LATIN LITERATURE OF THE MID DLE AGES. The very greatness of the Roman Empire gives the reason for its dis solution, even apart from the barbaric invasions, and the vicissitudes attending this dissolution were reflected in the cultivated and the popular language alike. There was this exception, how ever; the latter preserved its vitality upon the tongues of the people, while the former tended to become a sort of official lingua franca with the monks and notaries, and even with the learned was modified by the influence of the colloquial dialects and new forms of thought, until it lost nearly every vestige of its former elegance and grace and became the barbarous Latin which, after serving as vehicle for the thought of western Europe for seven centuries, contributed to the later revival of that tongue in its classic purity that was so important a feature of the Renaissance. . • The Latin language during the centuries of the literary decadence could not of course be maintained in this classic purity. On the one hand, the prevalence of vulgar idioms and the accumulation of foreign elements through the granting of citizenship to all the subjects of the empire, and, on the other hand, the rapid transformation of thought which, to give ex pression to new ideas, constrained the words to new meanings often far removed from their origin — these were the elements which con tributed to the rapid corruption of the literary language. Meanwhile, in the individual prov inces, the mixture of the official language with the dialectal elements and the natural differ entiation due to a variety of causes had brought about the birth of different forms of the lan guage from the 3d century on; so that the Gallic Latin, for example, had its own charac teristics which distinguished it from the Afri can Latin with its bombastic sonority. These were the first germs of new languages which were to spring from the root of Latinity. Nevertheless, although it is probably impossible to determine just when • Latin ceased to exist as a spoken language among the COnMon peo ple, it continued throughout the Middle Ages to be the language of the Church, of the law courts and of both religious and secular edu cation and in this way became the medium of no inconsiderable number of real literary pro ductions.
It is generally conceded that the Middle Ages began with the fall of the Empire of i the West in 476, for it was then that the civil ization and culture of the ancient Romans suc cumbed to the barbarians. It is from this point, then, that we begm the history of the Latin literature of the Middle Ages, continuing from that date to the fall of Constantinople in 145.3. For purposes of discussion, it will • be convenient to make roughly a division into pe riods, although this does not necessarily con note abrupt changes. From 476 to the 8th cen tury Latin literature is found in a condition of deepest decline, from which it recovers by progressive steps through the ecclesiastical re naissance (from the 8th to the 10th centuries) and the period of scholasticism (from the-llth to the 14th centuries) to the world Renaissance (from the 14th century on). Without malting these arbitrary limits too hard and .fast, we shall proceed to enumerate briefly the chief authors in the various fields of literature.
1. Pra-Carolingian Period.— With the tri umphant spread of Christianity, the things of the world had lost their appeal and the think ing man begins to look within; after the con version of Spain and France, the only worthy objects of human endeavor are the restoration of God's kindom on earth and the struggle against earthly enticements to sin. There arose a natural antagonism to pagan literature and consequently to pagan literary forms and ideals, many Christian writers professing to despise exactness in writing, °since I think it utterly as Pope Gregory said, constrain the words of the divine oracles under the rules of Donatus.° At any rate, the fall of the Western Empire and the supremacy of the bar barians ended by giving the last blow to the language of Cicero and Virgil, reducing it very quickly to a language of official formulas, which the people • were certainly not at all anxious to learn, content as they were with their own vulgar dialect.