FROM THE FOURTH CENTURY onward in most of Western Europe the language of thinking and writing was Latin. There were areas where that language was Greek, and there were certainly other languages and other modes of thinking at work in the early Middle Ages, but the basic linguistic worldview from 300 to 1500 CE in Europe was Latin. A student could start his education at Heidelberg in Germany, could then attend lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris, could finish with the lectures of a famous legal thinker at Bologna, and submit himself for examination in Oxford. After that, he could set himself up to teach anywhere in Europe. Even a century after the supposed end of the Middle Ages, Shakespeare could craft a Hamlet, a Danish prince just returned from university in Germany at Wittenberg, and another nobleman at the same court, Laertes, who was doing his further education in France. Both were learning in the same language.

Latin offered the rich and the powerful and the literate and the religious a common language, a vocabulary, and a construction of the European world which was both stable and permanent. Moreover, from the seventh century the basic religious worldview became Roman Christianity with its fully developed sense of hierarchy, its process for determining theology and heresy, and its preference for incremental change. Other languages and other religions battered against these central pillars of Europe, but without significantly affecting the hegemony of either Latin or Christianity. And the liturgy, crafted in Latin for all Christians, offered a daily ground bass to support the life and thought of every individual in the Middle Ages. If it was the week after Easter, then the triple “Alleluia” was to be sung at every liturgical service. The Great “O” Antiphons were sung in the last few days before Christmas, the “Sorrows of Mary” were to be sung on the Friday after the third Sunday in Easter, and Michaelmas was near the end of September, marking the beginning of harvest season. Of such everyday and festal details were the roots and branches of medieval life constructed.

In the modern era, while the religious worldview remains largely the same – if not Roman Christianity itself, then certainly inflected by a Christian culture – the linguistic worldview has shifted to English, at least for my purposes here.