Overview

Though not without its rivals, Latin stood at the apex of Western culture from the Renaissance until relatively recently. Françoise Waquet offers an enthralling, original history of the language's uses, its detractors and defenders, and the social hierarchies its practitioners inscribed. Granted a new lease of life by the Humanists and the Catholic Church, Latin was the form in which generations of schoolchildren were taught to read, millions of people worshipped, and an international community of scholars communicated with one another. It conveyed sacredness, but also obscenity; learning, as well as pedantry; science, but also trickery and mumbo-jumbo. Few individuals even among the clergy or the most learned scholars have ever managed to speak it with any degree of correctness or fluency, let alone elegance. Why, despite rationalist criticisms that Latin was inaccessible to the great majority of people, and inconvenient and time-consuming for the rest, did it maintain such a strong presence - some would say a tyranny - for so long?

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9781804290491

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Reviews

A splendid book: original in method, suggestive in argument, and a pleasure to read. -- Anthony Grafton * London Review of Books * ... [a] fascinating and lively survey of the place of Latin western culture during the past 400 years. * Independent * ... richly researched and delightful ... with scholars of Waquet's generosity and ability, the old language might yet have a future. * New Criterion * ... detailed and wide-ranging ... * Los Angeles Times Book Review * ... an eloquent obituary ... * Spectator * Fascinating. -- A.C. Grayling * Guardian, Summer Choice * Latin is dead and this book is its epitaph ... it is the merit and interest of Waquet's survey that she finds Latin not only deployed for the liturgy, but also to describe things carnal, pornographic, or otherwise shameful. * Daily Telegraph * A wonderful survey. -- A. N. Wilson

Author Information

Françoise Waquet is director of research emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Latin, or the Empire of a Sign is the opening volume in a highly praised sequence of books on the social worlds of intellectuals, continued most recently with Une histoire émotionnelle du savoir (2019).

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