Mediaeval Latin

This chapter provides an introduction to mediaeval Latin. After demonstrating the impossibility of providing any sort of meaningful survey of so extensive, varied and underexplored a literary field, I model two different ways of approaching the subject. One is through microhistory, where one looks at texts with certain generic, formal or geographic characteristics in a diachronic fashion from their classical ancestors to their Renaissance progeny always keeping in view contiguous material in other genres and in languages other than Latin. The other is the history of style, where one looks synchronically at texts produced in widely different regions and in different generic categories to obtain a broader vista of the way Latin as a literary language changed over time. One way to do this is to look at mannerism, or deliberate obscurity of style for rhetorical effect, as a persistent feature of Latin literature from late antiquity on, in a dialectic with classicism on the one hand, and biblical simplicity on the other. This leads to a revisionist view of the earliest stages of humanistic poetry in Trecento Italy, as growing organically from pre-existing mediaeval stylistic canons.