Catherine Conybeare

Catherine Conybeare teaches classics at Bryn Mawr College. Her most recent book, Augustine the African, places North Africa at the centre of Augustine of Hippo’s life and thought; it will be published by Liveright in 2025. She has written widely on the Latin literature and culture of late antiquity and is the editor of a series from Cambridge University Press, “Cultures of Latin”, which explores Latin as a continuous tradition from antiquity to the present.

The new project, Latin, Music, and Meaning, starts from two ideas: that a swathe of Western music is grounded in Latin, thanks to its emergence from hymnody and plainchant; and that it is through music that our contemporaries are most likely to encounter Latin. Four sections on hymns, plainchant, polyphony, and silence will be interspersed with case studies of pregnant Latin phrases in different musical settings to explore how the combination of words and music may generate meaning.