Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-13225-2 — Early and Late Latin Edited by J. N. Adams , Nigel Vincent Excerpt More Information www.cambridge.org © in this web service Cambridge University Press 1 Chapter 1 Continuity and change from Latin to Romance Nigel Vincent 1. he periods of Latin Anyone whose concern is with patterns of continuity and change, in other words with history, whether of states and societies or of literature and language, is faced with a paradox: it is hard, if not impossible, to study the topic without narrowing the focus to a given timespan or period, but at the same time deining a period and assigning boundaries inevitably involves a good measure of arbitrariness. Time does not come pre-divided into periods or units, and hence, as Hunter (2008: 14) observes, ‘periodisa- tion and the rise of scholarship can … hardly be separated’. Perhaps inevi- tably, the point of departure in such divisions tends to be chronological, but again in the words of Hunter (2008: 15), ‘the vocabulary of periodisa- tion turns out (unsurprisingly) to have as much to do with description as with chronology’. At least, however, political, social and literary devel- opments and change can be linked to speciic and datable occurrences, individuals and works, and these have served as natural breakpoints in the unravelling of chronology. hus, in the ield of history scholars have long operated with period labels conveniently tailored to major events, so that historians of Britain may study the ‘long eighteenth century’, begin- ning with the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and ending with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Or again world history may be narrated within the conines of the ‘short twentieth century’ running from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Literary and cultural historians may also make use of chronological divi- sions but in addition have recourse to labels such as the Enlightenment or Romanticism which connect periods of time with particular artistic prac- tices or currents of thought. In Italy the names of the centuries come with capital letters – Duecento, Trecento, Quattrocento and so on – and are indicative as much, if not more, of cultural trends as they are of the passage of time. his division has been carried over into the study of the history