Neven Jovanović
University of Zagreb
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Department of Classical Philology
neven.jovanovic PVNCTVM ffzg.hr

Around 1980 E. D. Hirsch developed the concept of cultural literacy, defining it as the body of background knowledge that is taken for granted in literate communication. Hirsch represented this general knowledge lexicographically, as a list of words and phrases, aware that it is largely dependant on a national (in that case, American) perspective. Intuition tells us that the Europe-wide community of people who wrote in Latin during the early modern era must have shared such a body of background knowledge as well; but what constituted it?

Works such as Helander's study of Neo-Latin literature in 17th-century Sweden (2004) suggest that it is possible to extract a list similar to Hirsch's from the Latin texts of our cultural heritage. If so, how did this general Latin knowledge change over centuries? How did it overlap with specifically national cultural literacy? Would a list of key terms in Latin differ from its equivalent in a national language?

We approach these questions through a digital collection of texts by Croatian Latin writers, the Croatiae auctores Latini CroALa). The collection invites such an experiment because it currently makes searchable over 170 files and 440.000 words by some 115 authors connected with Croatian culture who wrote different kinds of texts in Latin from 1200 to 1900.

Text of the paper that will be read in Innsbruck is here.

Slides to accompany the paper are here.

1. A list of terms from E. D. Hirsch's "What every American should know" on physical science and mathematics. Scientific terms that couldn't have been known before the 20th century (e. g. relativity, nuclear energy) are excluded, as well as most terms that exist also in common language use (e. g. force, heat, weight). The test list has 44 terms, with data on frequency in texts from post-Renaissance period (1600–1850). The terms are connected with CroALa general search, in form of report on authors (ordered by frequency of occurrence and then chronologically)
2. A list of lemmata from MATEO TERMINI project (Uni Mannheim), are found in CroALa texts. This is a very provisory list: it contains only words starting with T-Z, only words with more than five letters, no lemmata which consist of several words. Still, there are 2991 lemmata, with links to EVRECA database and CroALa searches.
3. Constantine VII Porphyrogenetus is important for the history of Croatian identity, because his work De administrando imperio contains first information on Southern Slavs and the region they've settled in.

Here's Porphyrogenetus in CroALa (occurring 26 times). Note how the earliest mention, from 1670, needs to explain who Porphyrogenetus is:

Cuius rei satis locuples testis est Porphyrogeneta Constantinus Orientis Imperator, cuius erat in ditione Dalmatia

(Gradić, Stjepan (1613. — 1683.) [1670]: De vita, ingenio, et studiis Junii Palmottae)

Duden - Was jeder wissen muss: 100 000 Tatsachen der Allgemeinbildung, Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim (15. Februar 2007):

Zwinger, Theodor/Zwinger, Jakob: Theatrum humanae vitae Theodori Zwingeri Bas. Tertiatione novem voluminibus locupletatum, interpolatum, renovatum … plurium inprimis recentiorum exemplorum auctario, titulorum & indicum certitudine ampliatum ; cum quadrigemino elencho, methodi scilicet, titulorum, exemplorum, rerum et verborum Basileae [1604], p. 255 (Source: BSB Digital)