Jozef IJsewijn

For the past few years the politicians of the European Community have been trying to encourage student mobility. They gave their scheme the name of a great Dutchman, Erasmus. One of the major problems to overcome, however, is the profound linguistic division of modern Europe, a problem that is felt acutely by the native speakers of minor languages.¹

If one looks at the ERASMUS plan from a historical point of view, it soon becomes clear that our politicians are now trying to partially restore a custom which for about a thousand years – say from Carolingian times down to the eighteenth century – was quite common throughout Europe (and not just Western Europe), and which was lost together with the loss of Europe’s former universal academic language, Latin. If I had addressed a learned audience in London two hundred years ago, I would certainly have done so in Latin.

Thanks to Latin it was possible to attend courses anywhere in Europe without being continually thwarted by linguistic barriers. In fact the only real difficulty one might encounter upon one’s arrival at a foreign university was the problem of getting used to the local accent in the pronunciation of Latin, a problem well known to everybody who in our days travels to an English-speaking institution. From the Middle Ages onwards large numbers of students went abroad, and many did so at a very tender age, being no more than thirteen or fourteen years old. Moreover, there was no separation between East and West: Vienna and Prague, Erfurt and Wittenberg, Krakow and Königsberg belonged to the European network of universities no less than Bologna or Paris, Salamanca or Granada, Cologne or Louvain, Cambridge, Oxford or St Andrews. Only the Balkans under Turkish occupation were cut off from the European community, which at that time extended from Malta to Iceland and from Portugal to the Baltic countries. Furthermore, the exchange was not limited to students, but included professors and technical personnel such as the transcribers of manuscripts and, from the late fifteenth century, the printers of books. Let me illustrate, by means of a few examples chosen from among students and scholars from the Low Countries, how real that Europe-wide academic community was at a time when travelling was so much more difficult and dangerous than nowadays.

One of the first students at the University of Louvain shortly after its foundation in 1425, a certain Henricus of Montenaken in Brabant, made his way to Krakow after a few semesters. Conversely, many Polish students arrived at Louvain in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One finds them, for example, in the Palaestra bonae mentis, a kind of institute for advanced training in Latin eloquence, organised by professor Erycius Puteanus with the support of the Archdukes Albert and Isabelle. Professor Puteanus himself had begun his academic career in Milan before succeeding Lipsius in the chair of Latin at Louvain. Lipsius himself, as we know, completed his studies in Rome with the French professor Marcus Antonius Muretus, and taught successively at Jena, Leiden and Louvain; he declined calls to Breslau, Pisa and Rome.

Erasmus’ main precursor in the Netherlands, the Frisian Rudolf Agricola from Baflo, north of Groningen, began his university studies at the age of thirteen in Erfurt. Afterwards he proceeded to Cologne, Louvain, Pavia and Ferrara. In the latter town he attended the courses of the famous professor Battista Guarini, the son and successor of the even more admired Guarino. In the classroom of the Guarinis one could meet students from all over Europe and even from Cyprus.² Agricola, then, was a true ERASMUS student at a time when Erasmus himself was still no more than a baby. I will conclude this list of examples with a country which today cannot yet participate in the ERASMUS scheme, yet was always a solid part of the old European cultural community, namely Hungary. Nicasius Ellebodius (1535–75), born in the South Flemish town of Cassel, was a famous Greek scholar. After studies in Padua and Rome he worked for many years in Poswony, now in Slovakia and better known as Bratislava. To this day he is highly esteemed in Hungarian learned circles.³ On the other hand thousands of Hungarian students went all over Europe for study. Let me quote from a paper read by I. Forro at the 1976 Neo-Latin Congress at Tours:

In Ungarn kann man sprechen von einer Peregrinatio continua der ungarischen Studenten nach dem Westen, Süden und Osten... Mein Thema erstreckt sich nur auf Holland und die holländischen Universitäten (Leyden, Utrecht, Groningen, Harderwijk, Amsterdam), insbesondere auf Franeker (1585–1811). Die Gesamtwahl der wandernden ungarischen Studenten nach Holland beträgt ungefähr mehr als 3000 und davon für Franeker mehr als 1200.

