A highly original and accessible history of Latin between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries
Françoise Waquet is director of research emeritus at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Latin, or the Empire of a Sign is the opening volume in a highly praised sequence of books on the social worlds of intellectuals, continued most recently with Une histoire émotionnelle du savoir (2019).
Waquet's wonderful, readable book (in Howe's fine translation)
provides an intellectual history of the Latin language ... Waquet
memorably charts Latin's reception in scholarly, comic, tender, and
exhaustive detail through learned literary, and popular
sources.
*Choice*
... an erudite, fascinating cultural history of the Latin language
in the modern era. A scholarly work, this will nonetheless appeal
to general readers as well.
*History*
... an eloquent obituary ...
*Spectator*
... [a] fascinating and lively survey of the place of Latin in
western culture during the past 400 years.
*Independent*
It is a wonderful survey of the uses to which we have put
Latin.
*A. N. Wilson*
... richly researched and delightful ... with scholars of Waquet's
generosity and ability, the old language might yet have a
future.
*New Criterion*
Latin is dead and this book is its epitaph. A fulsome, plangent,
finely engraved epitaph but an epitaph all the same ... it is the
merit and interest of Waquet's survey that she finds Latin not only
deployed for the liturgy, but also to describe things carnal,
pornographic or otherwise shameful.
*Daily Telegraph*
... the book is valuable if for no other reason than for the
historical light it sheds on contemporary debates over the value of
'traditional' education - and for reminding us that a classical
education is sometimes more about class than about education.
*Washington Times*
... a splendid book: original in method, suggestive in argument,
and a pleasure to read.
*London Review of Books*
And for something differently serious, read part of Europe's future
in part of its past: the fascinating Latin: or the Empire of the
Sign.
*Guardian, Summer Choice 2002*
... detailed and wide-ranging ...
*Los Angeles Times Book Review*
... a lucid, learned retelling of the fortunes of the Latin
language from the 16th century to its rapid decline in the
1960s.
*Telegraph Books of the Year 2001*
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