COLLOQUIUM: Christopher S. Celenza, The Johns Hopkins University, "What sort of Language did the ancient Romans speak? A fifteenth-century debate"

Running throughout fifteenth-century Italian intellectual life was a debate: what was the nature of that Latin language? Was it an "artificial" language — one with its own, notionally permanent rules? Or was it a "natural" language, one once spoken in the home?  This talk will highlight what was at stake in this debate, how it fueled and was fueled by fifteenth-century thinkers' views about history, and how, at least in one respect, it provides an interpretive key for italian Renaissance intellectual life.