USTC

Early modern Europe witnessed a flourishing of the vernacular written word. Latin, dominant in the mediaeval era, receded in the face of the Reformation and administrative modernisation. Local languages had been steadily displacing it from literature, catechisms and official documents but not everywhere was the process equally dynamic. Latin had not fallen into disuse in diplomacy, the academy, the Catholic Church and\u2026 Poland.The status of Latin in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had remained high for an extremely long period, serving as its official language until the end of the state\u2019s existence in 1795. This does not mean that no official texts were written in the vernaculars (Polish, Ruthenian or German). Nevertheless, knowledge of Cicero\u2019s language was common among at least some strata of the population, which frequently amazed foreigners: The Latin language is among them [Poles] in such common use that there are few (not only among the nobility, but also among burgers and craftsmen) who would not understand it and speak it fluently.The view of Girolamo Lippomano, Venetian ambassador in Cracow in 1575, was shared almost exactly a hundred and fifty years later by Daniel Defoe: If a man was to travell thro\u2019 Poland, [\u2026] they [Poles] can talk Latin, and a man that can talk Latin may travel from one end of Poland to another as familiarly as if he was born in the country.Such opinions (we would be able to find at least a dozen more) were undoubtedly exaggerations. But they also create the misconception that the situation in this respect remained unchanged throughout the entire period. The graph below shows that Latin was at one point overtaken by Polish.Source: Maria Cytowska (ed.), Bibliografia druk\u00f3w urz\u0119dowych XVI wieku (Wroc\u0142aw: Zak\u0142ad Narodowy im. Ossoli\u0144skich, 1961).The Polish language entered the official print scene in the mid-sixteenth century. At first, everything seemed to indicate that it would simply replace Latin by fulfilling the postulate expressed by the nobility gathered in 1534: \u2018[We demand] that the priests do not prevent us from printing history, chronicles, our laws and other things, especially the Bible, in Polish\u2019.For some reason, the trend did not continue. When foreign princes who could not speak Slavic were elected kings (Henry de Valois in 1574 and Stephen B\u00e1thory in 1576), Latin returned to favour in official printing houses. What is interesting is that a similar pattern can be seen in total printing production in Poland-Lithuania.Source: USTCWhat is even more striking is that until the end of the seventeenth century, the number of Polish-language works only once exceeded the total number of those in the language of ancient Rome. Moreover, taking into account only books produced entirely in Latin would be a stark underestimation of the presence of Caesar\u2019s language in printing output in Poland-Lithuania. I do not think I would be very much mistaken if I guessed that every second book published in Polish was in fact full of Latin, in the form of \u2018macaronic language\u2019: a form of expression which uses a mixture of languages in the same piece of text.Macaronic language in the Commonwealth was not just a poetic affectation. It was common practice in political and cultural elite circles as an everyday form of expression. Not only did it appear in legal and parliamentary jargon, meaning all the legal codes and official documents are filled with Latin terms and sentences, but it also constituted an indispensable component of oratorical phraseology. In early modern Poland, it was simply impossible to give a speech, regardless of the occasion, without a handful of quotations from Tacitus and Seneca and another handful of Latin proverbs.A page from the collection of speeches. In every second line there is at least one Latin word, M\u00f3wca Polski, Kalisz, Koleium Societatis Iesu, 1683, p. 68. Another edition USTC 1773365. Image courtesy of Podlaska Biblioteka Cyfrowa.And thus, Polish nobles at the Diet issued a law not unanimously, but nemine contradicente. Behind the scenes, they spoke not freely, but liberius. And for speaking too freely, they paid not a fine but poenam. I really sympathise with all those printers in Poland who had to manage this linguistic interlacing. As Sarmatian speakers interspersed Polish with Latin, so typesetters had to intermingle Schwabacher with Italic.","image_url":"blog\/rsqpDRo7VjbdDiXbbudA3DLVcKhO9hIy5Hsoclg4.jpg","image_caption":"Jan M\u0105czy\u0144ski, Laxicon Lainopolonicum, [Kr\u00f3Iewiec], Johann Daubmannus, 1564. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.","image_alt":null,"author_name":"Pawe\u0142 Pietrowcew","ustc_social_profile_id":null,"author_biography":"Pawe\u0142 Pietrowcew is a PhD student with the COMLAWEU project, for which he is responsible for Poland-Lithuania. He is interested in the social history of the early modern period, particularly in...