Profiling cultural literacy of Croatian Latin writers
Profiling cultural literacy of Croatian Latin writers
Neven Jovanović
University of Zagreb
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Classical Philology
neven.jovanovic@ffzg.hr
Dec 12, 2012
Abstract
Around 1980 E. D. Hirsch developed the concept of "cultural literacy", defining it as the body of background knowledge that is taken for granted in literate communication. Hirsch represented this general knowledge lexicographically, as a list of words and phrases, and from a national (in that case, American) perspective. Intuition tells us that the Europe-wide community of people who wrote in Latin during the early modern era must have shared a body of background knowledge as well; but what constituted it? Works such as Helander's study of Neo-Latin literature in 17th-century Sweden (2004) suggest that it is possible to extract a list similar to Hirsch's from the Latin texts of our cultural heritage. But how did this general Latin knowledge change over centuries? How did it overlap with specifically national cultural literacy? Would a list of key terms in Latin differ from its equivalent in a national language?
We approach these questions through a digital collection of texts by Croatian Latin writers, the Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa, www.ffzg.unizg.hr/klafil/croala). CroALa invites such an experiment because it currently makes searchable over 170 files and 440.000 words by some 115 authors connected with Croatian culture who wrote different kinds of texts in Latin from 1200 to 1900.
1 Cultural literacy and history of ideas
According to the definition of U.S. educator E. D. Hirsch, "cultural literacy" is "the body of background knowledge that is taken for granted in literate communication". In Europe, this concept isn't something particularly new; in German it would be allgemeine Bildung or Bildungsgut, in Italian cultura generale, in Croatian opća kultura. And when we see that Hirsch decided to represent this body of general knowledge as a list of words and phrases (under the titles "What every American needs to know" and "What literate Americans know"), we realize that "cultural literacy" is a modern name for what historians such as Kristeller, Curtius, or Walter Ong call the "commonplace tradition" - that is, medieval and early modern accumulation, storage, and retrieval of important existing knowledge, the strategy of preparation and use of the stock of things one can say and think concerning a given subject. Hirsch's list of "What every American needs to know" (as well as "Duden - Allgemeinbildung kompakt: Was jeder wissen muss") are modern versions of commonplace collections; as such, they are similar to the Officina (1520) and the Epitheta (1518/24) by Ioannes Ravisius Textor (Jean Tixier, 1470-1524), and to the Theatrum humanae vitae by Theodor Zwinger (1533-1588).
Hirsch (75) imagined a "national vocabulary" as comprising three distinct domains. The first domain is international, shared by literate people everywhere in the world, taught in all national educational systems, and not confined to any particular national language. The second domain contains vocabulary needed for literacy in a given language - in case of English, this would be the vocabulary shared by all people using English in communication. The third domain consists of information and vocabulary special to a literate person's own country.
We modified Hirsch's theory proposing that people from the past, especially people who communicated in Latin, also shared a common vocabulary and a common body of general knowledge - and that this vocabulary and knowledge can be reconstructed from texts. Obviously, their knowledge differ from our cultural literacy, and therefore in reconstructing it we would also be learning something about the past (and perhaps even about ourselves).
The hypothesis has a corollary as well. If there really is a common body of knowledge in neo-Latin, would this body also turn out to have three domains - not only the universal one, and the one of the shared speech community, but also a domain that is specifically national?
2 Croatiae auctores Latini
We tested the hypothesis and its corollary on the texts from the Croatiae auctores Latini digital collection. (Here I have to thank Google Inc, whose Google European Digital Humanities Research Award, which we won in 2011, enabled us to carry out this research.)
CroALa, first published in 2009, comprises in its Beta-3 version, from October 2012, around 4.7 million words in 373 documents by 163 authors of Croatian origin, writing between 976 and 1984. At a rough estimate, Croatian neo-Latin literature would consist of about 7000 titles and 4000 authors. CroALa represents only a small fraction of it - about 5.3% of works and 4% of authors. And yet, it is the largest extant curated collection of Croatian Latin texts, both in print and in digital form.
