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'Renaissance Latin' is a name given to the distinctive form of Latin style developed during the European Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, particularly by the humanist movement.
''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. Because humanist Latin lacked precise vocabulary to deal with modern issues, their reforms accelerated the process of turning Latin from a workday language to an object of antiquarian study. Their attempts at literary work, especially poetry, often have a strong element of pastiche.
Renaissance Latin gradually developed into the New Latin of the 17th-19th centuries, used as the language of choice for authors discussing subjects considered sufficiently important to merit an international (i.e., pan-European) audience.

Contents

Renaissance Latin authors

Fourteenth century

Fifteenth century

Sixteenth century

External links

Renaissance Latin authors

Fourteenth century

★ Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

★ William of Ockham (c. 1288-c. 1348)

★ Jean Buridan (1300-1358)

★ Petrarch (1304-1374)

★ Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375)

Fifteenth century

★ Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370-1444)

★ Antonio Beccadelli (1394-1471)

★ Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481)

★ Leone Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

★ Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pope Pius II (1405-1464)

★ Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457)

★ Bartolomeo Platina (1421-1481)

★ Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)

★ Rodolphus Agricola (1444-1485)

★ Poliziano (1454-1494)

★ Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)

Sixteenth century

★ Guillaume Budé (1467-1540)

★ Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

★ Thomas More (1478-1535)

★ Girolamo Fracastoro (1478-1553)

★ George Buchanan (1506-1582)

External links

★ An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Titles — Bibliography of Renaissance Latin and Neo-Latin literature on the web.

★ Neo-Latin Humanist Texts from DigitalBookIndex

★ René Hoven, ''Lexique de la prose latine de la Renaissance. Dictionary of Renaissance Latin from prose sources'', with the collaboration of Laurent Grailet, Leiden, Brill, 2006 (2nd edition), 683 p.