Over the several months, I have been reading a pair of the most wonderful
new books -- well, new to me, anyway:
Grosser, Hermann. La sottigliezza del disputare: teorie degli stili e
teorie dei generi in età rinascimentale e nel Tasso. Pubblicazioni della
Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell'Università di Milano 149. Sezione a
cura dell'Istituto di filologia moderna 19. Florence: Nuova Italia, 1992.
and
Ramos, María José Vega. El secreto artificio: Qualitas sonorum,
maronolatría y tradición pontaniana en la poética del Renacimiento.
Biblioteca de filología hispánica 8. Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad de Extremadura, 1992.
It is astonishing how much useful information is collected in these two
volumes. One of the subjects that they both treat is the old idea that
languages have natural affinities. I don't know what modern linguists have
to say about this, but it's an idea that was taken very seriously in the
period that we all study. Thus, according to Tasso, Greek is a precise
language (all of those declensions and tenses and definite articles!) and
therefore good for describing details (cf. Auerbach's famous description of
the Homeric style). For broader effects, and for majesty in particular,
Latin is the best language of all. If, however, you are going to write
about love, then it is good to write in Tuscan. And so on.
My question is this: what did the English think that their language was
good for? As best I can tell (browsing, somewhat systematically, in the
collections of Ren. English lit. crit. edited by Gregory Smith and Brian
Vickers), what the English worried about was whether their language was
good _enough_. Apparently it was. But what it was good _for_ is not clear
to me. Did they think about such things? Or did they leave that kind of
theorizing to the Romance languages?
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David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
East Carolina University Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
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