More than 1,200 Hungarian students in 125 years or an average of ten students every year in a small Frisian university like Franeker is really an impressive figure! In Dutch archives Forro unearthed over 200 Latin disputations and dissertations as well as ninety Carmina gratulatoria written by those Hungarian students.⁴

There is probably no need for more examples. For many centuries academic Europe was a truly united Europe thanks to Latin. But before coming to the specific contribution of the Low Countries to this world of Latin learning I want to add another point which I deem not unimportant. As long as Latin was the common academic language of Europe – and of America for that matter – artists, scholars and scientists from small nations were able to work on the same footing as those from the emerging bigger national languages areas.⁵ A native speaker of Dutch, Danish or Czech was not at a disadvantage compared to a Frenchman from Paris, a Spaniard from Valladolid or an Italian from Florence. Everybody had to learn Latin, which nobody spoke at home. Nowadays we have to learn English but will never be equal to a native English speaker. Even for the greatest genius, if he hails from a smaller nation, it will be much more difficult to achieve a performance comparable to that of Erasmus, partly at least because he no longer starts from the same position as an English- or French-born scholar or artist. At the same time it is true that a successful participation in the learned art of writing Latin presupposed a well-functioning school system with able teachers. It is surely no mere chance that the Low Countries reached the highest level of Latin artistry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as only then were there universities and good Latin schools in sufficient number.

I will now try to draw an overall picture of the Low Countries’ contribution to Latin literature. Although I am much better acquainted with the age of humanism, I will also include the Middle Ages in order to make clear the basic features and the highlights of the long Latin tradition within Dutch culture. Since, however, there have been hundreds of Latin authors in the Low Countries and since endless lists of more or less glorious names are tedious, I will select just a few of the most noteworthy cases in the fields of belles lettres, scholarship and the sciences. Furthermore, I will limit myself to the Dutch- and Frisian-speaking areas of the Low Countries, excluding the Southern Walloon part. I am well aware of the fact that such an artificial limitation hardly made sense under the Ancien régime, but in our specific case it allows me to devote all my time to such authors as belong directly to Dutch culture, if not by language, at least by origin or acculturation.

Latin came to the Low Countries in the tracks of the Roman legions, and for three or four centuries it became the official language. How many of the local population adopted the new tongue is hard to say. It is even harder to know if ever a Batavus or Morinus or other native went so far as to use it for literary purposes. There may have been such authors, as we know there were in Britain, but nothing survives except a few inscriptions in stone and wooden tablets from soldiers enlisted, for example, at Tongeren (Tungri) and based in various parts of the Roman world from Britain (Vindolanda at Hadrian’s wall) to Asia Minor.⁶ Whatever literary life there was, it perished during the devastating Germanic invasions. In the second half of the fifth century Sidonius Appolinaris of Lyons, one of the luminaries of literary life in his age, wrote to Arbogastes, governor at Treves: ‘The splendour of the Roman speech, if it still exists anywhere, has survived in you, though it has long been wiped out from the Belgian and Rhenic lands...’⁷ It would take several centuries before Latin was resuscitated in those Belgicae terrae sufficiently to bring forth writers who were able to do more than compose a saint’s life in barbarous language. As far as I can see the Germanic part of the Low Countries re-entered the Latin literary world in a more or less dignified manner with Bishop Radbod from Utrecht at the turn of the tenth century; and he had been educated in the palace school at Tours. Although his poetry⁸ has nothing exceptional to offer, it reveals a thorough schooling and an acquaintance with the rhetorical and poetic devices cherished since late antiquity such as epanaleptic distiches (in his Oratio ad S. Martinum) and mannerist metaphors such as the one at the beginning of his Ecloga de virtutibus Beati Lebuini:

Inclitus Anglorum veniens Lebuinus ab oris
Sacris virtutum remis et remige Christo
Saeva procellosi compressit flumina Hreni

in which the sacred oars of the virtues, and Christ the rower, who bring Lebuin from England to Deventer, anticipate by centuries the so-called argutiae of the baroque age. But in contrast to the argutiae artists Radbod knows that all exaggeration is a source of annoyance and he refrains from overlong compositions lest his rustic Muses weary finer ears:

Ecce autem cohibere monent fastidia carmen.
Ne Musis doctas laedam ruralibus aures.

A sympathetic poem is the short piece DeHirundine. In his valuable History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, F. J. Raby found this swallow poem important enough to quote it in full⁹ ‘as we try to make out the course of medieval nature-poetry’. There is indeed more to it than learned and rhetorical material (in which it is certainly not lacking!); it contains various charming details which prove that Radbod has been observing the flittering bird with real affection. At the same time the poem is built on classical and late Roman traditions and reminds the reader of similar nature snapshots in Venantius Fortunatus; I for my part cannot see why the Swallow is a ‘true German product’ as Raby puts it.

