Using Medieval Latin: A Toolbox of Resources
by Carol D. Lanham

[updated 17 June 1999]

VALE!

To repeat, there are no shortcuts to mastering medieval Latin (and I would define “mastering” very conservatively, as coming to feel confident, at home, with your texts—not that you can ever put your dictionaries away). I have concentrated on talking about words because I’ve found that students tend to have at least as much trouble with vocabulary as with syntax. Every author will present you with new vocabulary, and perhaps a disconcerting mix of stylistic registers.

My parting advice may seem frivolous, but it’s not at all; it aims at addressing all of the issues I have touched on: Browse around in Isidore’s Etymologies.

• The encyclopedic nature of the work presupposes a large and diverse vocabulary (the Latin is sometimes unusual, but rarely difficult).
  
• It is intrinsically interesting, and contains all kinds of entertaining lore.
  
• As an encyclopedia, and mirror, of human knowledge in Europe in the early seventh century, it is potentially useful for many areas of research.
  
• It was quarried wholesale by generations of later writers.
  
• And finally, it conveys a lively, almost tangible sense of how the Middle Ages themselves felt about words, Latin words.
  

I hope that as you work with medieval Latin texts, some of the items in my “toolbox” can help you to understand Isidore’s faith that to probe the words is to grasp the meaning.