Colloquia

Preorder. Ships this fall.

Hermann Schottennius wrote these conversations in the 1520s for the boys in his Latin school at Cologne. Pairs of schoolboys talk their way through the day and the year: getting up and going to bed, meals and lessons, the rod, holidays and saints’ days, games and fairs, plague and war, weddings and funerals. A second part, the Convīvia, sets thirty dinners at which philosophers, kings, peasants, and students eat, argue, and drink.

The Latin is the everyday speech of a Renaissance classroom, short and practical, and it makes good reading for anyone who wants to speak or think in Latin. This edition gives the complete text with every long vowel marked by Aurélien Coudurier, and nearly eighty woodcuts of German life in Schottennius’ century by the Petrarch Master, Albrecht Dürer, and Jost Amman.

Vilhelmus. Bonum māne.
Volfgangus. Semper sānē.
Vilhelmus. Sīc ipse nōn respondērem.
Volfgangus. Cūr nōn?
Vilhelmus. Quia barbarum est, et doctīs displicet.
Good morning. / Always, to be sure. / I would not answer like that. / Why not? / Because it is barbarous, and the learned dislike it.

First edition, 2026. Paperback, 6 × 9 inches, 260 pages.