Traditional research into the so-called
questione della lingua has treated Latin and the vernacular languages as conflicting opposites representing a world in transition. A predetermined account of history fixated the downfall of the Latin world language (presumed to be elitist) in the seventeenth century, with the demotic idioms (with the implication of being egalitarian) taking over as part of what is usually described as the nation formation process. However, recent studies from several disciplinary fields show a growing awareness that the Latin and national languages did not take their natural turns representing an old and new Europe, but coexisted together for centuries in overlapping and mutually influencing communities. Two milestones reveal this double-edged bilingual landscape: Dante's
De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1300), the first manifest of the use of the vernacular, and Jacob Grimm's Göttingen inaugural lecture,
De desiderio patriae (1830), promoting a new ideology of national identity based on the mother tongue - both significantly formulated in Latin. Within this polyglot world the international Latin was not merely a language, but the carrier of European culture par excellence, conveying common values and beliefs, in some territories even until deep into the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the native vernacular languages, elitist in their own right, were never in all cultural fields and literary genres eclipsed by Latin.
This conference will explore the crossroads between Europe's Latin and vernacular cultures, identifying their points of convergence and divergence. To what extent did the language systems and the windows of cultural references opened up by them meet and interplay within the communities and political, religious and educational institutions of early modern Europe? What was the impact of bilingualism on social stratification and the self-fashioning of individuals or groups? In this respect, what were the implications of the fact that a considerable amount of authors, including Dante, Petrarca, Thomas More, Martin Luther and Hugo Grotius, published both in Latin and in the vernacular?
As a result of the conference, an edited, refereed book with a prominent publisher is planned, drawing the outlines of a new socio-cultural and intellectual history of late medieval and early modern Europe.
