PrepTest 112

Topic: Humanities

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Binns's view (important Latin Renaissance texts are underappreciated because of academic specialization)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Binns's view:
    • People who learn Latin tend to leave alone texts on "theology and science, law and medicine," even though those writings "revolutionized Western thought" (fifth sentence)
  • Comparisons, according to Binns:
    • Latin was used by English intellectuals (especially for works of law, theology, and science) more than English during the Renaissance (second sentence)
    • Language specialists focus on poems and orations more than works of theology, science, law, and medicine (fifth sentence)
    • Unlike language specialists, specialists in theology, science, law, and medicine do not have philological (linguistic) training (fifth sentence)
    • Historians can find more guidance when reading Milton's Latin poetry than they can when reading the more challenging scientific works by Newton (last sentence)

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • More on Binns's view (intellectual historians underestimate the importance of Latin on Renaissance England)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Binns's view:
    • "Intellectual historians" love to dig into "historical, cosmological, and theological" topics, but they do so with texts that were either written in or translated into English (first sentence)
    • This means that they ignore important context for these English writers, including that English writers were taught Latin in school and grew up in a world that was dominated by Latin (second through last sentence)

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Author's view (limitations are understandable but distort our understanding of Renaissance England)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Author's view:
    • This problem is understandable because no one is trained with all the skills that you would need to completely understand some Renaissance texts (first and second sentence)
    • Still, this problem keeps us from truly understanding some important texts (last sentence)
  • Author's attitude: "understandable" (first sentence), "No modern classicist" (second sentence), "difficult" (second sentence), "few students" (second sentence), "inability to cross boundaries" (last sentence), "each presents a distorted reading" (last sentence)

Main Point: Because so few academics are trained to read Renaissance Latin, some important texts from the English Renaissance have not been thoroughly studied.

Problem/Solution: This passage uses a Problem/Solution Meta-Structure.* In such passages, the author will articulate a problem and then (usually) will discuss potential solutions.

In this specific passage, the first paragraph lays out the problem as it has been stated by one J.W. Binns. According to Binns, "because many academic specializations do not overlap, many texts central to an interpretation of early modern English culture have gone unexamined" (P1, S3). The rest of the first paragraph and the entirety of the second describes how people who can read Latin only read the literary stuff (like poems and stories) and the people who have the specialized knowledge to understand the more technical stuff (like science, medicine, theology, and law) haven't been trained to read Latin.

Now that we have identified the problem, we need to ask ourselves, does the author provide a solution? The answer is simply no. The author never identifies what could be done to fix this problem, but that's okay! In a Problem/Solution Meta-structure, the author is not obligated to fix the problem that the passage introduces. In this specific case, the author is content to simply tell us that the issue at hand is a problem.

Generally, the main point in a Problem/Solution passage will be either the solution the author endorses or proffers. However, since we know that our author does not tell us about any potential solutions, our main point will be our author's opinion on the problem. In the last paragraph, the passage gives us a sentence that summarizes just that. It says, "[T]he result of each side's inability to cross boundaries has been that each presents a distorted reading of the intellectual culture of Renaissance England" (P3, S2). Thus, our main point will be something like, "Because so few academics are trained to read Renaissance Latin, some important texts from the English Renaissance have not been thoroughly studied."

*This passage is almost a Reporting a Viewpoint passage but the author presents their view in the third paragraph. Still, if you treated this passage like a Reporting a Viewpoint passage, you'd come out with a solid grasp of the main point and organization. You could also think of this as a Phenomenon/Explanation passage (phenomenon: many English Renaissance texts go unexamined; explanation: few scholars can appreciate these texts in their original Latin)

Whenever a RC passage discusses an author at length (as this passage does with Binns), it's important to analyze the relationship between this writer and the author of the passage. Does the author of the passage agree? Do they disagree? In this text, there's nothing explicit to tell us how our author feels about Binns, so we have to rely on inferring that attitude from the tone of the passage. 

To that end, we should note that the first two paragraphs are framed as Binn's argument. Sentences often say "Binn asserts" or "according to Bin." Nowhere in these two paragraphs is it apparent that the author has shifted into their own voice and perspective. Yet, in the third paragraph, where there is no "Binn says," it seems that we have shifted to the author's voice. Other than conceding that the limitations Binns observes are "understandable," the argument remains the same. Therefore, we can infer that the author implicitly agrees with Binn's thoughts. Understanding that relationships will almost certainly help us answer some of the questions about this passage.