White Trash Scriptorium
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The Windows programs listed below are hypertexts designed to provide the reader with quick access to vocabulary and notes. You can retrieve the definition of any word in the text by double-clicking on it. These programs require that the runtime library file vbrun300.dll be installed in the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory on your hard drive. If you don't have this file you can download it here.



The Record Interpreter
(Charles T. Martin, 1911)

(We apologize for the difficulties you might have had in accessing this work the past few months. There's a limit on the amount of data that can be transferred each month from our little site, and the Record Interpreter has been exceeding it. We encourage folks with homepages dealing with Medieval Latin to grab the work and put it on their sites. It's in the public domain. We'd also like to add that a photocopy of the Record Interpreter can now be fully accessed through Google Books, and includes a lengthy glossary of manuscript abbreviations, not available here. The Google Book version is of course more unwieldy than the html, but it does have a search function that enables you to look up words in the glossaries.)

Neo-Latin

Recommended Links

Classics

Neo-Latin

Trolling through the Perseus website, we came upon a Latin biography of George Washington, published in 1836 under the title Washingtonii Vita. The work was written by Francis Glass, an eccentric frontier schoolmaster, and edited by J.N. Reynolds, a former pupil in Glass's log cabin school. In his English preface, Reynolds provides a humorous and sensitive sketch of the curious Mr. Glass. We did a Google Search to find out more about the work, and discovered a review that was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1835, and written by Edgar Allan Poe. . . . .We'd also like to recommend a very rich and funny piece of writing by Alexander Lenard, the Latin translator of Winnie the Pooh, entitled A Few Words about Winnie-Ille-Pu. (Trivia Question: What's the only Latin work to make the New York Times Best Seller List?) There's also a nice little article from the Times about Lenard and Winnie Ille Pu, written on the 25th anniversary of the book's publication.

Lege et Luge: We were looking around a while back for some verses by Jacob Balde, and were surprised to light upon a very strong funeral poem in rhyme and accentual rhythm, unusual for Balde. The poem commemorates the death in childbirth of Leopoldina, young wife of Ferdinand III. We found the poem in a collection titled Sacred Latin Poetry, published in 1864 and compiled by Richard C. Trench, the Anglican Archbishop of Dublin. Rev. Trench read widely and had very good taste; he's got some real gems here. He also edited them with a very free hand, nota bene . . . A footnote of the good reverend doctor's led us to another piece we got excited about, Richard Crashaw's Bulla. The poem is nicely described by one of its verses: "Pulchrum spargitur hic Chaos." We can't make head or tail of it, but it's written in this trippy glyconic meter and contains some beautiful and arresting imagery. Consider: Hic [est] grex velleris aurei,/ grex pellucidus aetheris,/ qui noctis nigra pascua/ puris morsibus atterit./ The poem inspired an orchestral work by the contemporary American composer Elliot Carter, entitled Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei. Crashaw's poetry, by the way, is fully available through Google Books. The poetry of Jacob Balde can be found at the Camena site.