BMCR 2008.11.19, Charles Burnett, Britannia Latina

Charles Burnett, Nicholas Mann (ed.), Britannia Latina: Latin in the
Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century.
Warburg Institute Colloquia 8.  London/Turin:  The Warburg Institute;
Nino Aragno Editore, 2005.  Pp. x, 230.  ISBN 0-85481-137-0.  L24.00.


Reviewed by Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford University Press
([email protected])
Word count:  2989 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

The present valuable volume contains papers delivered (with two
absences and one accretion) at the 'Britannia Latina' conference
sponsored by the Fondazione Cassamarca and held at the British Academy
and the Warburg Institute in 2003; it is dedicated to the memory of the
Institute's former President J. B. Trapp. As the editors state, it was
never intended 'to provide a comprehensive chronological account of
Latin in Great Britain'; to the admitted lacunae, Roman Britain and the
twelfth century (even William of Malmesbury achieves no more than a
single passing mention), may be added the influence of Latin on the
vernacular tongues, at its most extreme in the aureate style of Middle
Scots. A paper on Scottish Latin was delivered but not published;
indeed Scotland furnishes only one chapter against Wales's two. Irish
Latinity has been excluded, geography trumping history.

In the first chapter Michael Lapidge searches for 'linguistic criteria
which would help to identify an anonymous Latin text as "English"', and
finds none despite trying f for Latin v, h treated as a consonant in
quantitative verse, volo as an auxiliary of the future, and the
hermeneutic style. As to the first, the substitution of /f/ is also
found in Irish and continental Germanic (p. 5).[[1]] Lapidge strangely
writes (p. 4) 'Old English did not have a voiced sound which
corresponded precisely to the Latin semi-vowel /w/', i.e. the initial
sound of modern English wet; how else was the Old English wynn
pronounced? The second he also finds in Walahfrid Strabo and Hrabanus
Maurus;[[2]] indeed, it goes back to late-antique misinterpretation of
caesural lengthening at Verg. Aen. 9. 610. Bede knew better, but
justified the usage out of Christian poets. On the examples of volo
paraphrasing the future Lapidge is a mite over-cautious; they are all
in the first person singular, representing Old English  'ic wille' used
of what the speaker will do by choice, not merely what he wishes to do:
'I will' not 'ich will'.[[3]] On the other hand, a thorough search of
other Latinities is needed to find whether the use (which after all
gave rise to the Romanian future, and can be found elsewhere in
Romance) really is confined to English in the relevant period. Lapidge
cites parallels for the strange words in the hermeneutic style from
Continental authors, notably Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Pre/s; but the
point is less to track down individual words like arcisterium (Abbo's
corruption of asceterium) than to compare the bloated ampullosity of
the Bella Parisiacae urbis with that of (say) late-tenth-century
English charters.

Unfortunately, Lapidge appears to have taken too literally the
exclusion of Irish Latinity. Even if 'the first Latin teaching in
England was done by the Roman [and Frankish?] monks who accompanied
Augustine to England' (p. 3), they were swiftly followed by the Irish
monks from Iona, whose mission was far more successful; it was
certainly they and not Romans (or Franks) who imparted the Latin
alphabet as the Anglo-Saxons wrote it. Had they really no influence on
the way in which the language was used, even in the earliest years?
After all, Lapidge himself in an earlier essay implicitly allowed
Hibernian influence on the syllabic verse of Aldhelm,[[4]] before
Theodore introduced a different model; and the Hisperica famina
(distributed from even if not concocted in Ireland) made their
contribution to the hermeneutic style, even if its scraps were stolen
from other feasts of languages as well.

Peter Dronke writes on 'Arbor eterna: A Ninth-Century Welsh Latin
Sequence', which he regards as older than Notker's productions, being
written in a late-ninth-century hand and exhibiting more than one level
of corruption; most startling is sensiaes for centies, taken down
uncomprehendingly from a French-speaker who rendered both c and t as
/ts/ in a word that a Welsh scribe would pronounce almost in classical
fashion. Despite its difficulties of text and diction, Dronke extracts
from it a sense in praise of Ecclesia, like that of the more
disciplined Winchester sequence Gloria resonante cimbalarum. He also
takes issue with an assertion of Erich Auerbach's, exhaled from the
grave of Romanticism, that Carolingian Latin was a dead language
written according to ancient models; that is not necessarily a bad
thing to be, as the best achievements of Renaissance Latin show, but it
simply does not apply to these sequences.

