3 ms·

> that was the tradition in scholarly work at the time True, though it's stronger than that. Latin was the closest thing to a universal language in Europe at

• jhbadger 4y ago
  Exactly. Like if somebody had a modern collection of Greek texts and called it "A Collection of Greek Texts" in English people wouldn't think it that strange that the title wasn't in Greek.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Yes, in the sense that Latin was the common language. But the sense was far stronger in that texts existed in Latin. And for the most part, not in other languages. (I'm not sure what the status of Greek was, given that much of Roman (and Byzantine) culture actually used Greek.) In modern terms, producing a single copy of a book cost on the order of half-a million to a million dollars: 300 cattle for the vellum medium, and 4-12 months of a scribe's work to copy out the text. It was vastly more tractable to bring readers to texts (by teaching the small literate portion of the population Latin) than to bring texts to readers. This all changed with the introduction of the printing press, one of the first consequences of which was creation of a large vernacular literature, both through translation of Latin works and the creation of new works in the common tongue. That also turned out to be highly disruptive, in interesting ways.