The main nations responsible for the rediscovery of classical antiquity were the Arabs (duh). Italian and French scholars would copy raid and steal manuscripts preserved and extensively commented on by the great Arab scholars like Averroes and Avicenna, as we know them. This was centuries before Luther. The classic work (fascinating reading) is L.D. Reynolds, Scribes and Scholars, 3d ed,
http://www.amazon.com/Scribes-Scholars-Guide-Transmission-Literature/dp/0198721463/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t
My old teacher Anthony Grafton has a whole series of wonderful, beautifully written, highly accessible books on the history of the transmission of culture, more early modern European than medieval. I recently read his book on Leon Batista Alberti. He also has a fun book on The Footnote and a study of forgeries that is a blast, among many other books.
Now all that said. Joanna, maybe you are talking about the 19th century use of the classics (by that time actually dead languages) by the likes of Jowett: "My name is Benjamin Jowett, I'm Master of Balliol College; Whatever is knowledge I know it, And what I don't know isn't knowledge," but in the days of Abelard, Aquinas, Occam, even Alberti, Latin was, you should pardon the expression, a Lingua Franca, the international language. Sure, the church served the interests of the rich, but that was not the first thing on the minds of the people I have mentioned, and the use of Latin in those days was as a tool of communication among scholars and clerics.
Latin was killed as a lingua franca by the scientific revolution; Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, even Newton wrote some of their stuff in Latin, but their great works were in their several vernaculars, and Galileo made a point of writing in Tuscan. (As did Dante three hundred years before.) This made life hard on everyone because you had to learn French, English, German, Latin, and Greek to be an educated person, and if you were serious Hebrew (if you were a cleric) and Arabic (if you were a philosopher, at least until scholasticism was finally put down). Now English is the international language, so we Americans can be provincial ignoramuses again. Joanna, though, probably knows half a dozen languages, right? I have a colleague who knows 15! Not Latin or ancient Greek, though. Pretty soon we'll all have to learn Chinese, though, like Werner von Braun. ("In Cherman und Englisch, I know how to count down down, und I'm learning Chinese, says Werner von
Braun.")
--- On Wed, 6/11/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] in which I'm accused of repressing the reptilian brain
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008, 1:44 AM
> I kind of get the feeling that I am intruding on a
> misdirected personal email, but Latin was not a dead
> language in the Middle Ages, and probably the main
> nations responsible for the "rediscovery of
> antiquity"
> were the Italians (the Renassiance) and Germans (via
> Martin Luther's emphasis on the Bible and, hence,
> Greek and Hebrew), neither of which were involved in
> colonialism or imperialism.
>
> --- Joanna <123hop at comcast.net> quoted CB:
> I
> > suspect that the
> > > intellectuals interested in enshrining dead
> > language were serving the
> > > classes who wanted to bring back Greek and Roman
> > imperialist ideals to
> > > graft them onto the new capitalist mode to
> > rationalize the new
> > > colonialism and slavery.
>
> Mataiotes mataioteton, eipen ho Ekklasiastes,
> mataiotes mataioteton, ta panta mataiotes.
>
>
>
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