The humanists made the ability to write obedient pastiches of Cicero and Catullus the outward sign of inward cultural grace. Traditional histories of modern Europe have treated Latin with some ambivalence. What trajectory did Latin follow between its heyday in the Renaissance and its slow death by a hundred bad conjectural emendations and a thousand cuts in curricula and budgets? By the beginning of the 20th century, as AE Housman remarked more in anger than sorrow, even professional Latinists revealed on every page of their work that they lived "in an age which is out of touch with Latinity". Individuals across Europe and beyond knew Latin as intimately, loved it as passionately and rolled it off the tongue as easily as they did their native languages. From Prague to Peru, it served as the arena of literary artistry, the vehicle of scientific communication and the medium of common-room gossip. Latin, in short, played vital roles in the first modern age. When a pedant irritated the poet Nicodemus Frischlin by addressing him with clumsy formality, "Tu, Frischline, vates," he replied, without missing a Latin beat: "Tu mihi lambe nates." The story delighted generations of schoolboys - who, in those happy days, did not need to be told that the great scholar had told his interlocutor to kiss his arse. They composed Senecan tragedies and Catullan love poems, Tacitean histories and Ciceronian dialogues, Plinian (Jr) letters and Plinian (Sr) treatises on every imaginable subject from astronomy to zoology. Joseph Scaliger noted with amusement that his favourite pupil at the University of Leiden, Daniel Heinsius, would turn up "on some days drunk on Lipsius, on others drunk on Muret, and on others drunk on Erasmus, and would insist that all the rest are asses". They savoured the variety and distinctiveness of Latin styles, ancient and modern. Learned Europeans gloried in the wealth of Latin's vocabulary - which Erasmus demonstrated, in his most popular textbook, by compiling a list of more than a hundred elegant ways to say "thank you for your letter". In the 16th century, mastery of formal Latin was the price of entrance to schools and universities. Like the Princeton campus's splendid trees and hideous buildings, like This Side of Paradise and The Duke of Deception, it forms part of the hazy, glowing nimbus of traditions and practices that renders four years in central New Jersey worth the formidable current price of some $140,000. (She agreed.) But the Latin oration still matters. A previous one interrupted his speech to hold up a sign, in English, asking a female classmate to marry him. This year's speaker doffed his academic gown and mortarboard to reveal that he was wearing a toga and a laurel wreath. Investigation remains necessary to identify both the scope and the depth of this tradition and its potential usefulness for re-imagining Latin teaching in the 21st century.No one takes the ritual entirely seriously. This reading is exemplary, targeting one model for Latin pedagogy from the early modern period. It seeks (1) to demonstrate the existence of an early modern Latin pedagogy with principles like those supported by contemporary SLA research, (2) to offer a comparative reading of that pedagogy's premises with consensus positions of current SLA-informed instruction, and (3) to reflect upon the potential uses of this comparison for present-day Latin teaching. This article attempts to redress this apparent lack of discussion by comparing basic principles of contemporary SLA-informed pedagogy with strategies from educational treatises published between the years 15. In short, present discussions have not been situated in the timeline of actual historical developments. Often framed as a contest between 'traditional' (Grammar-Translation) and 'new' (SLA-informed) pedagogies, debate in the field has proceeded according to assumptions regarding the relative historicity of both frameworks with little reference to the recorded tradition of Latin teaching practices. Growing interest in 'active' Latin has prompted much discussion regarding the role of contemporary Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Theory in Latin instruction.
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