A natural history of Latin
from Gregory of Tours even though they all write in Latin. Unlike him, most of them write a very correct kind of Latin, and many even do so with elegance and according to the ancient rhetorical principles. And there are hundreds of them!
In the twelfth century in particular the writing of history flourished, as in fact did many other kinds of literary activity. There is, for example, William of Malmesbury, who wrote a history of England (Gesta regum Anglorum ‘Deeds of the English Kings’), or William, bishop of Tyre in present-day Lebanon, who produced an excellent history of the Crusades (Historia rerum in pártibus transmarínis gestárum ‘History of matters that have passed in the lands beyond the sea’). A much more fanciful view of the past was provided by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae ‘History of the Kings of Britain’. He asserts that in fact he has just translated Britannici sermonis librum ‘a book in the British (i.e. Celtic) language’; however, there is no other trace of that work. Geoffrey tells the story of the Britons from their first origin, which was in his opinion Troy. This of course made them the equals of the Romans, who also believed that they came from that city through Aeneas and his followers. The narrative carries on to the eighth century CE, when the Britons finally lost the wars against the Anglo-Saxons. Geoffrey’s eventful work became immensely popular, and for good reason. It includes a great number of good stories that have been retold many times by others. The plot of King Lear is there, for example, but above all the work constitutes the starting point for the whole cycle of literature about the magician Merlin, King Arthur, his sword Excalibur and his famous followers. Geoffrey presents the first written version of the Arthurian legend; in that way, he is the first in an enormous tradition of romance and fantasy. This kind of literary production remains as popular as ever, as witness The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books. However, romance was an area in which people soon started to use other languages. There are works of this kind both in French and in English soon after Geoffrey, and Latin did not play any important role in the subsequent tradition. For ordinary history, however, Latin remained in use for several centuries to come.
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But it is not only the great historians who communicate knowledge about history. More modest writers who write about what happens around them or produce documents like letters or contracts are often much more reliable sources for the historians of today, and material of this kind can be found in very large quantities. The supply varies a good deal from place to place and period to period, but in general more has been preserved from the later than from the earlier periods. Historical sources of this kind are almost always in Latin throughout Europe until the thirteenth century. After that it varies, but it is common to find Latin sources up to and including the seventeenth century. Almost all of the history of Europe was written in Latin from the moment when the Romans themselves started writing history some time before the birth of Christ down until the fourteenth century.And for the following 300 or 400 years Latin was still in frequent use. Anyone who wants to study the history of Europe and read the sources will either have to learn Latin or limit their attention to the last 250–300 years.
Poetry after antiquity
All through the Middle Ages people continued to use Latin even for writing poetry. Much was written in the same style and the same metres as the great poets of antiquity had adopted. That tradition did not end with the Middle Ages either. If anything it increased during the Renaissance, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries enormous amounts of Latin poetry were produced, including a number of verse epics in the style of Virgil. Writers followed this tradition throughout Europe; from England alone in this period there are hundreds of Latin poems. But probably only very few people ever read them. They were already for the most part learned exercises even at the time when they were written, but they still contain a good deal which is of interest to historians of culture and society.
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It was certainly not only second-class writers who wrote in Latin in the classical style. For example, in the fourteenth century the great Italian humanist poet Petrarch wrote a fine epic in Latin with the title Africa. It is about the second Punic war between the Romans and the Carthaginians and was very justly celebrated in its time, but no one reads it today. Petrarch’s love poems, which are written in Italian, are by contrast still very much alive and widely read. The same goes for John Milton, who composed a substantial quantity of poetry in Latin which is now known only to a handful of specialists. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, is firmly established as an English classic. Yet Latin poetry after antiquity is not just an imitation of the ancient texts. During the early Middle Ages a new kind of Latin poem developed, which was completely different both in content and form. This new content came with Christianity. The greater part of the poetry which was written in the Middle Ages revolved around Christian themes, which was natural enough, as most of the people who learnt Latin belonged to the Church. Above all there were hymns, simple texts which the congregation would be able to sing, but there were also many other kinds of poems in praise of God and the saints, or which urged people on to a better life.
