During the 17th and the 18th centuries, the status of Latin was gradually transformed, and the roles of the ancient roman language changed in a radical way. I shall try to give a picture of that metamorphosis in my lecture.
Up to the 18th century educated people learnt nearly everything they knew by means of literature written in Latin. This holds true for all disciplines, including the sciences. In Early Modern Europe, the Latin texts reflect the rise of the nation states, the geographical discoveries, the Protestant movement, the Counter-Reformation and the scientific revolution. Latin was the vehicle of all the new ideas, beliefs and insights generated by these processes, from Early Renaissance up to the end of the 18th century. This is a long period of dynamic innovations, and the world of 15th century Italian scholars is very different from the conditions of the baroque theatrum mundi of the mid-17th century, and these in turn are utterly dissimilar to the Age of Reason that was to follow. In addition to scholarly and scientific works, learned men produced an enormous quantity of epic and panegyric works in Latin, to a large part occasional literature, extolling the virtues of their sovereigns in their struggle for the True Religion, often in close imitation of the tributes that Virgil, Horace and Ovid had paid to Augustus.
Of all the publications mentioned in Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe 1728-1740, 31% were still in Latin [1]. In many European countries, academic dissertations were normally written in Latin at least up to the beginning of the 19th century.
There are geographical differences to take into account, between various countries and regions of Europe, but the general pattern for Western Europe seems to be remarkably uniform, and the changing roles of Latin can be seen and explained as an expression of a general cultural and mental development that mirrors the European transition from the baroque world of religious orthodoxy and royal absolutism to the enlightenment.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the basic conditions for works in Latin change. In the course of one or two decades, the world seems to have become different. The spirit of the early enlightenment had for some decades gradually transformed Europe, and the scholars that were born and brought up during the latter part of the 17th century were necessarily influenced by these new ideas. In this new world there is suddenly little need of Latin epic works and panegyrics in honor of warrior kings. Religious zeal and obscurantism slowly but gradually abate. The muses string their lyres to new tunes, the humanists start praising their sovereigns in the vernaculars, in French or other languages, and the shift in outlook and focus witnesses to the changes that the enlightenment brought about in the European conception of the world.
