Reading Latin in Old New England Graveyards

Abstract

In the course of many years collecting and studying early New England epitaph verse, I have found a surprising abundance of works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Isaac Watts, Edward Young, and many lesser poets. Recently I was asked if Classical literature was also chosen for use on these Congregationalist gravestones. An admiring emulation of ancient Rome is observable in many aspects of eighteenth-century American culture, from principles of government, to the details of fancy dress and formal architecture, to the idealization of George Washington as the American Cincinnatus. So too in funerary monuments. At Harvard and Yale, aspiring ministers learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and many of their gravestones bear elaborate encomia in finely-wrought New Latin (fig. 1).