188 LATIN LANGUAGE 



like Priscian, Bede, and Alcuin. The relations of Latin were mainly 

 with the monasteries; and to these centuries, if to any, may be fitly 

 applied the term "The Dark Age." The three centuries that follow 

 (A.D. 800-1100) are a period of transition to a brighter period, and 

 are marked by a reform of schools. But Latin is still mainly confined 

 to the clergy, though the works of men like Scotus Erigena and 

 Eginhard must not be forgotten. It is not till the twelfth and 

 thirteenth centuries that Latin once more becomes a great force in 

 the world. During this last stage of its existence as a living language 

 it puts off its ecclesiastical character and enters on new paths as an 

 organ of secular life, in philosophy, in law, and in science, especially 

 the science of medicine. It becomes the language of the universities 

 which were then springing into existence, and finds a wide field of 

 activity open to it in the service of that movement which has been 

 rightly called the Early or Scholastic Renaissance, as distinct from 

 that greater Humanistic Renaissance of which Petrarch was the 

 "morning star." The stimulus to all this new life came partly from 

 the Saracens. Arabic works on philosophy, mathematics, astro- 

 nomy, medicine, and other branches of science and pseudo-science 

 were translated into Latin, and Europe was thus brought for a 

 third time into contact with Semitic thought. But it must be re- 

 membered that the light of Arabia was in large measure a light bor- 

 rowed from Greece and the remoter East; conspicuously so in the 

 case of the Arabic Aristotle, which made its way hi a Latin dress 

 from Spain into Northern Europe at the beginning of the thirteenth 

 century. 



After the fourteenth century Latin is no longer the universal 

 language of Europe, no longer a national language in the sense in 

 which the term has been used above, though it continued to live in 

 works like the Imitatio Christi of Thomas a Kempis. The reason is 

 that it was no longer alone in the field. And the Renaissance, from 

 the very fact that it was a revival of purer standards of taste and 

 diction, necessarily turned its back upon that well of living speech 

 which had supplied the needs of the preceding centuries. But what 

 killed Latin as a living tongue was not only purism but also the 

 growth of its rivals in literary capacity. English had blossomed into 

 literature as early as the seventh century (Csedmon, to say nothing of 

 Beowulf). German had produced a truly national literature in the 

 twelfth and thirteenth. The reign of Latin thus overlaps that of 

 the modern tongues as an organ of literature and science; and as 

 their influence waxed, hers waned. 



But I have yet to ask your attention to one more phase in the life 

 of Lathi. For if Latin died as a universal language when the new 

 literatures were born, yet it died only to rise again, together with 

 Greek, in a new form. 



