This chapter is an introduction to a study of Tudor attitudes towards language, and especially about disputes over its proper use.  Shaped by Renaissance humanism and Reformation politics, the clash centered on a network of ideas about rhetoric and Christianity rooted in humanist curricula of the schools, and often universities, that most of the disputants had attended.[1]  If you spent much time in Tudor public schools (places where otherwise unrelated students learned in a group—in “public”—rather than “private” instruction at home) you came to adulthood as convinced that language is God’s special grace to human well-being as modern Westerners believe in popularized notions of Freud and Einstein.  Brought to England via continental humanism, platitudes about the power of language had permeated your schooling, and you could likely make witty (in your eyes, at least) allusions to the best-known of them at social gatherings or in the corridors of court.

Citing different, often divergent, myths, your classic and Christian sources informed you that under divine inspiration some great personage (always male) “discovered” language and bequeathed it to humankind to further our well-being—and that thanks to the inevitability of worldly decay, your contemporary language was a shadow of its former greatness.  Your primary classical supports were Cicero and Horace, who described a dismal, antique time when humanity lived entirely like beasts, governed only by emotion (today we might say id) unmediated by the divine spark of reason.  Happily, however, a great master of language appeared and taught these barbarians[2] how to speak, and so how to share reason.  Shared speech in turn prompted the invention of the arts and made possible a shared community, a “civil” society: the very meaning of civilization has its roots in linguistic skill.  For Cicero (106-43 B.C.), oratory was the primal civilizing tool;[3] for Horace (65-8 B.C.), it was poetry (which embodies imaginative literature in general), as exemplified by the musical prowess of Orpheus and Amphion. [4]

 In early Christian writers you encountered a similar spirit argued on quite different grounds.  Language was still a divine gift, but from a Christian God.[5]  It did not begin in some unspecified barbaric clime but in Eden when Adam named the animals under God’s guidance.  Instead of pagan orators and poets, great preachers and prophets of scriptural history, like Moses (a law-giver) and David (a musician—and hence poet— who played the harp), “civilized” humanity by bringing it divine truth.[6]

Whatever pieces of either tradition you embraced, you also believed that thanks to the Fall all worldly things decay.  In historic times, the pure Latin of Cicero began deteriorating soon after his death, accelerated in its decline by medieval ignorance, while from the beginning of the world, the spiritual language Adam spoke in Eden was lost at the Fall along with human innocence.  But because good language promotes social and religious virtue while wicked language undermines all civil order, you yearned for ways to regenerate the original power of speech.

This common heritage about the origin and fate of language diverged in two general directions.  On one side were the pietists: basing themselves on patristic thought, convinced that human sin too readily abuses the truly spiritual power of language, adamant about the incompatibility of pagan and Christian thought, they condemned artful language—orations, poetry, fictions, theater—and promoted a Christian rhetoric to replace classical rhetoric.[7]  On the other side were the secularists, who ranged from the supposedly irreligious like Christopher Marlowe to deeply pious political figures like Thomas More and divines like George Herbert: no less concerned with the victory of true faith (whatever it might be) but believing that rhetoric, which includes any kind of artful language, figures forth divine truth, they felt no conflict in enhancing truth with artifice and integrating pagan thought into their Christianity.[8]  “Secular” here does not mean non-religious: like pietists, secularists were always religious in some way, which in England, as the sixteenth century proceeded, increasingly meant Protestant, with Catholics more and more marginalized and repressed.  But pietists distanced themselves from both secularism and humanism, which they anyway considered synonymous and prone to be unChristian.[9]

What can you believe any more? and whom?

