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David and all,

What a wonderful topic for inquiry and discussion!  I hope we'll have a good long string of contributions.  One thing that comes to mind, as a basis for comparison, is Walter Ong's old essay, of which I recall little beyond the provocative title, 'Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite.'  Having passed through that rite, as I take it all the writers who matter to us did, why did the makers of Elizabethan English devote themselves to developing the uses of their mother tongue?  I would suggest that, given the motley state of English, with its various regional dialects and argots, and the developments in commerce that brought so many people up against each others' differences, in London and elsewhere (most emphatically, perhaps, in Ireland), English more or less had to be developed as the matrix within which people could be sorted, and in which social mobility could be regulated.  Hence the development of 'aureate' language, on the one hand, and hyper-colorful vern!
acular language on the other.

Against this backdrop, what was it that drove Spenser to develop his artificially archaic language --
'no language,' according to Jonson?

Does it help to consider the notion that 'writing is about anxiety' -- specifically, I guess, an anxious desire to control the passing away of things, thoughts, all that was once tried and true?

Cheers, Jon Quitslund
> 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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