One of the most influential books ever written in Latin Boethius was born into a time of transition. For the first time in over 500 years, there was no Roman emperor in the West; knowledge of Greek had becoming exceedingly rare, and so understand of the great classical works, including […]
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The 13th Century Devotional Classic On February 2, 1257, a brilliant young theologian from Italy who went by the name of Bonaventure was elected to lead the Franciscan order, which was not yet quite 50 years old. Seeking clarity for this new mission, he traveled to Mount Alverna, where Francis […]
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A Classic Method In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, students learned Latin so that they would be able to do all of their other studies in that language. Their first introduction to the language was not Caesar or Cicero, but the forms of the language required to ask questions […]
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Dive into Latin Poetry! Latin poetry is glorious! But it is not very like English poetry. So different are the quantitative meters native to Latin from the accentual meters of English that it can almost seem like a category error to call them both poetry. As a result, our experience […]
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Latin Reading of a Classic Text De Doctrina Christiana, usually translated as On Christian Teaching, was written by Augustine of Hippo at the beginning of the 5th century AD, and has been a classic text on reading the Scriptures ever since. In this course, we will be reading this book […]
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Add Spoken Latin to Your Language Ability It’s a simple truth: Latin is a language, and was spoken long before it was ever written down. The language developed with an eye (or ear) to oral communication, and this has been its main use for most of its life. To really […]
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Understanding Latin from the Inside Out Much of Latin seems counter-intuitive to English-speaking students. Seemingly arbitrary and very difficult features of the language like cases, word order, and the incredible number of verb forms not only make the language difficult to learn, they also take a major toll on student […]
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Correcting Our Understanding of Grammar Grammar, as the foundation of language, is an essential element in all good writing. And yet very few opportunities exist for us as adults to think about grammar in a focused way, to explore and question those rules that we so often teach more by […]
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Languages Were Made to Be Spoken The student of French of Spanish comes home on the first day having learned to say a few simple phrases. From the first moments in the classroom, they are beginning to speak in another language, taking the step towards thinking with a foreign mind. […]
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