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The position of flaminicae of the imperial cult enabled elite women living in the provinces and Italian cities to assume a public role more significant than that of elite women of Rome, where the imperial family was the center of focus.

Latin teachers recreating their instruction through a process called “comprehensible input” create a new equity in acquiring a classical language that has been missing in Latin classrooms for too long. Simultaneously, these teachers sustain interest and demonstrably higher retention rates in secondary Latin programs.

Any discussion of orality in the Greek and Latin classroom should begin and end with a discussion of learning goals. Orality and recitation is a (now neglected) strategy, not a goal in itself. In the intermediate-level Latin or Greek classroom, goals for most teachers probably include getting students to read, understand, translate, interpret, and appreciate ancient texts, poetry or prose. Orality can be a significant tool for working toward each of these goals, but how?

This paper draws on my personal experience as a teacher of Greek and Latin and an actor in classical plays to argue for introducing into the classroom the performance of ancient drama in the original language. In the paper’s first part, I shall present three reasons why performing plays in Greek and Latin can be an effective tool in the language classroom, to wit: it aids instruction, is entertaining and, quite literally, brings the ancient languages back to life.

Teaching students to speak Latin correctly and master its cadences is indispensable. Latin was meant to be heard, and the texts of antiquity were meant to be read aloud. Quintilian’s instructions for reading and mastering one’s letters provide evidence that scrolls were written with a view towards cultivating a pastime of reciting aloud (Johnson 2010). Today, that pastime is a crucial pedagogical tool. I offer in my paper my insights both as a teacher of Latin as well as a former Classics Major in the recent past.

This paper will consider the representation of Virgil portrayed in the historiated initials in an Italian-school manuscript of the Georgics housed in the Bodleian Library (MS Rawl. G. 98: fol. 05r, 19r; 34r; 49v). That manuscript, which Conington regards as of minor importance to the textual tradition (Conington/Nettleship [1979] cxv), contains superb historiated initials of Virgil wrought by the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum (fl. 1430), who ranks among the finest of manuscript illustrators (cf. Pächt [1948] 17).

The Cambridge: Trinity College MS R.14.5 contains fourteen semi-grisaille illustrations that represent scenes from Liber apologeticus de omni statu humane naturae, a morality play by Thomas Chaundler (c. 1460) that directly follows the illustrations in the manuscript. Each illustration has several lines of rubrication underneath that are not merely descriptive of the action in the scene that is being depicted, but are also performative for the potential readers/viewers of the illustrations.

This paper argues, through case studies of three medieval manuscripts (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 864; Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Latin 7980; Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 88), that the presence and absence of marginal and interlinear commentary material predetermines how Horace’s text was read in the Middle Ages. Horace was widely read and copied in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; about 850 manuscripts of Horace’s works survive from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries (Friis-Jensen, 2007).

My research, conducted as part of the project 'Turning Over a New Leaf: Manuscript Innovation in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance' (Leiden University, Netherlands http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/turning-over-a-new-leaf/), broadly focuses on the role of schematic diagrams in Ciceronian rhetorical manuscripts dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.