The ancient metres were based on an alternation between long and short syllables, as we have already seen. But Latin changed, and in late antiquity that distinction did not exist in the spoken language any more. In Christian poetry another principle was then introduced, namely that of a line based on fixed stresses and a certain number of syllables. More or less the same basic principle is to be found in early English poetry and is still used (more or less successfully) in the lyrics of popular music.
Medieval texts came to resemble modern ones even more closely as a result of a new device which was introduced about a thousand years ago. In antiquity there had been no practice of systematically letting the last words of each line rhyme, but this technique was invented and gradually developed during the early Middle Ages, both in Latin and in the new national languages like French,
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German, and Provençal. The habit of rhyming seems to have spread from Latin to the new written languages, although it was in the latter that it was to continue for hundreds of years. As an example of these new Latin poetic techniques using syllable count, fixed accents, and rhymes let us take one of the best-known Christian hymns, written in the thirteenth century by a man named Thomas of Celano. This is not exactly a light-hearted piece, painting as it does a terrible picture of the Last Judgement. Although it is not to be found in modern hymn books, it is often heard even today, set to music, since it forms part of the Requiem Mass. This translation is by the English vicar and hymn-writer William Josiah Irons and was published in 1848.
Day of wrath and doom impending,
David’s word with Sibyl’s blending!
Heaven and earth in ashes ending!
O what fear man’s bosom rendeth
When from heaven the Judge descendeth,
On whose sentence all dependeth!
Wondrous sound the trumpet flingeth,
Through earth’s sepulchres it ringeth,
All before the throne it bringeth.
This translation sticks fairly closely to the line and rhyme pattern of the original, as quickly becomes clear when we compare it with the original Latin:
Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla
teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus quando iudex est venturus cuncta stricte discussurus.
Tuba, mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum.
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It is easy to read the Latin; you just follow the same rhythm as in the English translation. The letter y is pronounced [i], so the rhyme is perfect even in the first stanza.
Let us use the Latin text of this rather sombre hymn as the basis of a little language exercise. Irons’s translation is not entirely literal, since otherwise he would not have been able to create the necessary rhymes and get the right number of syllables in each line. Here is the poem again with a completely literal translation:
Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla
teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus quando iudex est venturus cuncta stricte discussurus.
Tuba, mirum spargens sonum per sepulchra regionum, coget omnes ante thronum.
The day of wrath, that day will reduce the world to ashes
as witness David with the Sybil.
How great will the terror be when the judge comes
to judge everything harshly.
The trumpet, spreading its wonderful sound through the graves of the lands, will summon everyone before the throne.
In general the text has been translated word for word, although with differences in the word order, as in the first line, where Latin allows a demonstrative like illa to either precede or follow the noun, but where only the order that day is possible in English. Similarly, in line 7 English does not allow the noun sonum ‘sound’ and the adjective mirum ‘wonderful’ to be separated from each other as in the Latin.
Many words in the text can be recognised from English and/or French. Saeculum literally means ‘a lifetime’ or ‘a generation’, and is the source of the modern French word siècle ‘century’. What is meant here is time itself, which together with the world will come to an end when the trumpets sound at the Last Judgement. Time, in other words, is synonymous with the world, which is a common motif in Christian Latin, and is reflected in our loanword secular, which means ‘worldly’ or ‘non-religious’, as when we speak of secular authorities. The word sonum (sonus in the nominative) is to be
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found in several English words such as resonance, whose original meaning was ‘echo’, dissonance (when sounds clash), sonata (a piece of music which comes via the Italian verb sonare ‘to make sounds, to play (an instrument)’), and consonant (which literally means ‘sounding with’, since consonants were thought of as sounds which accompanied vowels).
