© Fernando Cortes
Neo-Latin texts provide students with a rich source of engaging activities beyond translation .
Neo-Latin texts — the revived Latin of the 1500s-to-present — provide an abundant source of potential projects for high school Latin classrooms . Some of these texts are scientific in nature , others include letters written between monarchs and other prominent figures of the Early Modern Period . The overwhelming majority of these texts have never been translated into English . One possible reason is that many scholars of the Early Modern Period may not have studied Latin . And we classicists never knew that these texts were available to us to translate !
Neo-Latin is the revived Latin of the 1500s to the present .
Thomas Hendrickson , Instructor of English and Latin at Stanford Online High School in Redwood City , California , recently completed a Neo-Latin project with his Latin II class , translating unpublished manuscripts from the court of William III of England ( 1690s ). Tom had learned about these untranslated texts from a scholar at the College of William and Mary and decided to bring scans of them into his classroom . His goal was to improve his students ’ Latin through the detective work that ’ s necessary to understand the documents . His secondary goal was to inspire them , fostering joy in the creation of a new translation . Indeed , these projects offer the opportunity for students to create knowledge : students are applying their language skills to an authentic project , the result of which can be used by other scholars .
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