“Vita S. Christophori” now available

🎧 Latin text syn­chro­nized with audio (eccle­si­as­ti­cal pro­nun­ci­a­tion, nar­ra­tor: Pater Mateus Mar­i­ano)

📖 lit­er­al Leg­en­tibus trans­la­tion

📝 com­men­tary

For those famil­iar with the Latin of authors like Cicero or Cae­sar, the lan­guage of the Vita S. Christophori will appear both rec­og­niz­able and dis­tinct.

Medieval Latin is not a dif­fer­ent lan­guage from Clas­si­cal Latin but rather a lat­er stage of its devel­op­ment, heav­i­ly influ­enced by the lan­guage of the Vul­gate Bible. The syn­tax is often more straight­for­ward than its clas­si­cal coun­ter­part.

One of the most notable dif­fer­ences is the fre­quent use of con­junc­tions like quod or quia (“that”) to intro­duce a clause, where a clas­si­cal author would have pre­ferred the accusative and infini­tive con­struc­tion.

There is also a greater flex­i­bil­i­ty in the gram­mat­i­cal rules, such as a less rigid dis­tinc­tion between the uses of dif­fer­ent pro­noun types (espe­cial­ly demon­stra­tive and reflex­ive pro­nouns).

Nev­er­the­less, the result is a direct and vivid form of Latin, per­fect­ly suit­ed to the telling of these foun­da­tion­al sto­ries of faith.

You can down­load the book here.

We hope you enjoy read­ing and lis­ten­ing to the sto­ry!