Maria Amalia D'Aronco examines the Latin background to the Old English
vernacular medical treatises collectively known as the Leechbook. They
represent the same practical dissemination of ancient knowledge (or
what passed for knowledge) as may be found in contemporary Continental
texts, from which however they differ in the use of the vernacular;
they also sometimes derive from better texts of their Latin sources
than we possess. Particular praise is lavished on the compiler's
'extraordinary competence in the subject matter', his 'lucid capacity
for synthesis', and above all the 'strong awareness of [his] own
national identity' visible in his aim of enlightening the non-Latinate.
(Others, no less romantically, would speak of oneness with the people;
perhaps rather he was loyally obeying instructions that in all
likelihood came ultimately from King Alfred.) One would still like to
know, however, how many of the remedies were likely to do the patient
any good, and how much of the materia medica was identifiable despite
scribal corruptions ('se monian' for 'scamonian', p. 29 n. 15) or
indeed available.

David Luscombe considers Roger Bacon's approach to language. In order
to understand both Christianity and the beliefs and intellectual
achievements of those who were to be converted, it was necessary to
know the languages in which they had been expressed--and not merely to
speak those languages but to know their grammar. For his time, he shows
an impressive command of biblical languages, knowing for instance that
Jer. 10: 11 is in Aramaic (which like Jerome he calls Chaldee);[[5]]
indeed, despite his desire, shared with others, for a more correct text
of the Vulgate, and his interest in expository semiotics, his interest
in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish exegesis was distinctly less than that
in the Hebrew language. Was Bacon, whatever he might profess, really
one of those who (in Jakob Grimm's dichotomy) studied the things for
the words' sake rather than vice versa? or was he even more bent on
demonstrating his superiority?[[6]]

John Marenbon re-examines the account of Robert Holcot's views on
virtuous pagans propagated by Middle English scholars: so far from
holding that they had been allowed to attain the knowledge needful for
salvation by natural reason, he maintained that no-one, Christian or
pagan, had ever attained that knowledge by natural reason, that such
pagans as had attained it had done so through learning of its
revelation, and that most even of those had failed to act on it. The
consequences for Chaucer and Langland are left for others to draw; but
at least Holcot allows that some pagans went to heaven.

David Rundle considers the complexity of English reactions to
fifteenth-century humanism, which were not confined to acceptance or
rejection of Italian development in style; to be sure he seems to
confuse the genus humanistic classicism with the species Ciceronianism,
for by no means all humanists felt called upon to eschew words and
constructions found in other ancient authors but not in Cicero,
fashionable as that firm basis for composition became in the decades
around 1500, but nevertheless there was a clear distinction between
even the most liberal humanistic Latin and the florid style of medieval
England, which took time to recede before it. Thomas Chaundler (who
styled himself M.T.C.) fused matter from Leonardo Bruni and Pier
Candido Decembrio into his Libellus de laudibus civitatum; others
collected texts and compiled (not always accurate) glossaries.
Moreover, even if for Henry VII, like other princes, humanists were
prestigious collectables like 'Burgundian tapestries, Venetian glass,
and exotic animals',[[7]] they were recognized to be purveying
worthwhile values as well as stylistic change.

Richard Sharpe, in by far the longest chapter, examines the motivation
and achievement of four English bibliographers, Henry of Kirkestede in
the fourteenth century, John Leland and John Bale in the sixteenth, and
Thomas Tanner in the eighteenth. Whereas the high proportion of works
by or ascribed to British authors in Henry's Catalogus was due to
compilation from English monastic libraries, above all that of Bury,
the other three all produced consciously national bibliographies such
as only Trithemius had attempted on the Continent; Leland and Bale,
despite their talk of Britain, primarily focused on the manuscripts
revealed and endangered by the dissolution of the English monasteries
and moved by the English patriotism of the age, Tanner, in the early
years of Great Britain, incorporating not only their work but that of
their seventeenth-century successors in England, Ireland, and Scotland
and of Edward Lhuyd on Wales. Particularly interesting is Sharpe's
study of the relationship between Leland and Bale, with particular
reference to Alberic of London (anonymized by Cardinal Mai as the Third
Vatican Mythographer); notable too are his concluding pages on the
difference between Insular and Continental bibliography.

Ceri Davies studies the Latin works of two Welsh cultural patriots,
John Prise, nephew by marriage to Thomas Cromwell, and John Davies,
reviser of the Bible and Prayer Book. The former in his Historiae
Brytannicae defensio sought to vindicate Geoffrey of Monmouth's fables
with the aid of old Welsh poetry, which he paraphrased in Latin verse,
elegant like his prose despite occasional false quantities,[[8]] the
latter wrote a Welsh grammar in Latin notable for its attention to the
language as actually used by the poets,[[9]] and a dictionary of the
two tongues, to each of which he prefixed a learned preface, in the
grammar magnificently defending not only his own work but the Welsh
language with particular reference to its value for preaching the Word
of God.