One cannot say that Radbod marks the beginning of a new flowering of Latin poetry in the Low Countries. As a swallow he did not really herald a new summer. As a matter of fact, in our Middle Ages poets who were more than scholastic versifiers (such as Petrus Pictor of St Omer) and who wrote work which cannot be overlooked in a general history of medieval Latin literature are few and far between. Indeed, I am inclined to point to two or three at most, viz. the poet of the Ysengrimus and, in the strictly religious sphere, Arnulf of Louvain, a Cistercian monk in the mid-thirteenth century who is the author of a deeply moving ecstatic hymn De Passione Domini. The section ‘Salve caput cruentatum’ became widely known through the German adaptation by the seventeenth-century poet Paul Gerhardt, OHaupt voll Blut und Wunden, and the latter’s musical accompaniment by J. S. Bach. In my own schooldays we still sang this hymn in the Dutch version O hoofd vol bloed en wonden, but nobody, of course was in the least aware of its Latin origin in our own Brabant.¹⁰,¹¹

Far more important than Arnulf, however, is Magister Nivardus or whoever it was who shortly before 1150 in Ghent, Flanders, wrote the epoch-making beast epic Ysengrimus, the ancestor of the whole rich literature around Reynart the Fox, one of the most characteristic parts of Europe’s medieval literature.

The exceptional importance of Nivardus leaps to the eye as soon as one opens a few histories of medieval Latin literature. Let me take a rather out of the way example, the Povijest svjetske Knjizevnosti (History of World Literature) in Croatian. The second of the eight volumes is devoted to classical, medieval and modern Greek and Latin literature and to Albanian and was published at Zagreb in 1977. Apart from a few authors from Liège, ‘Nivard Gentski’ is the only medieval Latin author from the Low Countries who is mentioned, and he gets half a page of text.¹² I should like to add that he fully deserves the honour. In his Ysengrimus the animals are for the first time given personal names and well-defined characters: Isengrimus the wolf and Reinardus the fox are the protagonist and antagonist, the former being the eternal victim of the tricks of his cunning cousin. Next to them appear the sick lion Rufanus, Bruno the bear, Berfirdus the goat, Gutero the hare, etc. In seven books and twelve episodes – the bacon, the fishing-trip, the pilgrimage, etc. – the story of the wolf and the fox are elaborated, the core of the work being the diet at the lion’s court.

Our poet is a most entertaining narrator with sometimes a touch of long-windedness; he is also an excellent satirist whose descriptions, now bantering now stinging, of ecclesiastical manners, abuses and dignitaries have lost nothing of their freshness and spirit. In his case I can easily agree with Raby who wrote that Nivard’s ‘poetical inspiration constructed an allegory and satire surpassing anything of this kind that the Middle Ages had as yet produced’.¹³ Indeed, as a satirist I would place him on an equal footing with our other pre-eminent master of ridiculing human vices and follies, Erasmus; in many respects the Ysengrimus is a medieval Laus Stultitiae or may be placed alongside the best of Erasmus’ Colloquies. However, one’s enjoyment of the poem is somewhat marred by the not too brilliant quality of Nivardus’ language and versification. Perhaps as a classicist and Neo-Latinist I am being a little unjust to him, but as one who likes the smooth harmony, the splendid clarity and melodious sound of classical Latin verse, I find it hard to appreciate the distichs of the Ysengrimus. And I am not criticising his use of many non-classical words such as babellare which can produce picturesque effects or give a lively and far from unpleasant flavour to the text; rather I am thinking of the really unidiomatic style, exceedingly opaque in many places and too often intricate, obscure and, to my taste at least, unpleasing. On the other hand I gladly admit that Nivardus rarely if ever bores us with outworn and trite stock tags and phrases or with a tedious uniformity of speech.

He knows how to surprise his reader with unexpected formulas, metaphors, simple but adequate comparisons and descriptions which may even take surrealistic forms, as when he makes the lips of the beheaded John the Baptist refuse the kisses of Herodias and blow her into the thin air through an open skylight:

Oscula captantem caput aufugit atque resufflat;

Ilia per impluvium turbine flantis abit.¹⁴

Nivardus’ imagination here comes very close to or even surpasses that of the ancient poet Ennius, who keeps a trumpet blowing after the head of the soldier playing it has been cut off.¹⁵

