Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn

Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn provides an entirely new look at an era of radical change in the history of West European thought, the period between 1480 and 1540, mainly in France and Germany. The lens for this novel perspective is the Latin language shift, from the Latin idiom in which late medieval intellectual inquiry was conducted to the reinvented classical idiom aggressively promoted and finally imposed by the humanists. This is not a narrow philological study of language change. The book's main thesis is that the Latin language turn was not only concurrent with other aspects of change, but was a fundamental instrument in reconfiguring horizons of thought, reformulating paradigms of argument, and rearticulating the relationship between fiction and truth. The book examines particularly crucial documents by a few major figures (Erasmus, Lefevre d'Etaples, Melanchthon), but it is original in the way it brings to the fore the contributions of secondary writers who rar