BANNIARD M. VIVA VOCE: COMUNICAZIONE SCRITTA E COMUNICAZIONE ORALE NELL’OCCIDENTE LATINO DAL IV AL IX SECOLO / Edizione italiana con una Retractatio dell’autore, a cura di L. Cristante e F. Romanini, con la collaborzione di J. Gesiot e V. Veronesi. Trieste: Edizione Università di Trieste, 2020. XVIII, 716 p. (Polymnia: Studi di filologia classica; 25)

The reviewed monograph is a translation of the French edition of 1992, revised and completed by the author in the face of scholarly achievements of subsequent years. It contains rich material on the history of the Latin language in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and on the formation on its basis of western Romance languages; yet it is not a systematic exposition of the facts which characterize this process. We are dealing with a study of one of its most important aspects, namely with the correlation of literary and spoken Latin. Analyzing very different sources (treatises, sermons, lives of saints, chronicles, acts of church councils, to a lesser extent documents and inscriptions) the author comes to the conclusion that till the end of the VIII c., in Italy – till the end of the IX c. and even later we witness the maintenance of a certain unity between the language of the educated elite and the language of the poorly educated and simply uneducated population. This unity made possible the continuity of vertical communication between the two social groups. It also helped to maintain a certain level of communication across the lands which constituted the Romance part of Europe. These conclusions are very important for evaluating the sociocultural processes of this period and the informational potential of the surviving sources as such. Having certain reservations about some of the thesis contained in the monograph, the authors of this review estimate it very highly.

Latin language, vulgar Latin, Romance languages, written and oral culture, sociocultural communication, Early Middle Ages