What was incompatible between pietists and secularists wasn’t entirely what they supposed.  Whichever side drew your sympathy, as far as you knew you were arguing about who was moral and who wasn’t, whose interpretation of true piety was correct and whose wasn’t.  In fact, however, you were often also collaborating to accelerate a drift away from long-standing attitudes about political, religious and intellectual roles.[10]

For starters, there was the problem of political and religious authority.  When the Reformation reached Tudor England, plenty of people were still alive who could remember the crisis of authority raised by the Wars of the Roses that after decades of civil strife (historians differ on just when they “began”) ended with the defeat of Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485.  The Reformation brought with it dilemmas about obedience and conscience that the English approach aggravated in fusing Church and State.  What would happen to your soul if you repudiated the anointed clergy who interceded with God on your behalf?  What was your spiritual duty when you swore a holy oath to the Pope and then came to realize that Catholicism was the Antichrist?  Where did your true loyalty and obedience lie when your religious conscience conflicted with the reigning monarch’s?[11]  Living through these times, you witnessed periodic armed rebellions, intrigues that seemed as inevitable in the political soil as weeds in a garden, a clouded succession after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon (assuming you accepted Tudor victory at Bosworth Field in the first place), a traumatizing national shift from Protestantism to Catholicism and back to Protestantism within five years at the middle of the sixteenth century, and constant backbiting over orthodoxy among Protestants themselves.

As an educated person, whatever else prompted you to question authority— even before the Reformation you couldn’t long remain blind, for example, to widespread corruption in the papacy and among many Catholic clerics—humanist textual and interpretive criticism had been key influences.  When you re-examined the texts of your beloved pre-Christian Latin and Greek authorities to make sure you had their true meaning, you ended up reducing their dominance and authority as you saw modern minds shining in their own right—cleansing old texts of corruptions accreted over the centuries, interpreting the hidden meanings of those texts, bringing to light lost texts that amplified ancient thought, and even exposing spurious texts like the Donation of Constantine.[12]  When you shifted your attention to religious matters—the need for reform, whether from within Catholicism or by breaking from it—your humanist bias towards returning to original sources in original languages gave you tools and a frame of mind for reading sacred texts in ways that helped you justify your cause.  Your ability as a Reformer to renounce papal authority while affirming the ascendancy of the individual conscience to interpret scripture without clerical mediation was implicit in the psychology that allowed a humanist scholar, on his (or very occasionally her) own authority, to establish texts and what they meant.[13]

Alongside often overt challenge to political and religious authority was an unconscious challenge to the intellectual authority of the centuries-old belief in a universe of correspondences, or resemblances, where you saw everything as a mirror or metaphor of everything else: you knew that God placed the earth at the center of the universe because the drama of human salvation is the center of heavenly concern; that comets presage earthly catastrophe; that mandrake roots look human because they have an occult affinity with human beings; that crawling serpents call attention to the lowliness of sin, and flying birds figure forth the aspirations of the soul; that the earth has changing seasons and lions devour lambs because the Fall destroyed terrestrial equanimity; that puns reveal a deep affinity among a word’s disparate meanings; that wicked people are physically ugly to reflect their moral natures…or that wicked people are physically appealing because material appearance is deceptive and sin must be attractive or else no would sin; that a tyrant is a visitation from God upon a wicked society…or a test of worthy souls; and so on, and on.  This habit of mind made you, however selectively, interconnect all areas of human thought—religion, morality, government, law, diplomacy, history, literature and gender roles (though of course this last construct wasn’t part of your consciousness), to name a few.[14]

As a secularist, you delighted in a universe filled with ambiguity and multiple truths that challenged your wit to endless searches for new connections that would unify seemingly disparate phenomena, a pursuit that reached its English literary climax with metaphysical conceits in secular and sacred poetry.  At the same time, as you went about your critical business you were unintentionally undermining this world view by developing analytical tools and perspectives that assumed you could undo inherited corruptions in language, received texts, religion, natural philosophy (what came to be called “science” in the 19^th century).  You were furthering a sense of unitary order, a sense that there are pure, lost or hidden truths free of ambiguity.

This way of viewing reality, however, contained an unrealized contradiction that humanism and Protestantism inherited from the medieval thought they both largely held in contempt.  On the one hand, the universe of correspondences made you view “truth” as multiple and ambiguous, expressible only indirectly (as through metaphor) and in endless ways.  On the other hand, however complex the order of the universe might be, you could imagine all correspondences neatly nesting together, as Pico della Mirandola embraced in aspiring to integrate the thought of all major cultures,[15] and as the new natural philosophy was about to attempt by seeking universal laws that would eventually produce the image of a clockmaker God.  Scholasticism, seeking supreme syntheses while also taking the universe of correspondences for granted, yoked the two tendencies together; the Renaissance, and especially the Reformation within (or overlapping) it, gradually pulled them asunder.

