The evolution of the English vernacular in the early Renaissance. The language as a means to assert national identity through poetry. A comparative study between Italy, France and England

Abstract

This thesis explores the evolution of the English vernacular in the early Renaissance. It investigates how the language was adopted to assert national identity through poetry in a comparative study between Italy, France and England. The dissertation analyses the need to establish a national language and examines the relationship between politics and poetry by questioning the bound between power and verse. It investigates the first attempts to codify the English language and to establish a literary canon. Furthermore, it emphasises the crucial role of French and Italian in the shaping of the English linguistic identity and it explores the theory and practice of literary imitation. It presents the choice to cultivate the language as an elitist and background activity but it also reveals the hindrances to the establishment of the English vernacular. It introduces the defence of the language as a subtle technique to assert pride and worthiness and it explores the controversial selection of those crucial traits which would characterise the English language in the following centuries. It also copes with the path towards self-aggrandisement by tackling the issues of originality and authenticity. This study shows the final triumph of the English language by presenting Edmund Spenser’s “reinvented” idiom and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie which epitomised all the qualities that Renaissance authors managed to confer to their newly refined and powerful mother tongue.