Vera Res is currently under consideration for funding by both The Library of Congress via the Kislak Short-Term Fellowship and The Smithsonian via the Dibner Library Resident Scholar Program.
This project brings primary sources, written in Latin, from the 14th to 19th centuries, with no published English translations, to students in secondary school and college advanced Latin courses for their analyses. In 2010-2012, I worked with David Mattern, a historian of early America at the University of Virginia, to have my Latin IV students at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, MD, transcribe and translate a letter, written in Latin, from the James Madison collection that had never been published in English. (I found the letter during a previous summer while just browsing through the Library of Congress' digital sources. The Library graciously connected me with Professor Mattern and off we went!) The students' work was used in publication and was acknowledged in Volume II of the Madison Papers, 2012. The idea born? That an interactive website through which similar work could be done by Latin students across the nation has the potential to bring a compelling new cogency to the study of Latin and its connection to American and European history. This kind of “original scholarship” generates excitement and impressive student buy-in to the study of Latin.
Returning to The Library of Congress, I searched and read, read and searched. There, in the Kislak collection is the Opus Epistolarum of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, best known for his De Orbe Novo...decades octo, published in multiple pieces by multiple sources during the Renaissance and later. The Decades, as they are typically referenced, are key primary sources for our understanding of the “Age of Exploration” and early European interaction with native North Americans. In light of the Decades, the Opus often has been dismissed and undervalued. But a Renaissance man like Peter, versed as he was in the Classics and in so many fields of learning, would have been well aware of the “work of letters” genre in ancient literature. In addition to important ‘hard knowledge’ about the Age of Exploration gleaned from individual letters, the work as a whole has more to tell us about Renaissance allusions to ancient literature than we may suspect. A majority of the letters of the Opus, more than 700!, remain untranslated from the Latin directly into English and remain unpublished in English. A very small number of historians of early America can read Latin with fluency and, indeed, a very small number of American scholars in any field in the last two centuries has ever studied the letters in any depth.
With fellowship funding or otherwise, I will translate 20 - 40 of the Opus letters and provide analyses. These will become part of this interactive website and serve as further structured examples so that the rest of the untranslated, unpublished letters of the Opus, made available on this site, can be electronically delegated to interested classes across the nation. These Latin teachers and their students would transcribe, translate, and annotate their selected letters, then submit them to the website where they would be centralized for faculty peer and professorial review. It is quite possible and eventually hoped that other Renaissance Latin sources, untranslated in English, will be made available here as well. A resource like this advances interdisciplinary connection and educational innovation by obliging students and their teachers to conduct actual original scholarship useful to historians. The study of Latin will always perpetuate powerful literacy and cognitive depth but, by developing this tool, students can engage in work they see as immediately useful, work with direct results. The project spurs interest among youth in primary sources long ignored but directly relevant to understanding the history of the Americas.
Of course, I am certainly not the first high school educator to find untranslated, unpublished Latin from the Renaissance or thereabouts and engage students with those texts. But, this may be a unique, interactive website in its attempt (1) to centralize, organize, and distribute selections, (2) to provide publishable examples and templates, (3) to ask for submission of completed, original student/teacher work within a set timeframe, and (4) to have that work faculty peer reviewed for potential publication, online or otherwise.
Your feedback is MOST WELCOME. Thank you for considering Vera Res: The Latin Primary Source Project.
Racquel Yerbury
Harpers Ferry, June 2013.
This project brings primary sources, written in Latin, from the 14th to 19th centuries, with no published English translations, to students in secondary school and college advanced Latin courses for their analyses. In 2010-2012, I worked with David Mattern, a historian of early America at the University of Virginia, to have my Latin IV students at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, MD, transcribe and translate a letter, written in Latin, from the James Madison collection that had never been published in English. (I found the letter during a previous summer while just browsing through the Library of Congress' digital sources. The Library graciously connected me with Professor Mattern and off we went!) The students' work was used in publication and was acknowledged in Volume II of the Madison Papers, 2012. The idea born? That an interactive website through which similar work could be done by Latin students across the nation has the potential to bring a compelling new cogency to the study of Latin and its connection to American and European history. This kind of “original scholarship” generates excitement and impressive student buy-in to the study of Latin.
Returning to The Library of Congress, I searched and read, read and searched. There, in the Kislak collection is the Opus Epistolarum of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, best known for his De Orbe Novo...decades octo, published in multiple pieces by multiple sources during the Renaissance and later. The Decades, as they are typically referenced, are key primary sources for our understanding of the “Age of Exploration” and early European interaction with native North Americans. In light of the Decades, the Opus often has been dismissed and undervalued. But a Renaissance man like Peter, versed as he was in the Classics and in so many fields of learning, would have been well aware of the “work of letters” genre in ancient literature. In addition to important ‘hard knowledge’ about the Age of Exploration gleaned from individual letters, the work as a whole has more to tell us about Renaissance allusions to ancient literature than we may suspect. A majority of the letters of the Opus, more than 700!, remain untranslated from the Latin directly into English and remain unpublished in English. A very small number of historians of early America can read Latin with fluency and, indeed, a very small number of American scholars in any field in the last two centuries has ever studied the letters in any depth.
With fellowship funding or otherwise, I will translate 20 - 40 of the Opus letters and provide analyses. These will become part of this interactive website and serve as further structured examples so that the rest of the untranslated, unpublished letters of the Opus, made available on this site, can be electronically delegated to interested classes across the nation. These Latin teachers and their students would transcribe, translate, and annotate their selected letters, then submit them to the website where they would be centralized for faculty peer and professorial review. It is quite possible and eventually hoped that other Renaissance Latin sources, untranslated in English, will be made available here as well. A resource like this advances interdisciplinary connection and educational innovation by obliging students and their teachers to conduct actual original scholarship useful to historians. The study of Latin will always perpetuate powerful literacy and cognitive depth but, by developing this tool, students can engage in work they see as immediately useful, work with direct results. The project spurs interest among youth in primary sources long ignored but directly relevant to understanding the history of the Americas.
Of course, I am certainly not the first high school educator to find untranslated, unpublished Latin from the Renaissance or thereabouts and engage students with those texts. But, this may be a unique, interactive website in its attempt (1) to centralize, organize, and distribute selections, (2) to provide publishable examples and templates, (3) to ask for submission of completed, original student/teacher work within a set timeframe, and (4) to have that work faculty peer reviewed for potential publication, online or otherwise.
Your feedback is MOST WELCOME. Thank you for considering Vera Res: The Latin Primary Source Project.
Racquel Yerbury
Harpers Ferry, June 2013.