Philip Ford examines the outburst of Scottish patriotism in a writer
who had elsewhere bestowed his praises on France, George Buchanan,
apparently in riposte to the preening tone of French epithalamia for
the Dauphin with Mary Stuart; in his own poem on that theme, not
content with celebrating the Scottish contribution on the field to the
Auld Alliance, he will have it that the Scots thwarted the advance of
Roman arms and helped Charlemagne bring culture to the Franks. (Alas,
from his Latin history of Scotland it appears that he took for Scots
not only the Irish monks known by that name, but--misled by 'Alba' and
'Albany'--the king's teacher Albinus, the Englishman Alcuin of York.)
Although he wrote one work in Scots, and was conversant with Spanish as
well as French, Ford suggests that his real homeland was not Scotland
or even France but the Latin language itself.

Stella P. Revard considers the political messages of Latin poems
addressed to Elizabeth I and Mary II, mostly by university poets from
Oxford and Cambridge, but beginning with two rather more accomplished
authors, Paulus Melissus and Janus Dousa. Melissus, praising Elizabeth
for her love of peace,[[10]] purchased enough goodwill to permit the
inclusion of an ode to Gregory XIII, who was even less her friend than
Revard observes,[[11]] having given support in word and deed to the
Geraldine rebellion in Ireland and encouraged plots against her life;
Dousa urges her to support the Dutch rebellion against Philip II, which
she reluctantly did. As to domestic eulogists, whatever their poetic
demerits the bards of Academe were true heirs of Horace in their
vicarious zeal for war: when Elizabeth died, many in their lamentations
besought her successor James I to continue the struggle with Spain,
which he did not; on the other hand those who, somewhat imaginatively,
likened Mary II to her were pushing at an open door when they bade
William III fight the French.

There follow three articles on the decline in the status of Latin
amongst the educated. First, James Binns surveys its course from the
early eighteenth century, when it was still the natural language not
only of learning, but of polite letters intended to be read in other
countries, to the later decades (the turning-point is placed about
1750), when its use provokes self-consciousness in authors, and when
the canon of Latin writers becomes more strictly classical; Binns looks
ahead to the reborn Ciceronianism that persisted even into my
schooldays, when I was told that et did not mean etiam and nec did not
mean ne...quidem. However, I miss a comparison with the comparable
contests and outcomes between Latin and the vernacular in France and
Germany; contests and outcomes taken too much for granted when compared
with the long persistence of Byzantine Greek, literary Arabic,
classical Chinese, and Sanskrit.

E. J. Kenney, whose title refers to the special place of Horace in
English hearts, devotes the first part of his chapter to the narrow
grammatical education and the thrashings by which it was imparted;
again I long for more comparisons than with the Canadian school of p.
181 n. 14 to which these practices had been exported.[[12]] But we may
relish the account of Horace as remade by the English in their own
image, lovable and clubbable (though in which clubs was a matter of
dispute), his interest in the ladies discreetly overlooked, and regret
the decline in the ability to quote him from memory once displayed even
by men (the correct word) of practical life, as not only Latin but the
gentleman scholar retreated. Has any other ancient author been so
widely loved in any country where the Greek and Roman classics are
studied?

Christopher Stray also examines the schoolroom, though his outrages are
committed by boys not masters, and the decline of the amateur,
symbolically silenced when the dreadful English pronunciation of Latin,
which surpassed even the French for unintelligibility to alien ears,
was finally suppressed; but he also traces the dissolution of the
authority the language had enjoyed, not merely as a mark of superior
education, but as a test of mental health,[[13]] and (even in
non-Latinists' eyes) a guarantor of level-headed self-control. In
addition, he considers the standing of Latin in relation to Greek, of
which little is said in other chapters,[[14]] and recent attempts to
teach the language in relation to Roman life, which indeed are showing
promise of making it a thing one wishes to learn now that no other
motivation will preserve it.[[15]]

In one matter, however, I must take issue with Stray, namely his
description of Housman's famous death-notice for the great English age
of scholarship (borrowed with improvements from Wilamowitz)[[16]] as 'a
grotesque travesty of the truth'. His reason is that the Classical
Museum was edited by a naturalized immigrant and that Continental
scholarship was published in translation; but what does that tell us
about the native production? We may admire Grote the historian and
Smith the lexicographer; but what, between the fatal year of 1825 and
Munro's Lucretius, did Britain produce to compare, I will not say with
the exact scholarship of the great Germans, of Cobet and van Herwerden
the Dutchmen, of Madvig the Dane, but with the literary criticism of
Sainte-Beuve's E/tude sur Virgile? What, in short, should we go back
and read?

