S. Worthen | Weblog

I'd agree that Latin wouldn't qualify as a foreign language for a late medieval humanist. If I may generalize widely, Latin was viewed as a learned/scientific language, and most people (well, people who have left any kind of records for posterity, which is admittedly a pretty damn selective group) would admit their inability to understand/write in it with about the same brief but genuine regret as non-scientists now bemoan their lack of comprehension with regard to science-journal articles. The same could be applied to facility with Greek in the third-century Latin West. It's quite distinct from the modern category of "foreign" language -- i.e., not what we speak, but perhaps handy to learn enough to get by on vacation. A "foreign language" (other than English!) no longer confers an automatic learned status in twenty-first-century American culture.

Just off the top of my head, I'd suggest that there are at least two more categories of "other" language: high and low undesirable languages, both equally familiar within a century or two of da Vinci. The low-undesirable option is best described as "vulgar" and is no doubt familiar to you if you've looked at late medieval Latin writers addressing vernacular theology. On the other hand, some of the Protestant second- and third-generation reformers, in dizzying transports of anti-scholasticism, came up with attitudes toward Latin that sound a lot more like our culture's prevalent attitudes toward humanities "jargon"; that's a high-undesirable, or "elitist," language.

The "Opera di santo Antonino Arciuescouo fiorentino vtilissima & necessaria alla instruttione delli Sacerdoti Idioti" is [obviously] in Italian; and the author [equally obviously] assumes that anyone who doesn't know Latin is an idiot (at least in their sense if not in ours). It would follow that Latin is not a foreign language; it's the Language that you know if you're not an idiot. As Kenneth Clarke (I believe) said, Latin was spoken everywhere, just not by everybody.