Latin or, The Empire of a Sign

From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries

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Postscript summary

Described in Donald Sassoon’s new foreword as ‘the essential text mapping out the grandeur and decline of Latin’, Waquet’s classic study traces the language’s changing role in Western culture from the Renaissance to the rise of the vernacular in the modern Catholic Church. Among the topics discussed are Latin’s dominance in school curricula, the social cachet that it acquired and scholars’ varying levels of competence in writing and speaking it.

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