In the Church and especially in the Catholic Church, Latin was used actively for a longer period than in other contexts, and the Christian poems in Latin became the ones that lasted longest. Early church music often consists of settings of Latin texts. If you want to hear what Latin sounds like, one way is to listen to masses and choral music by Bach. But medieval Latin poetry was not just religious. Even at that time people’s minds turned to many other things apart from prayers and God’s judgement, such as spring and love. These had been the subject of many poems already in antiquity, but during the early Middle Ages few poets wrote about such frivolous matters. From the twelfth century the spirit of the age changed, and people started writing and singing love poems in many languages, in the beginning especially in Provençal, German, and French. In Provence people talk of troubadour poetry, in Germany of Minnesang. At exactly the same time people also started writing love poems, drinking songs, poems about nature, and all sorts of non-religious poems in Latin. That did not happen by chance, of course, as everybody who knew Latin obviously also knew at least one of the spoken languages, and sometimes a writer was able to write in several languages. There are even mixed poems partly in Latin, partly in German or French.
This period was the first great Golden Age of poetry in the modern European languages. Even so, this does not mean that the Latin poems were imitations of the ones written in the national languages. In the beginning it may have been the other way round. Poetry and the art of versification in Latin was a model for the pioneers of the new languages. Gradually the poetry in the new languages grew away from those models. The authors of this new kind of poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were for the most part students, who tended to move from school to school, especially if their studies
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were not going well or if they had not paid their tuition bills. Quite a lot of this poetry has survived, but most of the poems are anonymous, and in several cases they were written down in extensive manuscript anthologies. One such manuscript is particularly famous. It was originally kept in a monastery in Benediktbeuren in Germany, south of Munich, and so the collection is called Carmina Burana which means ‘songs from Benediktbeuren’. This collection has become particularly well known because the composer Carl Orff set a number of the Latin and German poems in it to music and created a great choral work called precisely Carmina Burana. One of the poems he includes is a very beautiful paean to spring and love which starts like this
Ecce gratum et optatum ver reducit gaudia: purpuratum floret pratum, sol serenat omnia.
Behold, the pleasant and longed-for spring brings back joy:
the meadow blossoms with violet flowers, the sun makes everything bright.
Compare the word-for-word translation above with a somewhat less literal, but nonetheless quite close, translation which aims to reproduce something of the rhyme and rhythm of the Latin:
Welcome, season, with good reason:
spring restores our old delight: violets grow
by the hedgerow,
sunshine renders all things bright.
To a modern poet these rhymes might seem somewhat banal but this is not the fault of the translator, who has made a fine job of imitating the poetic devices of the original. Rather, after hundreds of years of this kind of poetry, virtually all rhymes have been exhausted and the rhythms have become commonplace; but when these poems were first written, the forms were fresh, unknown and intoxicating, just like spring itself to a twenty-year-old student.
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Abelard and Héloïse
One of the most remarkable students and poets ever to come to Paris was called Petrus Abelardus. Or at least that was how he wrote his name in Latin; in English he is usually called simply Abelard. We know a good deal about his life through his own writings, in particular an autobiographical work which he wrote when he was a little over fifty called Historia calamitatum, ‘History of calamities’. The title could not be more apt: he had more than his fair share of hardship and disaster.
Abelard was born in 1079 in what is today Brittany, close to the mouth of the Loire. From an early age it was evident that he was exceptionally talented, and it was not long before he went to Paris, which was beginning to gain a reputation as an important centre of learning. Abelard quickly came to realize that he was a better logician than the man who was the most prominent teacher there and the head of the cathedral school. The two men fell out and Abelard established himself as a teacher on the left bank of the Seine, just a few hundred metres from the cathedral school which was situated where Notre-Dame still stands to this day. Abelard’s school was the first on the spot where the Sorbonne has been for the last 900 years, so in a sense he could be considered the founder of the University of Paris. He was a brilliant teacher: knowledgeable, charming, and inspirational. Students flocked to hear him, and he achieved one success after another. When he was about thirty, he took over the headship of the cathedral school, so obtaining a very prominent position in the city of Paris. At this moment, when he was at the pinnacle of his career, there occurred the biggest and most crucial disaster in his life: he fell in love.
