Sietske Fransen

Latin in a Time of Change: The Choice of Language as Signifier of a New Science?

This essay discusses three authors from the early seventeenth century (Galileo, Descartes, and Van Helmont) and the reasons that guided their decisions to write occasionally in their respective vernacular languages even though Latin remained the accepted language for learned communication. From their writings we can see that their choices were social, political, and always of high importance. The choice of language of these multilingual authors conveyed a message that was sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit. Their usage of both Latin and vernacular proved, on the one hand, their place in the international learned community and, on the other hand, their interest and investment in changing the educational system. This essay focuses on the first half of the seventeenth century in Western Europe as the period in which Latin gradually lost its status as the preeminent language of scientific discourse and ceded ground to the European vernaculars.1 Authors of scientific texts exhibited a high level of awareness about their choice of language.2 This is demonstrated explicitly in their reflections on the use of language and implicitly in their decisions to choose either Latin or a vernacular as the language of their publications. I discuss three examples of famous authors: Galileo Galileo, René Descartes, and Jan Baptista van Helmont. Each was a multilingual author who chose to write and publish his scientific texts in both Latin and his own vernacular. I preface this discussion with a brief exploration of the presence maintained by Latin in the European society of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the role it played in the scientific community of the time.