Latin Texts

In Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, J. W. Binns asserts that the drama of Shakespeare, the verse of Marlowe, and the prose of Sidney—all of whom wrote in English—do not alone represent the high culture of Renaissance (roughly sixteenth-and seventeenth-century) England. Latin, the language of ancient Rome, continued during this none when confronting the more alien and difficult terminology, syntax, and content of the scientist Newton.

Intellectual historians of Renaissance England, by contrast with Latin language specialists, have surveyed in great detail the historical, cosmological, and theological battles of the day, but too often they have done so on the basis of texts written in or translated into English. Binns argues that these scholars treat the English-language writings time into any modern language became the bases of classic English works of literature and scholarship.

These limitations are understandable. No modern classicist is trained to deal with the range of problems posed by a difficult piece of late Renaissance science; few students of English intellectual history are trained to read the sort of Latin in which such works were written. Yet the result of each side’s a distorted reading of the intellectual culture of Renaissance England.