The Latin of North America
Andrew Dinan Discusses His “Americana Latine,” An Anthology of American Latin
Binx Bolling, the anti-hero of Walker Percy’s award-winning novel The Moviegoer, claims: “I am attracted to movie stars but not for the usual reasons . . . It is their peculiar reality which astounds me.” The dreariness of a March day in New Orleans is quickened when Binx unexpectedly catches sight of William Holden walking through the French Quarter. In Binx’s estimation, “an aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it.”
Heightened reality, for some of us, is conferred not by Hollywood stardom but by the Latin language. Such is the effect of discovering, unexpectedly, that someone, something, or someplace familiar has been described in Latin. One does not have to go to Europe to experience this.
Latin, it is well known, was the language of cultural exchange in Europe throughout the Middle Ages and through much of the early modern period. What is less well known, however, is that Latin continued to be written and spoken into the twentieth century and in regions far removed from European capitals and universities. Within the Americas, even within the United States, Latin has enjoyed a long history as a language of communication.
This should not be surprising. Crossing the Atlantic did not necessarily strip one of previous habits and inclinations. Members of the Winthrop family wrote Latin letters when they were in England, and they continued to use Latin actively when they settled in New England. John Winthrop’s diplomatic correspondence with neighboring European powers in the New World was occasionally in Latin, and John Winthrop, Jr. kept a travel diary partly in Latin. The curriculum at Harvard, like the curricula at European universities, was Latin-based.
The Latin of early New England and the mid-Atlantic is fairly well known, thanks especially to the catalogues, studies, and anthology produced by Leo M. Kaiser (1919–2001), a Classicist who taught for three decades at Loyola University Chicago. Within the last five years scholars working in the rapidly-expanding field of Neo-Latin studies have augmented and contextualized Kaiser’s materials. Yet the field of American Neo-Latin is still in its early stages. Much American Latin remains undiscovered, especially from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and from regions beyond the Eastern seaboard.
In the summer of 2013 I set out to discover original Latin texts that pertain to each of the fifty United States. In part my motivation was practical — I wanted to demonstrate to my undergraduate students the relevance of Latin for Americans. Additionally, a colleague and I had recently returned from a ten-day trip to Rome in which we read Latin with students in situ. Could something similar be done closer to home?
Seven years later what has emerged is Americana Latine: Latin Moments in the History of the United States, which Paideia Institute Press has now released.
Following a brief preface and general introduction, the volume presents over one hundred Latin texts written for the most part in or about North America, with a special focus on the lands that would become the United States. Preceding each Latin text is an English introduction, and each text is annotated with historical and occasionally linguistic detail.
The earliest text is from Adam of Bremen, an eleventh-century chronicler, and it concerns Vinland, which some have identified as the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. The latest text is an excerpt of an address delivered at the Second Vatican Council by Philip Hannan, the auxiliary Bishop of Washington, D.C. Hannan, who had been a chaplain during World War II to a Parachute Regiment in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, spoke to the Council Fathers about the morality of nuclear weapons.
Readers of Americana Latine may be surprised by the diversity of texts included (for a full list of the table of contents, visit this link here). Not all of the fifty states are represented, but at least every region is. Readers will find Latin of Presidents, Popes and well-known personages, but they will also discover Latin written by men and women whose names are absent from history textbooks. Henry David Thoreau, not surprisingly, was adept with Latin, but so too were others in his family. Included in Americana Latine is a Latin letter Thoreau wrote to his sister, Helen, as well as a letter from his mother Cynthia to his sister Sophia (with Thoreau himself serving as amanuensis). The volume also features texts written by, or pertaining to, various immigrant populations as well as African Americans and Native Americans. Included is a Latin poem written by James Kwegyir Aggrey (1875–1927), a native of (present-day) Ghana, who studied at Livingstone College in North Carolina. Aggrey, in fact, was said to have given the first Greek oration in Livingstone’s history. Also included is a Latin letter signed by nine members of the Oneida tribe and addressed to Pope Pius VI (r. 1775–1799).
Readers will find Latin documents concerning little-known, but not unimportant, events in American history. In fact, some of the included texts are valuable primary sources for these events. For example, it is not well known that in 1570 a group of Spanish Jesuits planted a mission, and were killed, not far from the site where the English would found Jamestown more than three and a half decades later. Included in Americana Latine is a neglected early Latin account of the destruction of this mission, written in classical Latin and sent from Mexico to Rome.
Similarly, the curiosity of Classicists has long been piqued by the elegant Vita of George Washington written by Francis Glass in the backwoods of Ohio and published in 1835. Readers of Americana Latine may enjoy seeing a Latin letter that Glass wrote James Madison asking permission to dedicate the Vita to the then ex-President. (Madison, responding in English, graciously declined.) The letter also offers precious biographical details about the elusive Glass.
Readers are likely to be enchanted and alternatively dismayed by some of the vivid Latin accounts presented in Americana Latine. For example, readers will discover a description of the perils of travel on the Erie Canal, a poem commemorating the dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge, an account of a devastating Alaska snowstorm, a Jesuit missionary’s account of the excruciating aftermath of an 1893 treaty that resulted in the loss of large tracts of Nez Percé lands in Idaho, and a Belgian priest’s confidential report to Rome detailing the sufferings of African Americans in the first years of the twentieth century.
Some of the texts in Americana Latine have not been published previously. Most, however, were culled from newspapers and periodicals or from early and often obscure histories or biographies. Hunting for them was anything but tedious; discriminating between them was at times challenging.
Every effort was made to avoid what might be called school-book Latin, i.e., Latin texts composed for a classroom assignment. Nor, on the other hand, will one find too many examples of belletristic Latin. Instead, the goal, for the most part, was to showcase Latin being used for real communication. Many of the selections, therefore, are eminently ordinary, even mundane, and some exhibit incorrect Latin. Therefore, although Americana Latine includes poetry, diplomatic correspondence, inscriptions, speeches, and treatises, it also features numerous examples of everyday Latin, especially diary entries and personal letters. Letters, after all, best illustrate the transnational quality of Latin, no less apparent on this side of the Atlantic than in Europe. To be sure, in the Americas Latin has at times been the only common means of communication between correspondents or interlocutors.
Finally, readers of Americana Latine will also observe friends and even family members (in addition to the Thoreaus) writing each other in Latin. At times this was for pedagogical purposes, to sustain or improve one’s knowledge of Latin. Yet this was not the only reason. Indeed, for some correspondents the use of Latin was entirely natural. Some, perhaps, employed Latin because it conferred something like “an aura of heightened reality.”
Americana Latine is available here from the Paideia Press.
Andrew C. Dinan is an Associate Professor of Classics & Early Christian Literature at Ave Maria University. His publications, in the fields of patristics, liturgical Latin, and Neo-Latin studies, have appeared in Humanistica Lovaniensia, The Classical Journal, Vigiliae Christianae, Journal of Early Christian Studies, American Catholic Studies, Antiphon, and others. His particular interest is the role of Latin within American history and culture, and he is currently working on an annotated transcription and translation of the Latin correspondence between the nineteenth-century American prelates Francis Patrick Kenrick (1797–1863) and his brother Peter Richard Kenrick (1806–1896).
