Review: Gwynne’s Latin

I found Gwynne’s Latin a delightful read. I have a Victorian-era mindset and tastes, and I will always be a huge fan of the Grammar-Translation pedagogy (called ‘Drill-and-Kill’ by non-fans) that I started my Via Latína with. This book is a direct and concise explanation of the most important rules of Latin, with stern and strict instructions to indelibly memorize the notorious charts of Latin morphology. It is useful for those studying Classical or Ecclesiastical Latin, as well as the Latin of Western Culture in general.

Critics of this book say that it reads like a Latin grammar. I love to read from my grammars, and I can happily say that Gwynne’s Latin does read like a grammar. He spells out fine gradations to rules that I had only intuited up to now. To this American, Mr. Gwynne comes across as a terse and tough British teacher who dislikes new-fangled nonsense but is warmly consumed with enabling the success of his students. As old-fashioned as I am, I just loved this attitude and tone in the book. But before all the grammar, the incredible Chapters One and Three give the author’s insights on Latin as being part of what had made England great for so many generations, and today what still makes minds and characters great as each of us takes ahold of Latin, and grapples with it for mastery. These chapters are a splendid panegyric to the value of Latin in our time, matched only by the words of Tracy Simmons’ book Climbing Parnassus.

I think this book would be almost impossible to use on its own as a teach-yourself guide. Mr. Gwynne has provided videos at his website for learning to memorize the word forms, but I have not watched any of those, and I still imagine this book requires a teacher even with the how-to-memorize videos. I think it is a beautifully compact book for teachers to use to provide students with essential grammar, but they will have to provide the meat of the daily reading practice for students, which should include but not be limited to rule-and-endings-memorizing. With an enthusiastic teacher who knows how to encourage students as well as drill them well, I see this as a very valuable new Latin textbook (well, it turns 10 this year, but that’s new for Latin books!). Gwynne’s Latin is simply and beautifully laid out, although I had to buy reading glasses to be able to see the tiny print in here. Highly recommended, especially for Latin teachers.