After Nivardus we have to wait several centuries before one of the numerous Latin poets and versifiers from the Low Countries achieves real European prominence.¹⁶ As we know, the diffusion of humanism resulted, among other things, in an unprecedented flowering of poetry in Latin. Most significantly, Renaissance humanists called themselves in Latin ‘poetae’, with or without the addition of the term ‘orator’. A particularly cherished genre was erotic poetry following the classical examples of the rediscovered Catullus, of Ovid and of Petrarch. The latter’s sonnets were popular among the Italian Neo-Latin poets and through them Petrarchan motives were carried across the Alps. By a happy coincidence this erotic poetry culminated in the Low Countries in the work of a young genius, who since then has always been the humanist love poet par excellence. This genius was Janus Secundus, who was born at The Hague on 15 November 1511 and died at the age of twenty-five at St Amand near Tournai. Janus had two brothers, Nicolaus Grudius and Hadrianus Marius. They were very distinguished poets in their own right and gave a final finishing touch to Janus’ posthumously printed poetry, as we can see in the Bodleian manuscript Rawlinson G. 154 discovered in 1977 by A. M. M. Dekker and P. M. M. Geurts.¹⁷ In his short life Janus wrote a book of fine Horatian odes, three books consisting partially of love elegies and the most glorious corner-stone of his lasting fame, a cycle of nineteen Basia or Kiss poems, short pieces in various metres which celebrate his love for Neaera. Ever since their first publication in Lyons in 1539 they have been in print, an honour which hardly any other Renaissance Latin poet enjoys. Even today one can buy them in a reprint edition, and only ten years ago two new editions were published, one in Barcelona, the other at Yale University Press. These places alone show the worldwide interest Secundus still provokes. How can we explain this dazzling success of a modern Latin poet, which surpasses that of other poets such as the Italian Johannes Jovianus Pontanus, who is certainly not his inferior in the field of Latin artistry? It may be the fact that Secundus succeeded perfectly in concentrating in one small cycle the very essence of Renaissance love lyrics and did so at the happy moment when Neo-Latin literature reached its heyday not just in Italy but all over Europe: Secundus’ own literary relations reach from Danzig to Lisbon. The concomitant and ensuing full bloom of Renaissance poetry in the vernaculars, which not infrequently invoked our poet as their model, certainly helped to consolidate his fame.

Secundus’ love lyrics, and Renaissance erotic poetry in general, are essentially a joyous eulogy of idealised feminine beauty. They rarely if ever express the deeper feelings which can unite a man and a woman for life.¹⁸ Exactly as humanists in the field of literature were fascinated by the perfection of classical word and verse artistry, so the love poet is spell-bound by the awesome beauty of his beloved, a sense expressed by Secundus in telling verses such as ‘O vis superba formae!’ (O proud power of beauty!), which concludes Basium VIII, and ‘Formosa divis imperat puella’ (A pretty girl rules the gods), the final thought of Basium XVIII. To be allowed to touch that beauty is the paramount desire; this desire and the physical description of the girl, especially her eyes, lips, hair and breasts, are repeated in endless variation. After Secundus it even resulted in the publication of entire books of Ocelli (Pretty Eyes), Capilli (Fair Hair) and the like. In sharp contrast to modern literature, however, the depiction of bodily contact rarely goes further than kisses and close embraces and mostly avoids a descent into overintimate details or vulgarity. A keen aesthetic sense of beauty and seemliness mostly guides the poet: formosa is the key word, papilla the most daring detail. Cruder descriptions of sexual activity or vices are left to writers of epigrams and satires in the wake of Martial and Juvenal. Secundus is definitely much chaster than his model Catullus. In all of the Basia there is perhaps a single line which by means of a Catullan echo suggests the physical reaction of his own body to Neaera’s frolicking and teasing.

Secundus had numerous imitators and admirers all over Europe and especially in Holland until far into the eighteenth century. In 1641, exactly one hundred years after the first complete edition of Secundus’ poetry prepared by his brothers, another noteworthy and posthumous book of Latin verses was published at The Hague, the Venus Zeelanda of Petrus Stratenus (Van der Straten). This young poet from Goes in Zeeland had died at The Hague in 1640 at the age of twenty-four, leaving three books of elegies and twenty-four Basia. The picturesque title-page shows us Venus sailing on the Scheldt river in a shell accompanied by two doves, the birds which pull her chariot in the first Basium of Secundus.

As long as neo-classical Latin poetry was part and parcel of European cultural life, authors from the Low Countries were at the forefront. Among a host of others we may single out Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655) and Sidronius Hosschius (1596–1653). The first, a professor at Leiden, a literary critic and a bilingual poet, aroused admiration as well as opposition from France to Sweden and from England to Silesia. The West-Flemish Jesuit Hosschius could be called a remarkably fine Christian Ovid. When he died Pope Alexander VII ordered an international pleiad of Latin poets to mourn his loss. His elegies were read in Catholic schools all over Europe and as far as Mexico.¹⁹ They were steadily reprinted until the first decades of the nineteenth century. A few years ago, when I was in Messina, a local Latin schoolteacher (Giuseppe Morabito) proudly showed me the only Latin poet of the Low Countries he possessed and whose exquisitely fine versification he highly admired (and he was speaking as a connoisseur, since he himself has written Latin verses all his life). That poet was Sidronius Hosschius.

