LATIN RESOURCES

for Latin Students at the
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
125 Queen's Park, Third Floor
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2C7 CANADA

DICTIONARIES (SELECTED)

  • Charlton T. Lewis, Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary (1879). Still a standard lexicon. Freely available online through The Perseus Digital Library.
  • Charlton T. Lewis. An Elementary Latin Dictionary (1891, numerous reprints). An abbreviated version of the same (also available online through Perseus, but perhaps its best recommendation is its affordability: numerous used copies starting around $30 at Abe Books.com).
  • P.G.W. Glare, ed. Oxford Latin Dictionary (1968-1982). An excellent recourse for Classical Latin, less so for Medieval Latin.
  • Alexander Souter. A Glossary of Later Latin to 600 AD (1949). An excellent supplement to Lewis and Short and the OLD (also affordable at Abe Books.com).
  • R.E. Latham. A Revised Medieval Latin Word List from British and Irish Sources (1965). Another affordable lexical aid containing words not included in Lewis and Short (check Abe Books.com).
  • L.F. Stelten. Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin (1995). Useful for reading scripture, canon law, liturgy, church fathers, etc. (find it at Amazon.com).
  • J.G.T. Graesse. Orbis Latinus: Lexikon lateinischer geographischer Namen des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (1909). This standard lexicon of place names is freely available online via Columbia University's Sources of Medieval History.
  • Jan Frederik Niermeyer. Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (1976). An invaluable resource, including English, French and German translations and (at least through c. 1150) generous quotations and citations.
  • Du Cange's classic glossary, the Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis (Paris, 1678; numerous reprints), can still be consulted with much profit, but it should be used with great care; it is not recommended as the first port of call. The École des chartes (ELEC), in association with the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes (IRHT), has prepared a fully digitized, searchable version of Du Cange, which presents Léopold Favre's ten volume edition of 1883-1887). The full text of Louis Hentschel's revision (1840-1850) is available through the the Medieval and Modern Thought Text Digitization Project at Standford, though the files are quite large (PDFs starting at 145MB).
  • The University of Toronto subscribes to the Database of Latin Dictionaries, a rich resource that searches the following dictionaries (note that dates reflect the editions indexed, not always the original publication date): Lexicon totius latinitatis cum appendicibus (Forcellini, 1940); Lexicon totius latinitatis Onomasticon (Perin, 1940); A Latin Dictionary (Lewis and Short, 1933); Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens (Blaise and Tombeur, 1954-1967 and 2005); Lexicon latinitatis medii aeui (Blaise, 1975); Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis (du Cange, 1883-1887); Firmini Verris Dictionarius (Merrilees and Edwards, 1994); Anonymi Montepessulanensis Dictionarius (Grondeux, 1998); Dictionarius familiaris et compendiosus (Merrilees and Edwards, 2002). University of Toronto computers can link directly; University of Toronto students can access the database at home by searching for "Database of Latin Dictionaries" in the E-Resources catalogue at the library website and logging in with a UTORid.

GRAMMARS (SELECTED)

  • Charles E. Bennett. New Latin Grammar (1908, reprinted by Bolchazy-Carducci, 1995). Freely available online via The Latin Library.
  • J.B. Greenough et al.. Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar (1888). Also available online via both The Perseus Digital Library and William Harris's Humanities and the Liberal Arts.
  • B.H. Kennedy. The Revised Latin Primer, ed. and rev. J. Mountford (1962, reprint. 1976). Find it on Abe Books.com
  • Students with a solid Classical Latin background may find helpful the brief comparative grammar appended to K. Sidwell's Reading Medieval Latin (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 362-372. A more in-depth exposition of Medieval Latin syntax and morphology can be found in: A.G. Rigg's "Morphology and Syntax," in F.A.C Mantello and A.G. Rigg, Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographic Guide (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp. 83-92; A.G. Elliott's grammatical introduction to K.P. Harrington's reader, Medieval Latin (2nd ed., rev. by J. Pucci, Chicago, 1997); and be aware of P. Stotz's Handbuch zur Lateinischen Sprache des Mittelalters, vol. 4: Formenlehre, Syntax und Stilistik (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, 2/5/4, Munich, 1998).

MORPHOLOGY, GRAMMAR, AND SYNTAX REVIEWS

The following list gathers some of the instructional materials posted for the various courses.