CroALa wasn't conceived as a linguistic or balanced corpus, and the "Beta" in its version number signals that we're still in an experimental phase. The collection is therefore uneven chronologically, editorially, and in genres it represents. Of the 373 documents now in CroALa, the majority (340) is from the modern period - 245 from the Renaissance (1400-1600), 92 from the period 1600-1850, and 4 later than that. This puts at our disposal a slightly random sample of Croatian early modern and modern neo-Latin literature; the random sample could be acceptable if we're interested in what a group of people from the past shared,
3 Cultural literacy in CroALa: an example
In exploring a national collection of neo-Latin texts, our approach differs from the one chosen by Hans Helander for his Neo-Latin literature in Sweden in the period 1620-1720. Helander's method is inductive. His study is based on reading the texts and listing and categorizing what is common or characteristic in them. Such an approach to CroALa texts could be used to notice, for example, that there are 26 mentions of Constantine VII Porphyrogenetus - the Byzantine emperor is important for Croatian history because his De administrando imperio contains the first report on Croatian people - but, as it happens, only the first author mentioning Porphyrogenetus, Stjepan Gradić (Stephanus Gradius, 1613-1683) from Dubrovnik, in his biography of another Dubrovnik writer, Junije Palmotić (De vita, ingenio, et studiis Junii Palmottae, 1670) - feels the need to give background information on Porphyrogenetus (for Pavao Ritter Vitezović, born in Senj, active in Zagreb, Porphyrogenetus is somebody his readers are well acquainted with):
Cuius rei satis locuples testis est Porphyrogeneta Constantinus Orientis Imperator, cuius erat in ditione Dalmatia
But, as I said, we didn't follow this inductive approach. We proceeded in a deductive way, taking lists of cultural terms found elsewhere and searching for these terms in CroALa. In the rest of the paper I'll give you a bird's eye view - we won't have time to go into details, which you can explore later, as the findings are freely accessible on the internet - of two such deductive tests. First, we'll see what is found when we apply to CroALa Hirsch's list of current American cultural literacy. Second, we'll have a look at terms from CAMENA TERMINI list - this is the database developed in Mannheim University, containing about 200.000 keywords culled from early modern dictionaries and encyclopedias - which are present in CroALa.
4 Approach 1: Hirsch's list in CroALa
In its 2002 edition, Hirsch's list is presented as The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy; the terms are categorized in sections (the Bible, mythology and folklore, proverbs, idioms, all the way to earth sciences, life sciences, medicine and health, technology). One of the sections is dedicated to physical sciences and mathematics. From that section we selected first 40 terms, excluding those which could not have been known to people before the year 1800 (such as relativity, atomic clock, black hole), as well as terms which belong not only to specialized language of science, but to the common usage as well (such as force, heat, axis). We further limited our test by searching for scientific terms only in CroALa texts from the post-Renaissance period. The table shows the selected terms, numbers of their ocurrence in post-Renaissance texts, and the search string that we used; you'll notice that the search string is at the same time link to that search - but this time in all texts in CroALa.
Searches in two different sets of CroALa texts enabled us to compare usages of Hirsch's scientific terms; this, again, put us in position to divide the terms in three groups, based on word frequency. We see that some terms occur very often - geometry (but not mathematics), comet (but not planet), diameter, element - but equilibrium is especially interesting in that it occurs exclusively in post-Renaissance Croatian texts. Examination of contexts shows, furthermore, that in our texts this is not only a word from physical sciences, but also a political term.
In the range of 20-100 occurrences I again call your attention to the terms which are used exclusively in texts after 1600; such terms are highlighted in the last group, words occurring less than 20 times. Everywhere we meet with the same phenomenon: a group of terms is used in their scientific meanings by authors of Jesuit didactic poetry, especially those from Dubrovnik (Stay, Bošković, Rastić, Kunić), while terms used in political and legal contexts are found in texts from continental Croatia (Krčelić, Škrlec, Barić).
The last group in this section are terms which are not not much thematized by post-Renaissance Croatian writers. While some of them have not yet become scientific terms (distillation, energy), others signal which themes are not in the centre of Croatian post-Renaissance Latin writers' attention (Euclides, circumference)
5 Approach 2: CAMENA TERMINI in CroALa
Queries from Hirsch's list were put together by hand. The process of searching CroALa can, however, also be automated - we can write simple, short programs which will post a hundred thousand queries to the collection and record the results. This enables us to experiment with large-scale searches, where several thousand queries are performed over ca. 270.000 different forms in CroALa texts. Furthermore, such large-scale queries are not especially costly; they are carried out on my old laptop, with basic command line tools.