Before turning to Latin prose I want to say a word on another genre which is closely linked to poetry, viz. drama. In several respects seminal contributions to the development of early modern drama came from the Low Countries in the course of the sixteenth century. The most important may well be due to Erasmus. He was one of the very first (in fact the first together with the lesser known Italian Anselmi) to translate two tragedies of Euripides into Latin, Hecuba and Iphigenia in Aulide, and to make them accessible again to all educated people in Europe.²⁰ After Erasmus others were to translate more plays, including the tragedies of Sophocles and, finally, of Aeschylus. The publication of these texts and their performances in school theatres signal the recovery in Western Europe of Greek tragedy after its long oblivion during the Middle Ages. Before long they stimulated other artists to make versions in the vernacular or to try their hand at entirely new dramas either in Latin or the modern tongues. The enormous popularity of the story of Jephthah, a Christian parallel to Iphigenia, is a good example of this. The theoretical grounding in the new dramatic art was found in a host of Latin essays; two major ones at least originated from the Low Countries: the Syntagma tragoediae latinae of Martinus Delrio from Antwerp (1593) and the even more important Detragoediae consitutione of Daniel Heinsius (1611), which became a respected authority in French literary circles. Apart from these theoreticians several of our Latin playwrights became real classics for about two centuries, especially in the field of biblical drama and morality plays. In the sixteenth century the lion’s share of humanist drama is taken by the fabula sacra, which nearly always borrows its subject from the Bible. A pioneering example of this kind of drama is the Acolastus or Prodigal Son story (1529), written by Cornelius Gnapheus of The Hague. In the sixteenth century alone it was printed over fifty times as well as being translated into German, French and English.²¹ Another Dutchman, who built on the solid foundations laid by Gnapheus, met with no less success: Cornelius Schonaeus from Gouda (1541–1611) and a life-long teacher at Haarlem, is known to this day among scholars of the Renaissance as the Terentius Christianus. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a hundred editions of his plays were published in places as far apart as Oxford and Varad/Oradea in Transylvania, Abo/Turku in Finland and in Paris, London and Prague. Add to them the various translations in Dutch, English, French, German, Swedish, Danish and Polish, and one can easily imagine how many young people read Schonaeus in their schooldays and learned from him the true Christian form of classical drama.²²

So far I have dealt only with biblical drama. But since we are investigating the European dimension of the Low Countries’ Latin literature we cannot skip another important branch of Neo-Latin drama, i.e. Elckerlyc or Everyman. Since Ischyrius’ rather literal Latinisation (Homulus), this theme was taken up again by at least four or five other Latin playwrights in the Low Countries. Two of them stand out by virtue of their intrinsic qualities and of their international propagation and reputation. Both authors came from Brabant, Georgius Macropedius from the region of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Laevinus Brechtus from Antwerp. The Hecastus (1539) of Macropedius is both his masterpiece and the classical Latin version of Elckerlyc. It was particularly popular and influential in the German empire. Ten years later at Louvain Brechtus composed his Euripis, which was to become the cherished model of a Christian play in the Jesuit colleges at the time the newly founded order began to work towards the creation of what now is known as the Ordensdrama, the last, brilliant phase of Latin theatre in the Catholic schools. Thus Brechtus’ free adaptation of the Everyman motif was performed in many Counter-Reformation schools from Spain to Bavaria and Bohemia.²³ At this point I must stress that these two or three authors are just the tip of a huge iceberg and that many of the minor ones were read and performed far beyond the narrow boundaries of the Netherlands. In 1540 Nicolaus Brylinger published at Basel a representative selection of ten biblical dramas: seven of them are the work of five different authors from Holland, Zeeland, Brabant and Flanders.²⁴ This shows the dominant position of these small countries in sixteenth-century humanist drama, a position made possible by the generalised use of Latin in the European school system of the time.

Our discussion of Neo-Latin drama has brought us to the field of education during the Renaissance. I already underlined the paramount importance of sound and thorough language instruction as a prerequisite for making valuable literature in Latin. Drama was one of the pedagogical devices, as were grammar books, colloquies, manuals and essays on rhetoric and style. In all of these the Low Countries provided the humanist schools all over Europe with first-class handbooks and critical discussions of basic issues. I can do no more than offer a hasty sketch of these fundamental areas of humanist learning and take a cursory look at the main scholars involved.

The study of a language begins with grammar and vocabulary, matters which in general do not appeal very strongly to children’s minds. This sentiment is voiced in an old French verse about

Un écolier qui ne s’amusait guère

à feuilleter Clénard et Despautère.

