The Oxford Latinitas Project is a society founded by members of the University of Oxford and alumni of the Accademia Vivarium Novum in order to cultivate a humanistic approach to the study of the litterae humaniores, liberal arts, and ancient languages. We are students and academics who not only research ancient, medieval, and Renaissance approaches to the study of the humanities, but also recreate the practices by which these arts and ideas were taught.

The aims of the Oxford Latinitas Project are thus simultaneously academic research and real-world pedagogical praxis. Firstly, we believe that, wherever possible, embodying and enacting the material we are studying yields immense benefits for our research (just as, for example, producing a Shakespeare play reveals things that simply reading the text does not). Secondly, the ancient methodologies we are retrieving afford approaches to the humanities that are conducive to human flourishing and the public good.

Following the spirit and methods of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance schools from Cicero and Cassiodorus through Alcuin to Erasmus and beyond, we offer a number of weekly language classes and literature seminars open to the public in which we read, speak, and write in the ancient tongues, spend more time with ancient texts than secondary literature, and debate questions that matter in a spirit of friendship. This website serves not only to promote this vision of learning at Oxford, but also as a locus communis for the collaborative output of our wider network.