Latin for Local and Family Historians

Book excerpt: Latin is the language of a vast quantity of untouched source material. Despite the widespread popular interest in research into local and family history there has been no recent textbook to help the beginner to cope with the great barrier preventing access to that wealth of information--medieval Latin. This book remedies the omission. It embodies the author's experience as a university teacher of Latin and local history over 20 years, deriving from the notes and material developed for the Latin examination in the local history certificate courses which he organized. After dealing with the basic grammar of Latin, this very practical book examines the structure and vocabulary of the records use in local and family research, including Episcopal visitation, church court records, sepulchral inscriptions, wills, manorial court rolls, charters, and deeds. A final chapter explains the abbreviations used in medieval Latin. The book is complete in itself and contains al the necessary tables of declensions and conjugations plus a glossary of more than 800 words. The book is uniquely user-friendly, as the pace of instruction is never rushed, and the passages for translation are carefully graded for grammar and vocabulary and selected both for their intrinsic interest and for their representative character. The reader who works systematically through the book will be equipped to handle the Latin of the documents encountered by the do-it-yourself local or family historian.