The books the pupil was unwillingly leafing through were a Greek and a Latin grammar. Their authors were Nicolaus Clenardus (1495–1542) from Diest in Brabant and Johannes Despauterius (1480–1520) from Ninove in Flanders, both educated at the University of Louvain. Clenardus published his Institutiones in linguam Graecam in 1530 and between that year and 1700 about 500 editions have been counted of both the original version and its seventeenth-century modernisation by the Dutch scholar Gerardus Vossius.²⁵ Clenardus is beyond any doubt the second author from the Low Countries who can never be overlooked in a history of Greek and Greek literature in the West. The first one in the same field is about 300 years older, the Fleming William van Moerbeke (c.1215–86), the friend of Thomas Aquinas, for whom he produced a Latin translation of the complete works of Aristotle.²⁶ This William came from the same south-eastern corner of Flanders as Despauterius, the man who made the final humanist adaptation of the immensely popular Doctrinale or versified medieval Latin grammar by the Norman Alexander de Villa Dei. Despauterius’ success can easily stand comparison with Clenardus. For several centuries two Latin grammars dominated in the European schools, by Despauterius and by the Portuguese Jesuit Alvarez.

It may be interesting also to mention the fact that Despauterius, when he was a teacher at Komen/Comines in Southern Flanders, had a noble protector and patron, George Lord of Halewijn/Halluin and Komen, who himself published a plea for learning Latin by what we call today the natural method.²⁷ We learn Spanish, so Georges argues, simply by listening to Spaniards, not by studying grammar books; so why don’t we do the same for Latin? With Latin, however, the problem was and still is that we don’t have native speakers to listen to. A partial remedy in humanist schools was found in the performance of dramas and, in an earlier stage, of dialogues, the so-called Colloquia and Declamationes. To this day the vast body of Colloquies written by Erasmus is rightly famous. It is the most splendid example of a schoolbook which combines excellent language with fascinating content. Beginning with the most simple greeting formulas and the like, Erasmus increases the word stock of his pupils step by step and at the same time tackles with them one after another all the major issues – cultural, religious, political, literary – of his time. And he does it in his unique and irresistibly humorous style, where nothing escapes his wit and irony: military life, marriage, stupid scholarship and ignorance, superstitions and pilgrimages, clerical abuses etc. Although Erasmus never entered a classroom he wrote one of the best and successful schoolbooks of all time. I suppose Erasmus had experienced the truly soporific qualities of most schoolbooks in his days in Paris when he had to make a living as tutor to rich German and English children.

In a humanist school it was not enough to learn the correct use of Latin; it was equally important to master the secrets of its artistic use, which involved a thorough acquaintance with all the devices of rhetoric, beginning with the inventio and its indispensable fund of the loci communes, or commonplaces. In the late fifteenth century Erasmus’ great predecessor, the Frisian Rudolf Agricola, a man formed in Italy, wrote a DeInventione Dialectica, which was destined to become the leading treatise in the field in most of Europe until it was supplanted in the latter half of the sixteenth century by the similar work of the Parisian professor Petrus Ramus.

I have mentioned the problem of the complete absence of native speakers of Latin. As a consequence the question arises of determining what constitutes good Latin. According to humanist perception these criteria must be sought, quite reasonably, in ancient literature. This principle, however, does not solve the problem, but only displaces it. Ancient literature covers a span of about 700–800 years and the Latin of Caesar is certainly not the same as that of Gregory the Great, notwithstanding the fact that both men were Romans by birth and talented authors to boot. So, it soon appeared necessary to agree upon the Latin of a well-defined period or group of authors. In Italy, two opposing schools clashed in violent disputes: one swore by Cicero and his age, the extremists among them by Cicero alone; the other group also admitted and sometimes preferred later authors such as Tacitus, the younger Pliny and Apuleius. Great and furious battles were fought. In the sixteenth century two eminent sons of the Netherlands spoke out authoritatively on the question: first Erasmus, and then Lipsius. In his Ciceronianus dialogue (1528) Erasmus ridiculed excessive Ciceronianism and thus prevented the greater part of Northern humanists from wasting their time and art on trying to become perfect Ciceronian clones (or in humanist terminology simii, apes). From then on Cicero’s style remained, certainly, the common base of literary prose, but only as a sort of general directive and not as an oppressive straitjacket. In the course of time it was to be expected, however, that one and the same model, even if followed in a free and intelligent manner, was bound to become tedious. So, half a century after Erasmus, Justus Lipsius – himself still educated according to the principles of smooth and harmonious classicism – tried to take a new direction basing his style on later authors such as Seneca and, especially, Tacitus: short, rough, chopped-up sentences were to take the place of lengthy well-balanced periods. Although this kind of style is much more difficult to understand for the reader, Lipsius’ immense authority as a scholar and philologist guaranteed success all over Europe and even influenced the style of vernacular languages. For a time that success was consolidated by Lipsius’ much-admired successor, Erycius Puteanus from Venlo. If in the long run the new style once more lost its hold in favour of the more classical one, the reason may be twofold: the classical style is easier for the reader, and the Jesuits in their influential colleges did not join in, but soon rejected the novelty, mainly through the authoritative essays of the Roman Famianus Strada, the ‘Latin oracle of his age’ as he used to be called.