The book ends with a view from across the Channel, Jean-Noe+l Guinot's
account of the political, spiritual, and intellectual impact made on
the wider world by Latinate churchmen from Britain down to 'le haut
Moyen-A^ge', which evidently extends to das Hochmittelalter: his
earliest case is St Patrick in Ireland, his latest Baldwin of Forde.
His definition of Britannia Latina is broad enough to include the
Irishman John the Scot; but the only Scot in the modern sense mentioned
is King David I, at whose court Aelred of Rievaulx had been a page.
Observing that clerical exchanges between England and France were not
all one-way, he notes (212) that two eleventh-century archbishops of
Canterbury, Lanfranc and Anselm, though both of Italian origin, came by
way of France; he might have remarked Lanfranc's predecessor but one
was Robert of Jumie\ges, ingloriously as he departed.

Interestingly, given the stultifying assumptions of monoglottia so
often imposed by Anglophonic publishers, this chapter is suffered to
remain in French, whereas D'Aronco's Italian is translated. Moreover,
as if to emphasize the loss of Latin, most contributors who quote it
feel obliged to append English versions, which indeed in the case of
Dronke's sequences may not be unwelcome even to the learned; some give
both Latin and English in the main text, but Luscombe and Marenbon
relegate the original to the notes, whereas D'Aronco adopts the inverse
scheme for both Latin and Old English. Lapidge translates most but not
all, but Rundle only his first quotation; Davies and Ford translate the
shorter passages but not the long, Davies not even the medieval Welsh
citations embedded in Prise's Defensio. It is impossible not to be
amused.

Authors and titles:

1. Michael Lapidge, 'How "English" is Pre-Conquest Anglo-Latin?', 1-13.

2. Peter Dronke, Arbor eterna: A Ninth-Century Welsh Latin Sequence',
14-26.

3. Maria Amalia D'Aronco, 'How "English" is Anglo-Saxon Medicine? The
Latin Sources for Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts', 27-41.

4. David Luscombe, 'Roger Bacon and Language', 42-54.

5. John Marenbon, 'Robert Holcot and the Pagan Philosophers', 55-67.

6. David Rundle, 'Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in
Fifteenth-Century England', 68-85.

7. Richard Sharpe, 'The English Bibliographical Tradition from
Kirkestede to Tanner', 86-128.

8. Ceri Davies, 'Two Welsh Renaissance Latinists: Sir John Prise of
Brecon and Dr John David of Mallwyd', 129-44.

9. Philip Ford, 'Scottish Nationalism in the Poetry of George
Buchanan', 145-55.

10. Stella P. Revard, 'The Latin Ode from Elizabeth I to Mary II:
Political Approaches to Encomia', 156-69.

11. James Binns, 'The Decline of Latin in Eighteenth-Century England',
170-7.

12. E. J. Kenney, '"A little bit of it sticks": The Englishman's
Horace', 178-93.

13. Christopher Stray, 'Scholars, Gentlemen and Schoolboys: The
Authority of Latin in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century England',
194-208.

14. Jean-Noe+l Guinot, 'Importance culturelle et politique de la
Britannia Latina dans l'antiquite/ tardive et le haut Moyen-A^ge',
209-22.


------------------
Notes:


1.   Long before the English learnt Latin, classical /w/ had been
spirantized to /<greek>b</greek>/, as is shown both by epigraphic
confusion with <b> and by Greek transliterations with
/<greek>b</greek>/ instead of  /<greek>ou</greek>/; this sound was in
turn converted to /v/ by the Franks and to /f/ by the Irish, who had
already substituted it for Celtic /w/ (which in Welsh became /gw/) in
such words as fer 'man' (modern fear, Welsh gw^r) and fi/r 'true'
(modern fi/or, Welsh gwir). The Germanic and Celtic peoples had learnt
of wine while the Romans still called it /wi:num/; accordingly the name
was adopted as /wi:n/ in Germanic, and became gwin in Welsh and fi/n
(now fi/on) in Irish. But, having their own poetic traditions, they
felt no need to borrow versus till they engaged more seriously with
Latin culture, by which time the initial consonant was no longer /w/
but a sound that did not exist word-initially in Germanic and only by
lenition in Irish; the nearest equivalent in both Irish and Germanic
was /f/, which in Old Irish fers perpetuated the graphic correspondence
of Latin initial <u> and Irish <f>. Hence, if Old English fers does not
come from Old Irish as it well may, it comes from Gallo-Roman like fann
or fon (modern English fan with changed sense) from */vans/ (= French
van), itself from Latin vannus, the substitution of /f/ for /v/ being
further commended by the allophonic relationship of e.g. hrof [hro:f] ~
hrofas [hro:vas].

