FEATURE
Fr Reggie Foster and his book Joseph Shaw bids farewell to the King of Catholic Latin
F
r Reginald Foster, uncrowned King of Catholic Latin, died on Christmas Day 2020, at the age of 81. He was a Discalced Carmelite, and to say that he was an eccentric would be an understatement. There are traditionally-minded Latinists all over the world with fond memories of his classes, but I’ve found him difficult to take seriously since he told an interviewer, in 1994, that he liked to celebrate Mass in the nude. In 2015 his teaching system was crystalised in the form of a massive tome, the Ossa Latinitatis Sola, with help from collaborators. Although I confess, I am still only about half-way through it, after a year, I think I can give readers a general impression of the distinctive Foster approach. Foster frequently boasts that he doesn’t use grammatical tables: no amo, amas, amat or mensa, mensa, mensam. Again, he regards the usual names of cases and tenses as potentially misleading, so creates entirely new ones. The Accusative becomes ‘the object function’, and the Ablative ‘the by-with-from function’. Tenses become ‘Time 1’, ‘Time 2’ and so on, with variants to distinguish active and passive, and indicative and subjunctive. Conjugations of verbs are renamed ‘Blocks’, and Declensions of nouns are ‘Groups’. Foster introduces each new point of grammar not with a neatly labelled table, but with a paragraph of dense, though folksy, prose, in which he simply tells you what the different endings are for the tense or group of nouns at issue are, noting how they differ those of similar words. He then illustrates their usage with a few examples, and moves on. There are no exercises. Foster insists that the best way to get an understanding of a point is through seeing it illustrated in Latin writing, and the book includes an enormous quantity of Latin text. However, this is not arranged by difficulty or by what kind of grammatical point it might
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Fr Reginald Foster: mixed feelings about the past
illustrate, and there is no apparatus of vocabulary, translation, or other help to assist the student. Clearly a Latin teacher is needed to take advantage of this material.
Does the Foster system work? The idiosyncratic terminology must have contributed to a feeling of solidarity among the select gang taught by Reggie. I don’t suppose this was his explicit
SUMMER 2021