If Reform was your primary concern, you never consciously renounced the universe of correspondences—that framework was so taken for granted that no one could dismiss its influence altogether; and noticing contradictions in the bedrock of one’s thought in the midst of shifting world views has never been an easy business.  But you could not afford to live with the resulting ambiguity.  Caught up in life-and-death disputes with Catholicism (and before long with competing Protestant theologies), you felt driven to seek an argumentative conclusiveness forbidden to a universe of multiple truths.  You invoked correspondences when you could make them fit your case and demanded unitary truth elsewhere.

The universe of correspondences did not suddenly vanish[16]; indeed, it coexisted with the 16^th and 17^th centuries’ evolving quest for single truth.  Instead of reflecting on the essential nature of reality, what you saw yourself arguing about were questions like whether secularists were promoting falsehood when they wrote fictions or argued both sides of a moral question, or whether pietists were tyrants intent on polarizing society or foisting solipsistic visions of religiosity on everyone.  Looking back from the twenty-first century, we can identify a pattern which contemporaries could not recognize, that the elegant and comforting explanations which had accompanied a universe of multi-layered meaning in which novelty was anathema were becoming decreasingly tenable as they encountered more and more contradictions in the changing times: a New World, new peoples, new mores, new animals, new plants; new (exploding) stars that appeared in the supposedly immutable heavens; new ways to make money that were bringing wealth to some people while overthrowing traditional methods of husbandry, land use and labor; a new natural philosophy that used mathematics and personal observation to explain nature and affirm a new kind of harmony and order to the universe, based on dispassionate, immutable laws—while simultaneously threatening the reassuring presence of active, involved divinity in daily life.[17]

Of all novelties, new religion was the most disturbing: Protestantism was challenging Catholic authority and corruptions.  Catholicism felt itself battling to retain stability, continuity and familiarity in Christian belief.  In the name of Christianity, as a few contemporaries like Montaigne realized,[18] Christians were slaughtering Christians all across Europe.  An old order was disappearing, a new one rising, but neither was entrenched.  Regardless of your intellectual stripe, even as you jerry-rigged newfangled responses to the instability of the times, you insisted that you were protecting tradition while your enemies were encouraging…novelty.[19]

New logic

One sign of growing interest in single, definitive truth was a comeback for logic—or what passed for it.  While you had never thrown it out of the curriculum altogether, [20] as a humanist you had subjugated logic to rhetoric when setting your sights on the will rather than the intellect in your quest to fire audiences to virtuous action.  That the spirit of truth was more important than its rigorous verifiability was a profoundly felt belief not only of educated people but also of religious people who may have had difficulty arguing theological nuances.  Writing about the world, you went through the motions of consistent, step-by-step argumentation without making it your ultimate concern.  You felt a commitment to promulgating beliefs, arguments and moral prescriptions regardless of “logical” c—onsistency.  Besides, you could never forget that logic was the core of scholasticism, a sterile Aristotelian heritage full of abstract, otherworldly concerns which minimized the value you placed in temporal affairs.  If you were also a Reformer, whether pietist or secularist, you had other, theological reasons for scorning scholasticism and so, by association, the classical logic that otherwise had the enviable virtue of forcing the mind to single conclusions: the schoolmen had contributed to “modern” Catholic corruptions—practices going back, depending on the polemicist you were reading, to anywhere from the death of Christ to the reign of Charlemagne.

What you needed was a new logic that would capture a spirit of systematic thinking while spurning Aristotle and the scholastics, and this you could find in Peter Ramus, a French Protestant who had taught eloquence and was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s massacre of 1572.[21]  Ramistic logic filled two key needs.  On the one hand it gave you a “logic” without syllogisms, replacing them with endless dichotomies.  On the other hand, it included a theory of rhetoric based on Cicero.[22]  Ramism spread largely in Protestant countries and came to England in the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, where it was embraced not only by pietists but also by thinkers like Philip Sidney who, secular in temperament and puritan in religion, needed a way to revel in the rhetorical world of endless meaning while simultaneously keeping a sense of rigor about their religion.[23] 

