Hello, I am looking for sources on the history of Latin education. Debates on how much Latin language should be taught and with what methods, what’s the significance of it, etc. Especially from 17th century. Does anything come to your minds?
Hi, there’s a great deal on this: you could approach it in different ways.
You might focus on new/revitalised approaches to learning at different times: e.g. in the 17th c. there was a renewed discussion on giving glosses/interlinears as part of Latin education. Milton and Locke both leaned into this. See e.g.
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-languages/
https://archive.org/details/selectorationso00ci/page/n7/mode/2up
Or you could focus on how classics was taught at the individual schools or in different countries (as it clearly differs from place to place).
For English public schools as just one example, a commission inquiry in the mid-1800s looked into the classical curriculum at the main public schools and traced the history of it back to the 1400s or so, see e.g. pages 11 and following here (and then there are descriptions of the classical classroom at the individual public schools in the later parts of the report):
(This is one of the sources cited in an article I posted previously to Textkit, worth reading in its own right:
https://tcl.camws.org/sites/default/files/TCL%2012.1%20Keeline%20Final%20Draft.pdf )
You’ll find information about this in a huge range of sources. I remember reading about Milton’s Latin education in a biography, and so cast the net widely and you’ll get more than enough.
Cheers, Chad
By chance, I happen to be reading The teaching of classics / edited by James Morwood.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, c2003. It’s a survey of British twentieth century classics teaching, and has some useful references to sources for the nineteenth> Might be worth a look?
You might look into the work of Comenius.
https://archive.org/details/comeniusandbegi02monrgoog/page/n148/mode/2up?view=theater
Thomas Whitfield Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1944, 2 vols.), might be helpful. I read this book many years ago. It is an effort to show what Shakespeare’s education could have been like. There is much information on scope and sequencing of Latin instruction in the (Latin) grammar schools of England of Shakespeare’s youth.
The expression “small Latine and lesse Greeke” is, I believe, taken from a comment of Ben Jonson about Shakespeare. Baldwin, who was a Shakespeare scholar, comments extensively on this quotation.
In the 17th century, the Jesuits ran over 500 colleges worldwide, standardising Latin education through the Ratio Studiorum (1599).
Students studied Latin grammar in three progressive levels (lowest, middle, highest), each using one of three books of Emmanuel Alvares’s Institutiones Grammaticae. They memorised grammatical rules, declensions, and conjugations, and concurrently read texts such as the Vulgate and Cicero. At the lowest level, pupils performed literal translations from Latin into their native language and then back into Latin to memorise vocabulary and grammar in context. Latin was strictly required as the exclusive language within Jesuit schools.
Here are interesting fragments (the pages are pdf pages):
- Page 106: RULES OF THE TEACHER OF THE LOWEST GRAMMAR CLASS
- Page 103: RULES OF THE TEACHER OF THE MIDDLE GRAMMAR CLASS
- Page 99: RULES OF THE TEACHER OF THE HIGHEST GRAMMAR CLASS
- Page 94: RULES OF THE TEACHER OF HUMANITIES
- Page 87: RULES OF THE TEACHER OF RHETORIC
I hope this helps.
And there’s Marrou’s excellent Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité, englished as A history of education in antiquity.
Thank you for these replies. This is an interesting topic.
Do you folks know if any histories or descriptions of these Latin curriculums went into detail about the extent to which they used spoken Latin in class, or learned to use spoken Latin to any extent ?
Thank you.
I’m with you. I’m trying to get a precise understanding of how Latin and Greek were actually learned in the past.
In Jesuit schools, Latin was the expected language of communication. The use of Latin was enforced both in the classroom and outside it, with only limited exceptions.
The Ratio Studiorum, in the Rules of the Rector, Rule 8, states:
He shall take care that at home our scholastics keep up the practice of speaking Latin. Exception may be made only on vacation days and during recreation periods, but even at these times the practice may be retained in certain places if the provincial thinks it advisable. The rector shall also see to it that when our scholastics who are still in their studies write to other scholastics they shall do so in Latin. Moreover, two or three times a year, on the occasion of some special festivity, such as the beginning of a new academic year or the renewal of vows, students of philosophy and theology should compose verses and display them in public.
There’s also a translator’s note accompanying this rule:
The practice of speaking and writing Latin by young Jesuits was stressed principally for four reasons: (1) In the Ratio, Latin was the dominant subject in the curriculum; (2) the practice of speaking Latin in the classroom was to be strictly observed except in the lower classes in which the pupils were still learning the fundamentals of Latin. Cf. Rule 18 of the common Rules for the Teachers of the Lower Classes; (3) Latin sermons, orations and addresses occupied a prominent place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; (4) Latin was still the language of scholarship, as witness, for example, the nine large volumes of Sommervogel’s Bibliothèque (op. cit.) of Jesuit publications in philosophy, theology, literature, history, mathematics, and astronomy.
I can recommend an illuminating piece by Carlotta Dionisotti on the development and function of colloquia (as they are known). And I see there’s now a decent AI summary for “Latin colloquia.”
Can you elaborate? I don’t know what a “summary” of colloquia would be.
It’s just my personal opinion, but I don’t think colloquia are a very effective teaching tool. I have a hunch that other people in the past may also have thought this, and I’m wondering if they ever wrote about it.
Thank you.
That’s fascinating. Did they actually document, in the curriculum, the phrases that the students would need? Were these structured only as “colloquia” or also in other ways?
Thank you very much for sharing your research.