For the past month, I have been conducting my research concurrently with a summer Latin intensive I have been taking at CUNY/Brooklyn College. On one hand, this has severely limited my research time, but on the other hand, I am grateful for the Latin I have learned, given that it is the primary source language for many documents related to my project. Since my entire life (this is not hyperbolic) has been consumed by this language, it only makes sense for me to write about how it has factored into my research.
I have mostly gone on about Les Grandes Chroniques in my various past posts and assignments. These manuscripts only began to be produced in the late medieval period, and many are written in French rather than Latin. However, as much as I have dumped about Les Grandes Chroniques, the research for my project really spans two eras–the late medieval, and the very early medieval, given that Brunhild lived and ruled during the 6th and early 7th centuries. Thus, the surviving primary sources documenting her life, such as Gregory of Tour’s Historia Francorum or the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus, are written in Latin.
The ability to grasp the language (with a dictionary, of course, let us not be hasty), including its syntax and subtleties, has given me a new appreciation for the primary source material and a deeper understanding of it. For instance, in a praise poem by Fortunatus, the lines “…Patruo pietas…patre…” and “…in voltu vivit…” are cases where Fortunatus uses playful alliteration (a characteristic of his), which would be missed in translation, “…Uncle’s pieties…father…” and “…lives in the face…” Although obviously a simple example, it is these little things that I have come to appreciate, and that have made me better at reading primary sources, pushing me towards utilizing them more often in my final essay.
As my research and Latin progress continue I hope to continue to intermingle these two vines by which my summer has hung. I aim to attempt to utilize as much primary source language as possible in my final draft, and am excited to see where Latin knowledge can take me!