He caught sight of a young girl called Héloïse. Abelard says: per faciem non erat ínfima, per abundántiam litterárum erat suprema
‘in beauty she was not the last, in learning she was the first’. He decided to seduce her. That plan too was a success. He managed to
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rent a room in her uncle’s house, where she lived, and the rest was very simple. But things probably did not turn out quite the way Abelard had intended. Not because Héloïse herself presented any obstacle to his designs, on the contrary. It all just became so much more serious than he had obviously planned. They fell passionately in love, devoted themselves to each other and their love. For the first time in his life Abelard neglected his teaching and his studies, and instead spent his time writing love poems, which became very popular and were widely circulated. Unfortunately they have not survived. Eventually their love affair became public knowledge, and at last the inevitable happened: even the naïve Fulbert, Héloïse’s uncle, realized what was going on. The situation was difficult. Fulbert insisted that Abelard and Héloïse should get married, especially as she was pregnant. But Abelard belonged to the priesthood, and it would be the end of his whole career if he were to marry. Unable to decide, he hummed and hawed for several months. Finally they married in secret, but afterwards Abelard refused to acknowledge the marriage. Fulbert and his relatives concluded that Abelard had intended to deceive Héloïse all along, and decided to take their revenge. They broke into his house at night and castrated him.
At that point Abelard decided to become a monk. He took his vows in the monastery of Saint-Denis shortly after he had been attacked, and he ordered Héloïse to do the same, which she did in the convent of Argenteuil. Her nearest relatives tried to dissuade her: she was only nineteen years old. But she was calm and quoted from the ancient poet Lucan the words which Pompey’s wife is supposed to have uttered immediately before she committed suicide: Cur ímpia nupsi, si míserum factura fui? ‘Why did I marry against God’s wish if I was only to make him unhappy?’ With these words, Abelard writes, she hurried to the altar, received the nun’s veil from the bishop, and took her vows. On the surface that is the end of the love story between Abelard and Héloïse. Physical love was no longer possible, and they remained bound by their vows for the rest of their lives. And yet the most interesting part of the story is still to come.
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The events we have just narrated took place in about 1117 to 1119, when Abelard was thirty-eight or thirty-nine and Héloïse eighteen or nineteen. Abelard wrote his Historia calamitatum some fifteen years later, probably in 1134, when he was fifty-five. There he gives a detailed account of what happened to him during those last fifteen years, which, like all of his life, were full of conflict. At that time he was abbot in a monastery, and Héloïse was abbess in a convent. From the same period in their lives a number of letters have come down to us. The first is from Héloïse to Abelard, and in it she explains that she has happened upon a copy of his Historia calamitatum and that, having read it, she feels constrained to write to him. There follows Abelard’s answer, Héloïse’s reply, and so on. The letters are some of the most widely read and discussed in world literature. In particular, the first two by Héloïse have fascinated and surprised readers throughout the centuries.
In these letters she begins by explaining her love for Abelard: te semper, ut ómnibus patet, immoderato amóre complexa sum ‘I have always embraced you with unfettered love, as everyone knows’. Most of the time she calls him unice ‘my only one’. Everything he does and thinks is higher and better than anything else; his genius and knowledge place him above kings and emperors; he was the most beautiful of all, could sing and write better than anyone, was desired by all women, married and unmarried alike. For her part she has always done what she has done out of love for him, not for any other reason. And that especially applies to her entry into the convent. Tua me ad religiónis hábitum iússio, non divina traxit diléctio ‘It was your command which made me take a nun’s vows, not my love for God’. And therefore, she continues, I do not have any real moral worth. Outwardly I live a pious life, but what really counts is the heart’s desire, and in my heart only you mean anything to me.
Moreover, she says, I live in chastity and am considered virtuous. But I still remember all the times when we were together in the flesh, where we were, what we did, and I think of you again and again at every moment, even during holy Mass. I am worthless in the sight of God and my suffering is intense. The one person who can and
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