Such large-scale searches prepare material for closer analysis of cultural literacy. We'll demonstrate this searching in CroALa for terms in CAMENA TERMINI databse of 200.000 Latin entries compiled from early modern reference works - lexica, encyclopedias, dictionaries. Our rationale is that the terms the authors of these works wanted to include were ipso facto elements of cultural literacy in the period. Also, the CAMENA TERMINI list is in Latin, as opposed to Hirsch's list, which we had to translate.
Our experiment was necessarilly limited in several ways. First, we chose only five last letters from the alphabet; second, we excluded words with less than five syllables (it turned out that they cannot be searched unambiguously enough). In all, we had 8718 queries to be executed on 270.000 Latin forms in CroALa. Search of this scale takes about an hour on my computer.
The results are presented here. The table shows 2991 terms which were found in CroALa texts, with additional information on how many occurrences belong to post-Renaissance texts ("0" means that a term exists in the collection, but isn't found in texts after the year 1600). Links on the left take us to corresponding CAMENA TERMINI entries, those on the right to searches in CroALa, performed this time over all texts. 830 terms - more than a quarter - are not present in post-Renaissance texts; such missing terms are themselves a welcome starting point for research. But, being pressed for time, we'll give a few highlights on what can be discovered by reading the remaining 2161 terms and their contexts in CroALa and TERMINI.
Categories start to form. Some terms are of local interest; they would belong to Hirsch's third, least universal core. Vaiuoda, Viennensis and Zagoria all belong there - but, while uaiuoda appears in both senses known from the lexicon (the uaiuoda of Transylvania and the uaiuoda as Slavic and Hungarian military leader), Zagoria in CroALa isn't "regio circa Develtum in Thracia". And Viennensis in the sense of "belonging to Vienna" appears only in texts from the 18th century.
Other terms reflect specific preoccupations of the period: the Jesuit saint St Francis Xavier, earthquakes; administration and the law (encountered in texts from continental Croatia); technology and science (found in school texts and in poems of the poets from Dubrovnik, many of them Jesuits, all educated in Jesuit schools).
Some terms show a change coming. Territorium, absent from texts after the Middle Ages, appears again, to assume its modern sense. Vaccinus, previously exclusively meaning "of the cow", is "vaccine" in "Vaccinatio carmen elegiacum" by Luko Stulli (Dubrovnik, 1804 - that is, eight years after Edward Jenner's successful experiment with cowpox vaccine). Usage changes are not limited to technology: while in the Renaissance terrigena can be an epitheton both of Giants from Greek mythology and of mankind, later it is used exclusively as a poetic term for the human race.
Let me conclude with a reflection on cultural literacy made by a Croatian author from the period. Telegonus appears in CroALa exclusively as Telegoni iuga, that is, a poetic antonomasia for the Tuscan hills; it is used by the 18th c. Dubrovnik Jesuit poets Kunić, Bošković, and Stay. To us, it seems a piece of learned knowledge shared inside a small group of highly educated priests. We're not the only ones; a certain Varus complained to Kunić that such usage is too learned. In an epigram Kunić replied, essentially, that it is a part of cultural literacy.
6 Some conclusions
In conclusion. We know that ideas spread, both over space and over time. We also know that during the early modern period some of the ideas which were spreading held seeds of modernity, first voices of the time that we live in. But how exactly did these ideas spread? Which seeds fell where, which sprang up? That is: which early modern ideas used neo-Latin writings as a medium, which did not? Which ones reached the region and the authors related to modern Croatia - that region which was in many respects on the periphery of the "big history"? We have seen answers taking shape. The shared cultural terms reveal regional interests and regional knowledge (remember uaiuoda and Zagoria). Poetry composed by Jesuit priests, such as Benedikt Stay, is not only leisure used ad maiorem Dei gloriam (as in religious poems about St Francis Xavier) - poems translate physics and astronomy into a language educated people understand and appreciate: into the language of Latin poetry. Public administrators and civil servants from the rank of lesser nobility (such as Baltazar Adam Krčelić and Nikola Škrlec) use the usual administrative Latin to formulate old and new challenges posed to government and its policies. But equally important is, I believe, that we have seen how a collection of digital texts, too many millions of words to be read by an individual, can be reshaped by computation. Extracting some terms actually recombines the texts, creates from the old something new and, hopefully, interesting. (This is harder to do with a set of printed books, even if they're as attractive and encompassing as the Tyrolis Latina.)
File translated from
TEX
by
TTH,
version 3.67.
On 12 Dec 2012, 14:53.