New ways of thinking about nature

The new natural philosophy echoed a humanist habit of looking for secret meaning.  Growing in part from humanist empiricism (personal experience of reality, as in looking at ancient texts for yourself)[24] and love of classical philosophy (for example, belief in universal laws, the geometrization of space, and application of mathematics to nature, which all owed debts to the revival of Platonism[25]), the new philosophy sought to “read” nature as humanists read texts, scurrying to outwit her and penetrate to her carefully-hidden secrets.[26]  At the same time, the new philosophy, seeking orderly, singular, inexorable laws and explanations for natural phenomena, gradually repudiated the multi-layered universe of correspondences.  One form of that repudiation was the program first proposed by Bacon, most famously urged by Thomas Sprat, and ridiculed by Jonathan Swift in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels: to reform language (and implicitly, rhetoric and all of humanist wit) so that one word would come to stand for only one thing.[27]

All the world’s a text: reading the universe

A key link between old and emerging approaches to the world was the continuing importance of interpretation or perspective—the awareness that the way you “looked” at something, with physical or mental eyes, determined your understanding of it—and through it the capture or re-capture of hidden truth.  Painters had learned to re-examine the world by playing with perspective to reproduce both physical and spiritual realities (a distinction blurred by attitudes towards allegory, as discussed below).  In Tudor England, because your schooling was founded on rhetoric, because your educated consciousness assumed that texts shape experience the way the modern Westerner assumes matter is made up of atoms, you re-examined the world by seeing texts everywhere and reading them—or more importantly, re-reading them: the word of God, the writings of the Church Fathers, the wisdom of classical thought, the myths of pagan Greece and Rome, the “signatures” embedded in worldly things,[28] God’s table of laws as a source for earthly ones,[29] the narratives and teachings of history, the book of nature, the language of mathematics.  The very salvation of your soul depended on which scriptural text you chose to read and how you interpreted its key words and phrases—for Catholicism, Jerome’s Vulgate; for Protestantism the original scriptural languages (insofar as you could reconstruct them) and their (contentious) vernacular translations.

You penetrated the secrets of the text by unlocking the rhetorical strategies of ancient writers, exposing interrelated truths expressed through etymological plays on words, recognizing a grand design behind kindred meanings in puns and variant spellings, appreciating multiple meaning in ambiguous syntax.  You read—you interpreted, you established your text—and like a painter adding visual perspective to fashion a new canvas,[30] you fashioned new texts.  You might emend an existing text to purge its (supposed) corruptions and restore its original purity, or you might pass along your discoveries by writing your own text, whether sermon, oration, commentary, polemic, homily, poem, play or narrative fiction.  Always, you were “imitating” form and content of the past: you shaped your writing with rhetorical techniques, whether from a classical or Christian rhetoric (to the extent they could be totally distinguished), and you re-shaped—we might say edited—old accounts to make them applicable to modern times, whether you were a preacher drawing contemporary lessons from scripture or a dramatist re-shaping borrowed plots or  history.  Always, you were revealing the inner workings, the inner secrets, of your world.  And always, you were revealing the depth and integrity of your own virtue, your own wit.  (Usually, you were also writing for select, wise readers who could penetrate and appreciate your clever meanings.)  What started as a desire to redeem pagan greatness to Christian service became the discovery of a new way to communicate among contemporaries.

This habit of mind began in school, where correct reading was the core of the Tudor humanist rhetorical curriculum and where you came to expect hidden meaning and surprises in what you read—and gradually learned to achieve similar effects in your own writing.  Although we first think of rhetoric[31] as an approach to writing, for Tudor humanism it was at least as much a way of reading, which then provided a way of writing.  Humanism, after all, doted on re-discovering texts; the literal fact of the discovery of ancient manuscripts, as with the fifteenth-century retrieval of texts long buried in a Greek monastery, was an emblem of the larger spirit of re-discovering classical texts and scripture by re-reading them to extract their lost or hidden meanings.  Your quest was a holy one, to regenerate meaning placed in texts by their authors, and so to regenerate language—and because texts shape the world, to regenerate the world itself.