2.   Cf. too the numerous examples in Waltharius, above all in
barbarous names (e.g. et Hunos 5, primatum Heriricus 35, nomine
Hiltgunt 36) but in Latin words too (e.g. sed haud 107, stantem hinc
406, ensem hac 1160).

3.   In the Old English Genesis, line 1296, God says to Noah 'Ic wille
mid flode folc acwellan' ('I will kill people with a flood'),
representing Vulg. Gen. 6. 17 adducam diluvii aquas . . . ut
interficiam, for God does everything by choice. In none of Lapidge's
examples is volo an appropriate translation.

4.   Michael Lapidge, 'Theodore and Anglo-Latin Octosyllabic Verse', in
id. (ed.), Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on his Life and
Influence (Cambridge, 1995), 260-80 at 262-4.

5.   Luscombe states (47 n. 26) that 'This passage', sc. Jerome's
prologue to Daniel, 'is not in the Vulgate'; it is in (for instance)
Weber's edition.

6.   His sneers at Willem van Moerbeke ('Willielmus Flemingus, qui
nihil novit dignum neque in scientiis neque in linguis', Opus maius,
ed. Bridges iii. 472) were not endorsed by others then or later, though
we no longer look to Willem's translations for Aristotle's meaning, but
for the exact text that they reveal; but what possessed him to claim
(ibid. 473) 'Quinquaginta enim libros fecit [sc. Aristoteles] de
animalibus praeclaros, ut Plinius dicit octavo Naturalium [8. 44], et
vidi in Graeco; sed Latini non habent nisi decem nouem libellos misere
imperfectos'? As well he did not know that Antigonus of Carystos had
stated the number as seventy (fr. 60b Giannini).

7.   Whether or not they could understand them (for which see p. 79);
cf. Trajan to Dio of Prusa: 'I do not know what you are saying, but I
love you as myself' (Philostratus, VS 1. 7, 479).

8.   Twice in two lines he scans navium with short a (unless he allowed
himself a synizesis typical of early medieval Celtic Latinity), in
another passage he makes the first syllable of Brytonum short and makes
cui a postclassical iambus.

9.   Of this grammar Sir John Morris Jones was to say in his own Welsh
Grammar (itself made a pleasure to read by the poetical illustrations):
'the author's analysis of the Modern literary language is final; he has
left to his successors only the correction and amplification of detail'
(p. v).

10.   And even professing himself her slave, an abjection she declined
in an epigram more elegant than that which it answered; the reference
is given by Revard at p. 158 n. 5.

11.   Nor, in her comments on Melissus' use of the swans on the Thames
to praise the Queen, does she remark that, as royal birds, they
belonged to Elizabeth literally and legally.

12.   The sadism reported of certain Christian Brothers schools would
appear to leave the English birching academy looking almost humane, but
I speak without experience of either.

13.   Dr Johnson's writing of Latin verses after a mild stroke is
mentioned, but also a delightful story about F. W. Schneidewin, for
Stray is not narrowly Anglocentric.

14.   It was in the nineteenth century, even as Latin was slipping down
(both Oxford and Cambridge found it necessary to appoint a professor of
the language), the educated Englishman, and indeed Englishwoman, was
likeliest to read and draw sustenance from Greek authors in the
original.

15.   In his Conclusion, Stray offers the aphorism 'As Constantine saw
the sign of victory in the heavens, so did classicists see the sign of
Latin's decline when Sputnik passed overhead in 1958' (sic for 1957)
and states that 'even in the law courts, Latin is officially prohibited
in favour of the everyday simplicity of the vernacular'. Not all will
allow that legal English is characterized by everyday simplicity; but
let that pass, for he ends with the approving remark of a journalist:
'Res ipsa loquitur.'

16.   Euripides: Herakles, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1889), i. 227: 'von
Bentleys brief an Mill bis zu dem unseligen jahre 1825, wo Peter Dobree
in das grab sank, das sich kaum ueber Peter Elmsley geschliessen
hatte'.