The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

Manios med vhe vhaked Numasioi, 441 is not indicative of the language‟s birth; likewise, there
is no death.
A final problem is that, as with many attempts to ring-fence, the definition of Late Latin
is wholly individualistic, with no communis opinio as to its delineations. Löfstedt highlighted
the difficulties of terminology, and noted the general consensus that, already by the early-
second century, there existed a different style from “the great Roman tradition” (1959: 1).
The two major English-language linguistic histories of the Latin language avoid explicit use
of the term at all (Palmer 1954; Clackson & Horrocks 2007), whilst Karakasis (2005:16)
posits Late Latin to mean the period from AD 200 to the sixth century, although suitable
nomenclature for what then comes after the sixth century is not provided. Posner (2004:
102-103) takes the point of view that things took a turn for the worse after AD 14, and
manages to use the moribund terms Vulgar Latin and Dark Ages in her discussion, whilst
Wright (1982: 52) similarly avoids the term, but instead uses the rarer „Imperial Latin‟.
Perhaps important for historiographical purposes is that any implication that Late Latin was
an „end-stage‟ in the language in many ways obscures the fact that the mid-first millennium
was in reality an extremely important period for both the development of the Latin language
and its literature. Not only was there likely to have existed a greater degree of Latinization
amongst the population in Western Europe than half a millennium earlier, but the spread of
Christianity promoted new literary genres and further uses of the language (Berry 2004).
Indeed, Banniard (1999: 228) noted that Christianisation may have been an important factor
in the Latinization of some language groups: “l‟irruption du christianisme et l‟expansion de
missions chrétiennes provoquent un bouleversement profond de la latinité”.
441 CIL i. 2. 3, c. 600 BC.
177