In training you as a reader, Tudor rhetoric conditioned you to expect texts to surprise you, to expect them to play with mental perspectives as painters played with visual ones and to convey truth only when apprehended all the levels of meaning simultaneously—only, finally, when you gave yourself up to the text and its tricks, became one with the text.[32]  Tudor rhetorical theory encouraged exactly these sorts of reading, for it placed self-consciousness at the center of the literary experience, whether as a conditioned reflex or deliberate strategy.[33]  As a result, the essence of rhetoric was to make language work in ways you did not expect—to “turn” (a translation of “trope”—and “verse”[34]) meaning from its accustomed content and thereby force you constantly to monitor your responses, so that the message was in the very movement of the rhetoric at least as much as in the diction. [35]  With this attitude as a foundation, you and other Tudor writers stressed reading at least as much as writing or oral exercises, setting out to teach readers how to penetrate to hidden meanings through re-examining their own responses.  Union of reader and text could appear in ruminations on a plain style as well as secularist approaches to rhetoric: for Thomas Cranmer, John King writes, the text of scripture “in effect creates its own audience of readers who adopt its ideal pattern of Christian life.  In understanding the Bible, the Christian should explicate himself.”[36] 

If ease of shifting between meanings had not already existed, Tudor writers would have had to invent it.  This kind of attitude demanded that you expect tricks in the rhetoric, expect to have ordinary experience of language and meaning violated, expect to keep reassessing the text and contrasting first and subsequent responses.  The essence of rhetorical devices demanded that you have simultaneous consciousness of technique and meaning, whether as a writer or reader.[37]  This fusion of rhetoric and meaning, of the experience of reading with the meaning of the text, is one more example of how the theory of correspondences prodded your mind to view everything in the universe as a figure or metaphor or shadow of everything else.  Form and content were not merely like correspondences in the universe; they were an example of correspondence.  Levels of reality were superimposed upon one another.  Principles on one plane of reality might be higher than those on another, but no more or less true, no more or less readable.  You did not create new ideas but brought to consciousness ones already there.[38]

Concern with reading showed up in how proposals for setting up schools stressed the importance of choosing “good” texts.  This was central, say, to pedagogical guidelines of the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives, a Tudor favorite: “He who would thus settle the choice of books [within a school], supported by a great knowledge and discriminating judgment would, in my opinion, truly confer a great benefit upon the whole race of mankind.”[39]   

Reading demanded re-reading.  Tudor texts sought to startle by setting readers up to expect one thing and then giving them another.  Rhetorical figures were “turns,” “alterations,” “translations,” even “transmutations.”  They were intended to “estrange” and “deceive,” “abuse” (with a root meaning of being applied away from or out of normal usage).[40]  Tudor writers were helped in promoting such definitions because their rhetorical vocabulary conveniently inherited a history of imprecision.  Even the ancient originators of rhetorical theory, E. R. Curtius tells us, waffled about their basic terminology.  While Greek schemata—the same as Latin figurae—in classical times were “conventionally divided into figures of language and figures of thought” (the first referring to patterns that words make and the second to ideas the words suggest), these seemingly clear distinctions quickly lose precision:

Besides figures of language and thought, grammatical figures (that is, figures occurring in the exegesis of the poets) and rhetorical figures have been distinguished.  Furthermore, antique and later textbooks commonly call many figures of speech tropoi (“turns”), tropi.  This lack of a settled terminology, and, in short, the endless variations in enumerating and defining the figures, are to be explained historically by contacts between various schools.[41]

For Tudor writers, “turns” applied to three general categories common to rhetoric and poetry.  Because they were making up the English terminology as they went along, writers varied on exactly how they grouped the categories and sometimes disagreed on the label for each.  Writing in 1553, Thomas Wilson offered a typical breakdown:

There are three kinds of figures, the one is when the nature of words is changed from one signification to another called a Trope of the Grecians: The other serveth for words when they are not changed by nature, but only altered by speaking, called of the Grecians a Scheme: The third is when by diversity of invention, a sentence is many ways spoken, and also matters are amplified by heaping examples, by dilating arguments, by comparing of things together, by similitudes, by contraries, and by diverse other like, called by Tully Exornation of sentences, or colors of rhetoric.[42]

