursuit involving communication and comprehension.
There is another approach to Latin, which more students are encountering, and which Minkova herself has been instrumental in promoting: using Latin to teach Latin. For those who speak Latin, this edition will be a treasure for the ages. The prefaces to each author help provide the vocabulary to discuss their lives and works, and the notes in Latin help to keep the student’s thought process and frame of reference in the target language. When learning French, I remember the point in my progress when a professor informed me that I should be using a French dictionary in which the definitions are in French rather than English. This edition takes Latin in the same direction, and it provides a model that I hope that it will be taken up by editors of Neo-Latin and Classical texts alike.
If you’re not sold on spoken Latin but still have an interest in trying new reading methods, this edition also provides a valuable opportunity. Try assigning students to read a given preface not in the way that they normally do, but for comprehension. Once they’ve read it, don’t ask them to translate, or to name the construction used in a given phrase, but rather ask them about the material covered. Students may find it to be a liberating experience.
However you might feel about the Latin prefaces and notes, this edition will be a useful resource. As I noted above, it will surely be the primary book for anyone teaching a Neo-Latin survey, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level. (Selected authors will also be good for high school students, although I think that they will need more help than the notes provide.) This edition will also be especially useful for accelerated summer programs, like those at Berkeley and CUNY, which often draw graduate students from fields like English, History, Philosophy, Art History, Music, and Religious Studies. Apart from coursework, this edition could prove a useful complement to graduate reading lists for any Classics departments interested in broadening the temporal expertise of their students. I admit that these reading lists are already crowded, but it would not be unduly wicked to request that students read, say, any five authors from this edition. Finally, this edition will also be good for any Latinist interested in a richer history of the language, and for historians and literary scholars of the modern era.
It is an interesting time to be a Latinist, and an exciting time.
[Haec est huius recensus versio Anglica; exstat etiam versio Latina. (This is an English version of this review. There is also a Latin version.)]
Milena Minkova’s Florilegium Recentioris Latinitatis can be ordered online at this page.
Tom Hendrickson teaches Latin and English at Stanford Online High School. He is the author of Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism and a co-author of Bartolomeo Platina’s Lives of the Popes, Paul II: An Intermediate Reader of Renaissance Latin.
