In case you wondered …

…Why posh politicians pretend to speak Latin | OUPblog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This view of a capacious Renaissance —a complex civilization in motion— is very different from previous historians’ idealised imagined past. In point of fact, the humanists of the Renaissance had their own imagined past, depicting themselves as reaching back across the dark Middle Ages to recapture the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea of a middle age of cultural darkness is of course untenable, as anyone who has visited a medieval cathedral will know, but the concept has survived in our own time: ‘medieval’ is still in popular usage as a synonym for outdated, or even barbaric. Similarly, we are now far less inclined to idealise the ancient Greeks and Romans, as we realise that slavery was embedded in those societies and that a Roman’s idea of entertainment was watching people being killed by wild animals or in combat with each other.