Teaching Piccolomini’s Historia de Duobus Amantibus in Intermediate Latin

This article is a report on using Piccolomini’s 15th-century novella Historia de Duobus Amantibus in an intermediatelevel college Latin class. We consider the text itself, background students will need before reading it, editing the text for students, and class activities and assessments. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, wrote a short novel in Latin called Historia de Duobus Amantibus in 1444. It became one of the most popular books of the 15th and 16th centuries, widely read and translated into many vernacular languages. It’s an amusing story of love, both marital and illicit; it’s also partly narrated through the characters’ letters to each other, making it an ancestor of the epistolary novels, in English, French, and other vernaculars, that become popular in the 18th century. At about 14,000 words, it’s short enough to be read in one semester, but long enough to be substantial. I’ve used this text with third-semester Latin students.1 In this article I’ll explain how I presented it and what supplements I needed to create to make it accessible, as a case study or experience report. The third semester of the college Latin sequence is challenging because, at least in our program, most of the students in the class are first-years, coming from a variety of different high-school programs. They have all learned roughly the same things, but from different points of view and with different emphases — and, in particular, aside from the most common words of Latin, their vocabularies may be quite different from each other. Hence it’s useful to give them a text that isn’t in any of the regular textbook series, one that’s equally unfamiliar to all of them, but one that will hold their interest. Such a text, though, may not exist in a convenient student edition with notes and vocabulary: there is no such edition for the Historia for example. In that case, the teacher may need to fill in background for the students, and here is an example of one way to do so. 1 The class was in Fall 2013. There were six students in the class, five first-years and a sophomore, two men and four women. Most of them took more Latin, even though this class completed the minimum foreign language requirement for graduation, three went on to major in classics, and two are now in graduate programs.