Grammar and rhetoric are not by any means the only areas of learning in which Latin authors of the Low Countries made distinguished contributions from the scholastic Middle Ages down to the age of Renaissance humanism. But, as I do not myself have sufficient competence to discuss the various scientific and scholarly disciplines, I will simply let a few names speak for themselves. They are, indeed, so famous that every educated person has learned them in his or her schooldays. I will then round off my survey with a short discussion of two remarkable travel journals by Flemish authors which will allow me to compare a typical medieval and a typical humanistic text and, in so doing, show the striking impact on both form and content of humanist education and language instruction as it was offered in institutions such as the Louvain Collegium Trilingue (founded 1517).

In the Middle Ages the main scholarly disciplines were theology-cum-philosophy and law. The Low Countries cannot boast of having given birth to the very greatest among the scholastic philosophers. Yet, in the thirteenth century Henricus of Ghent (d. 1293) is not unworthy to stand in the company of Thomas Aquinas, whose Aristotelianism he did not share, or for that matter, of Roger Bacon. And at the very end of the scholastic age the philosopher and mystic Denis the Carthusian from Rijker, Limburg (d. 1471), made the final synthesis of the views held by the representatives of the Via Antiqua. Denis is a contemporary of Thomas à Kempis, whose authorship of the Imitatio Christi, one of the most popular books of Christian piety ever written, is no longer seriously challenged. During the Renaissance scholastic philosophy drags out a lingering existence in ecclesiastical schools and seminaries, once in a while rejuvenated by a rare original thinker such as the Jesuit Leonardus Lessius from Brecht near Antwerp (1554–1623), who is now considered to be one of the pioneering authors in economic theory. At about the same time as Lessius a Dutch theologian and lawyer, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), laid the foundations of modern international law in his De iure belli ac pacis (1625).

In the field of medicine everybody knows at least the title of Vesalius’ anatomical work De fabrica corporis humani (1543); in the same field the Amsterdam anatomist Nicolaus Tulp (1593–1674) deserves an honourable mention as one of the founders of pathological anatomy. His fame, however, now seems better guaranteed by the fact that Rembrandt happened to paint one of his anatomical lessons. Another physician, Johannes Baptista van Helmont from Brussels (1579–1644), who specialised in chemical – or if you prefer alchemical – research gave the concept and the term ‘gas’ to the modern world. How far his fame spread through Europe is shown by the fact that around 1700 Rumania’s greatest Latin author, the Moldavian prince Demetrius Cantemir, wrote in praise of Van Helmont and his physical doctrine.

These examples amply suffice to illustrate how well Latin served many generations of scholars and scientists from the Low Countries whose native language would have prevented them from participating fully in the international development of learning. I will now withdraw from disciplines which I do not know from my own studies and turn to two texts, a medieval and a humanist one, which offer a broad range of interesting aspects to students of language, literature, history and culture in general.

Ever since Cicero wrote his voluminous correspondence to Atticus and other friends, letters have been an important genre in Western literature. Our greatest Latin author, Erasmus, is at the same time one of the most brilliant epistolographers that ever wrote. His correspondence can easily be called a Speculum historiale of his time. A whole library of scholarship has been devoted to its study and I will not try to summarise it or to add an insignificant trifle to such an amount of learning. I rather wish to look at two other letter-writers, who committed their adventurous experiences in the course of journeys to the East to long letters in Latin: Marco Polo’s immediate precursor William of Rubroek (now Rubrouck near Cassel in northern France) travelling to Mongolia in the middle of the thirteenth century and, almost exactly 300 years later, Augerius Busbequius, who travelled from Vienna to the Sultan’s court in Constantinople and Amasia in north-central Turkey. The first was a Franciscan monk unofficially in the service of the French king Louis IX (St Louis), to whom he addressed his report on his return in 1255.²⁸ The second went on diplomatic missions on behalf of Ferdinand I, the younger brother of Charles V. His first letter is dated 1 September 1554, his fourth and last 16 December 1562.²⁹,³⁰ Whoever entertains doubts about the profound differences between the Middle Ages and Renaissance should read the two men’s letters successively: he will find two entirely different spiritual worlds notwithstanding the fact that both men were Roman Catholics writing in Latin. William and Augerius came from the same south-western comer of Flanders which now belongs to France. Their native dialect must have been much the same and we hear a faint echo of it in the observation they both make about the Germanic language of Crimean Gothic. William actually passed through their region and expressly mentions those Goti, quorum ydioma est teutonicum, but fails to give further information. Busbequius had the opportunity of interviewing a Crimean Goth in Constantinople and his keener humanist interest in languages made him jot down a small word-list, the basic numerals and three lines of a song. On this occasion he states that his Flemish pronunciation of seven (‘sevene’) is exactly the same as in Gothic but different from that in Brabant, which is ‘seven’.³¹ There are still other common traits, for example a certain humorous view of their own persons. William tells us that he was always given a strong horse, quia eram ponderosus valde, ‘because I was very fat’.³² Augerius describes the special attire the Turks put on him upon being received by the Sultan and then adds: Procedo cum hac pompa veluti Agamemnonem aut similem aliquem in tragoedia acturus, ‘I looked as if I was going to play the part of Agamemnon or a similar character in a tragedy’.³³

