We need to be allowed to talk about Latinitas in the context of Latin teaching. What follows is a 7,000 word explanation why. In the course of this essay we will explore the effects of mandating a veneer of public positivity about CI Latin novellas and why this is problematic. There is also the surprising news that many current novellas might have been published in violation of Intellectual Property, and not for the reasons you might expect. As a community we need to be able to face uncomfortable discussions and question whether our current practices are helping or harming fellow teachers. As ..read more

Recently, I wanted to compare many different English translator’s approaches to a particular line in Vergil’s Aeneid, but I discovered that there was no easy reference chart online listing all English translations of the Aeneid. The few aging websites that had some partial bibliographies only listed a handful of translations, and did not include notable recent translations, including the few produced by female translators (a factor I felt was relevant to the line I was looking at). So there was only one thing to do – collate the list myself. Here it is: Translator Date Link Prose or verse ..read more

Recently I was emailed by someone asking what I thought about an essay called “The Art of Reading Latin: how to teach it” by W. G. Hale of Cornell University published in 1887. The essay is a fascinating document in that it advocates for the incorporation of reading, listening, speaking, and writing in Latin instruction, and the gradual elimination of English translation as the learner builds up speed in understanding Latin in Latin. The fluency problems it addresses are just as relevant today as ever. I thought I’d share my response with you all here. Salvē Br. Joseph, I remember reading W. G ..read more

I’ve been an amateur producer of web content almost all of my life. But as I reflect on the publication and positive reception of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 I’ve come to a greater appreciation and respect for the professional, mainstream, slow-moving avenues of book publication. There is an argument that creating more small, low-stakes projects allows you to experiment, refine your skills, iterate, and learn from mistakes. ‘Fail faster,’ they say: make minimum viable products, realise what fundamental problems limit their scope, and rebuild the next one better from scratch ..read more

It’s so close! The launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4 is happening this weekend at the following times (click here to join, or click the thumbnail below): US: Sat 23 Sep, 4pm EDT UK: Sat 23 Sep, 9pm BST Australia: Sun 24 Sep, 6am AEST This is my final post in the series celebrating the publication of Latin tiered readers throughout the ages. While Part 1 shared public domain works, Part 2 discussed 20th century textbooks, and Part 3 considered recently published tiered readers, here in Part 4 I will be spotlighting soon-to-be published tiered readers. Sagarum Cr ..read more

Welcome back to my series of posts celebrating tiered readers as I count down to the launch party for The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4. In Part 1, I spoke about old tiered readers which are now in the public domain. In Part 2, I spoke about tiered texts in 20th century textbooks. Now in Part 3, I will talk about recently published 21st century tiered readers. This is a difficult subject to talk frankly about, because recently published tiered texts suffer from the same quality control issues which plague nearly the whole genre of self-published Latin CI material. But in a post se ..read more

In celebration of the upcoming launch of The Lover’s Curse: A Tiered Reader of Aeneid 4, I’m working my way through the history of published tiered texts. In the previous post (Part 1), I spoke about tiered texts that were old enough to be in the public domain. The next chapter of the history is the 20th century Latin textbook scene. In this era, it was reasonably common for textbook authors to produce abridged or adapted versions of stories from the Classical canon. A well-known example would be Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata, Pars II: Roma Aeterna, which presents the intermediate reader wit ..read more

I developed this flowchart as a way to visualise how a student could use explicit knowledge of Latin case endings to arrive at a set of possibilities for what those forms could signify. noun-case-recognition-flowchartDownload I said ‘explicit knowledge’. I’ve been thinking more about the role of explicit knowledge in second language teaching. We shouldn’t reject a potentially useful tool based on ideological opposition to the concept, but we should weigh up the relative merits and drawbacks of the tool, and act in the interests of our students within the imperfect educational systems we have ..read more

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