The Death of Latin? What 1.6 Million Books Tell Us

Ask most people when Latin died and you'll get a vague answer: "the Renaissance" or "when vernacular literature took off." But thanks to 1.6 million books in the Universal Short Title Catalogue, we can pinpoint the answer precisely.

German overtook Latin in the 1670s.

The Data

The USTC, maintained by the University of St Andrews, catalogs every known book printed in Europe during the first 250 years of printing. We analyzed the complete database (1,628,578 editions) by language and decade. Here's what emerged:

Latin wasn't just important—it was dominant. Nearly a third of everything printed in early modern Europe was in Latin.

The Rise and Fall

The Early Days (1450s-1470s)

In the first decades of printing, Latin was king. When Gutenberg printed his Bible, when the first presses spread across Europe, the market was overwhelmingly Latin. In the 1470s, Latin accounted for 79% of all editions.

Why? The audience for books was small: clergy, scholars, lawyers. These were people who read Latin as a matter of course. The infrastructure of learning—universities, monasteries, courts—ran on Latin.

The Reformation Spike (1520s)

Then came Luther.

The 1520s saw an explosion of German-language printing. German editions jumped from 1,870 in the 1510s to 8,343 in the 1520s—a 346% increase. For one decade, German nearly matched Latin in output.

This was the pamphlet war of the Reformation: vernacular polemics, translated Bibles, popular religious tracts. For the first time, printing reached beyond the educated elite.

But Latin recovered. The 1530s saw German drop back while Latin held steady. The scholarly infrastructure remained Latin.

The Long Plateau (1550s-1660s)

For over a century, Latin maintained its position. The numbers kept growing:

This was the golden age of Neo-Latin: scientific treatises, humanist scholarship, international correspondence, university disputations. Newton's Principia (1687) was in Latin. So were Spinoza's Ethics (1677), Leibniz's philosophical works, and virtually all academic publications.

The Tipping Point (1670s)

Then, almost suddenly, the lines crossed.

German didn't just overtake Latin—it accelerated while Latin declined. By the 1690s, German output was 49% higher than Latin.

What Happened?

Several factors converged in the late 17th century:

• The rise of national academies. The Royal Society (1660), the Académie des Sciences (1666), and similar institutions began publishing in vernacular languages. Science, once Latin's stronghold, started switching.
• Growing literacy. Education expanded beyond Latin-trained elites. A new reading public wanted books in their own languages.
• Philosophical shift. Thinkers like Descartes and Locke deliberately chose vernaculars to reach wider audiences. The idea that serious thought required Latin was fading.
• German institutional strength. The Holy Roman Empire's fragmented political structure paradoxically created a unified literary market. German became the common language of a dispersed but culturally connected region.

The English Exception

One striking pattern: English printing exploded in the 1640s.

That's the English Civil War and Interregnum. Pamphlets, newsbooks, political tracts, religious controversy. England's revolution was fought as much in print as on battlefields.

The 1640s spike in English (24,112 editions) briefly made it the second-most-printed language in Europe, surpassing German (20,521) and approaching Latin (30,143).

What This Means for Latin Today

The USTC data reveals something important: Latin didn't die in 1700. It was still producing 33,000+ editions per decade at the end of the 17th century—more than at any point before 1600.

Latin's "death" was relative, not absolute. It was overtaken, not abandoned. And the corpus it left behind is staggering.

Of those 503,486 Latin editions in the USTC, how many have been translated into English?

Less than 2%.

The university publications (147,859 editions), the religious texts (118,250), the legal commentaries (35,243), the medical treatises (13,357)—the vast majority remain accessible only to those who can read Latin.

We tend to think of Latin literature as a solved problem: Cicero, Virgil, Augustine, the "classics." But the USTC reveals a different picture. The real Latin corpus isn't ancient—it's early modern. And it's largely untranslated.

Source: Universal Short Title Catalogue, University of St Andrews. Direct analysis of USTC Editions July 2025.accdb database export. ustc.ac.uk