Such similarities cannot conceal, however, the unbridgeable differences. William is a medieval monk who goes in search of Christian rulers and people to baptise. His attention is first and foremost directed to religious questions. In between there are, to be sure, many interesting observations: he mentions skis (XXIX 45); he is the first Westerner to give correct information on Chinese writing (XXIX 50), etc. Yet the essential part of his narrative about his sojourn in Mongolia is devoted to theological discussions in which he tries to convince the local sovereign of the superiority of Roman Catholicism. The much more enlightened attitude of the Manchu Khan is a bitter disappointment for our Franciscan, who concludes the story with the astonishing reflection: ‘If I had had the power of doing miracles like Moses, he would perhaps have abased himself.’³⁴ William, furthermore, writes horrible and in all respects unidiomatic Latin which it is no pleasure at all to read and which, under its deceptive simplicity, often verges on obscurity because of its un-Latin style. To give him his due, I should add that William was aware of his poor qualities as a writer since he introduces himself with the words: ‘ab homine parum prudente nec consueto tam longas hystorias scribere’.³⁵

Busbequius on the other hand is a truly gifted writer who handles classical Latin with masterly skill. His excellent, straightforward, lucid style is a joy to read and easy to understand. Moreover his interest is boundless: the lands and the peoples, local dress and architecture, plants and animals, ancient manuscripts, ruins and inscriptions and much more. He describes rice-fields in Bulgaria, and tulips near Edirne; he visits the zoo at Constantinople and asks to disinter the only giraffe which had died just before his arrival; he tastes and appreciates yoghurt, acidi lactis genus, quod illi iugurtham dicunt.³⁶ A pervasive characteristic of Busbequius’ reports is the keen interest in all aspects and traces of classical civilisation. In William’s letters references to ancient sources are limited to two medieval encyclopedias, Isidore of Seville and Solinus; and an isolated half-line from Virgil’s Aeneid.³⁷ Augerius, on the contrary, knows his classics, which are part and parcel of his intellectual world. When he is called to Amasia, he remembers that it is the birthplace of the geographer Strabo. He reports that he could not find the Insulae Cyaneae, the famous colliding islands from the story of the Argonauts; he believes that at Nicea he slept in the very room in which the Council was held; he is happy to discover near Ankara the Res Gestae Augusti, which he copied out. Busbequius quite clearly is a man of a new era: thanks to the spectacular improvement in education he possesses a solid and broad cultural grounding based on both ancient and modern literature (he refers e.g. to Thomas More’s Utopia).³⁸ Furthermore he has at his disposal a rich and flexible Latin, which enables him to express all his thoughts and experiences in an adequate way. In Busbequius one can fully appreciate the splendid results humanist education could achieve with talented individuals.

It is time to conclude. Latin is, as we have seen, an integral part of the medieval and early modern culture of the Low Countries. Through it they spoke to the whole civilised Western world. Today it is disappearing rapidly from the intellectual equipment of artists and educated people. Yet the old language has been slow to die in Holland and Flanders. Until 1978 the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam every year issued a successful international contest for Latin poets, the Certamen Hoeufflianum. In 1961 my own doctoral dissertation was published in Latin by the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts. At that time Latin was the only international language allowed to be used in the Academy’s publications next to its own Dutch. Those times will never return. In the field of sciences and scholarship Latin can no longer challenge English. Nevertheless, it would be a substantial loss to our cultural heritage if in the future the scholarly knowledge of Latin were to waste away to such an extent that almost nobody was able to study our Latin literature with reliable competence.