Creating a CTS Text Collection: The Neo-Latin Colloquia Project

Scholastic colloquia are didactic works from the 15th and 16th centuries designed to teach Latin
to younger students through interactive listening and speaking. Accordingly, many of the colloquia deal with the everyday life of schoolboys, enabling them to speak in ordinary situations using proper Latin. These dialogues,
generally short and written with many idiomatic
constructions, were simple enough for beginners who already possessed a basic knowledge of Latin grammar. Mastery of sermo quotidianus (“daily conversation”) was and remains an excellent means of reaching the stage where one thinks directly in Latin rather than translating from a native language. Moreover, students who learn
idiomatic Latin then read classical texts with greater
facility, and their own written style improves. Writers such as Petrus Mosellanus (early sixteenth century) assert that colloquia offered the means for the learner to master
the cultivated but familiar speech found in Cicero’s
letters or Terence’s plays, but applied to subject matter
and thoughts never treated by Cicero or Terence. Erasmus thought his contemporaries could learn the best Latin style for contemporary use by reading the best authors, but also imitating the Latin conversation of those who “spoke just as the best authors wrote.”
Colloquia scholastica form a genre of largely unexplored texts that reveal much about the pedagogical practice that supported the continuing use of Latin as Europe’s universal language for the educated into the Early Modern era,
when it was no longer anyone’s native tongue. The
perpetuation of a stable language (“dead” in the argot
of the linguists) based on texts only, supported by no
vernacular usage, for so many centuries represents a
significant and potentially illuminating linguistic
phenomenon. The colloquia offer an untapped source from which we can learn more about the history of
pedagogy during the rise of western humanism. In
addition, the colloquia provide plentiful insights into
social history. Designed to promote the use of spoken Latin
for discussion of daily affairs, they reveal a great deal about the conditions and customs of life at the time when they were produced, especially about scholars, teachers, and students in and out of schools or universities, but also about conditions among the citizens, merchants, and tradesmen at large.
Over the last three years, a group at the Stoa Consortium has begun to assemble the most comprehensive collection of neo-Latin colloquia availably anywhere in the world, in any medium. So far we have imposed the structural markup prescribed by the Text Encoding Initiative [TEI] in its “Base Tag Set for Drama” [http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/DR.html] on over 650 colloquia containing over 620,000 words of text. We continue to
build the collection through the addition of complex TEI markup, and we have enabled preliminary access to the collection online using the Classical Text Services
protocol [CTS].
CTS allows us to access the Colloquia Collection on two levels. First, using CTS we can create a citation scheme specific to each set of colloquia, based on the organization of the dialogues themselves, and the internal structure of the individual dialogues. This structure is based mainly on the “Base Tag Set for Drama” as described in the TEI P5 Guidelines, so the typical citation scheme would follow the structure of a <div> for each individual colloquia, containing a <sp> for each speaker in turn, containing a <p> for the spoken text. CTS thus provides us with a way to easily cite (and thus to link to) any specific point in the colloquia texts.
In addition, CTS also enables us to create citations for the quotations (mainly from classical authors) that appear
regularly in the colloquia. Colloquia originally served as a bridge to canonical literature. Including markup to
identify references, both those specifically made by the colloquia authors, and those identified within the text by the modern editors, will illuminate how the
colloquia authors used the classical texts, and which
classical authors and works were most influential for early modern pedagogy. Encoding these bibliographical references will also enable us in many cases to point to full texts in the Perseus Digital Library [www.perseus.
tufts.edu], where users may peruse the full context of
the quotations or allusions. Using the TEI markup for Bibliographic Citations and References, we identify
quotations and non-quotation references that the
colloquia make to biblical and classical texts. For example, the author Pontanus quotes and refers to classical authors
(and more recent ones) after each colloquium in his
Annotationes, a section of notes following each
colloquium.
In addition to bibliographic citations, we are explicitly marking references to specific dates, people, and place
names. These references may be to historical events or people, or to events contemporary with the writing of the colloquia. Using the TEI tagset for Names and
Dates [http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/html/ND.html], we mark instances where the colloquia name specific people, places, dates, and events. In the short example below, the author Vives names both a specific
person and a place. TEI not only enables us to mark
names as they appear in the text, but also include a
regularized version to simplify both searching and reading
of the text (<orig> for the original version, <reg> for the regularized version).
<sp>
<speaker>Mag.</speaker>
<p>Ubi fecisti Latinae linguae tyrocinium? Nam
non videris mihi prave institutus.</p>
</sp>
<sp>
<speaker>Nep.</speaker>
<p> <placeName> <choice><orig>Brugis
</orig><reg>Bruges</reg></choice> </placeName>, sub <persName> <choice><orig>Joanne Theodoro Nervio</orig><reg>Johannes Theodorus Nervius </reg></choice> </persName>.</p>
</sp>
<sp>
<speaker>Mag.</speaker>
<p>Viro diligenti, docto, probo. <placeName>
<choice><orig>Brugae </orig><reg>Bruges
</reg></choice></placeName> elegantissimae: nisi quod pereunt in dies vitio plebis profusissimae,
dolendum </p>
</sp>
(Colloquium 7, in Ludovicus Vives, Linguae Latinae Exercitatio Joan. Lodov. Vivis Valentini: libellus valde doctus, et elegans, nuncque primum in lucem editus, una cum rerum, et verborum memorabilium diligentissimo indice. Parisiis: apud Joannem Foncher et Vivantium Gaultherot, 1538, p. 298.)
In this presentation, we will discuss the reasons for building CTS support into our edition, and give examples of the encoding we use to open up the colloquia to querying and organization through CTS.