Print permitted the direct visual confrontation of the 
ancient styles in all their fixity. The humanists were shocked to 
discover how far they were in their oral Latin modes from all 
classical precedent. They decided at once to teach Latin by the 
printed page rather than by discourse, as a means of stopping 
the further spread of their own barbarous medieval Latin 
speech and idiom. Lewis concludes (p. 21): “They succeeded in 
killing the medieval Latin: but not in keeping alive the 
schoolroom severities of their restored Augustanism.”

Typography extended its character to the regulation and 
fixation of languages.

*     Later (pp. 83­4), Lewis contrasts the Renaissance 
schoolroom “classicality” with the oral and auditory freedom 
and variety of the medieval Latinity of Gavin Douglas, Bishop of