Tropes included metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, circumlocution, allegory, enigma.  Schemes included syntactical rearrangements, which could lead to multiple meaning through ambiguity, and puns resulting from the fluidity of Tudor spelling.[43]  Orthographical schemes created deliberate changes in spelling—adding letters or syllables to or subtracting them from words.  Finally, colors or exornations included description, apostrophe, personification, temporary interruption in a narrative, digression, and other methods of narration.[44]

The rhetorical-allegorical universe

A multi-layered universe with no distinction between primary and secondary meaning was supremely, simultaneously, rhetorical and allegorical,[45] as Michael Murrin indicates when he explains that Renaissance allegorists expected (elite) readers to re-assess every detail of the surface meaning in the text to penetrate to hidden meaning: “a poet is exploiting in his allegorical myths the interrelationship of the three worlds which make up the universe: the supercelestial, the celestial, and the sublunary…  [He] talks about many things at the same time, using an image in one world to signify its corollaries in the other two.”[46]  As we have seen, “reading” relied on the same assumption, that more should be behind the words than meets the eye, and that one way or another, the text should end up surprising you. 

When put this way the labels you placed upon Renaissance thought processes—rhetoric, allegory, wit, poetry, drama, history, exegesis—ended up as inseparable mirrors of one another, as synonyms for one another.  Each area of thought might focus on a different cultural tradition, but they all applied the same quintessentially literary habit of mind to illuminate their subject matter and when combined with devotion to rhetoric as understood by Renaissance theorists, made the universe a kind of linguistic allegory.  Just as in rhetoric there was no way to say whether the movement of the language or its content was “truer,” so in allegory you could not say which level was “surface,” which superimposed.  The principle here is the same as those children’s picture puzzles that “hide” animals in the landscape: until found, the animals are maddening in their elusiveness, but once recognized, they keep jumping out at you.  Is the “purpose” to hide the animals from the traditional eye, to reveal them to the astute eye that can rearrange experience, or to coerce the eye through delightful challenge to learn how to rearrange that experience?  (Is any game only a game?)  Is the “real” picture the one that hides the animals, or the cleverly concealed animals themselves?  When you have finished, you stand back and look at both, admire both in their interrelationship—and admire yourself for having “read” the picture in its totality.[47]

Patristic traditions of allegorizing scripture[48] with their insistence on hidden meanings in ancient Christian texts exactly mirrored the way you saw rhetoric working.  Here was William Golding in 1567 explaining Ovidian fables:

                       Poets then with leasings and with fables shadowed so
The certain truth, [and therefore] what letteth us to pluck those visors fro
Their doings, and to bring again the darkened truth to light,
That all men may behold thereof the clearness shining bright?
The readers therefore earnestly admonished are to be
To seek a further meaning than the letter gives to see.[49]

In scripture and pagan literature alike, you assumed that the study of Truth involved a quest for hidden meanings, a need to look at the surface narrative and read the superimposed truth apprehensible only to the mind specially trained or guided to virtue as a result of practice in analyzing texts.  Learning the formulae of the rhetoric handbooks made you constantly aware of yourself as an audience evaluating texts, as an understander of texts, and encouraged a habit of mind that reinforced traditional rhetorical admonitions to consider one’s audience: when you yourself wrote, you had keen consciousness of whom you wanted to address.  In experiencing a culture so aware of audience response, of rhetorical organization, of mystery figured forth in words, of “turning” words to unexpected meanings, it should not be surprising that when experiencing the great works of literature of the time, we today still find ourselves drawn into a text and thrown off guard, re-evaluating our responses as we proceed through the text, struggling to absorb meaning from the very flow of the rhetoric.

Self-doubting enemies and their affinities

Tudor intellectual culture was in the early throes of a shift away from stressing multi-valent truth (which we associate with Renaissance humanism) and towards unambiguous, unitary truth.  In their dispute over the proper role of language that I examine in other chapters, secularists and pietists may have used different sources for their arguments but they were responding to a shared sense of breakdown in their familiar universe of orderly multiple meaning.  As humanist pedagogy came to pervade Tudor schools and universities in the first half of the 16^th century, secularists and pietists typically shared the same intellectual upbringing, which included the overarching commonality we have seen in treating all phenomena as texts to be interpreted.  Such broad shared contexts point to an underlying empathy intermingled with temperamental antagonisms, suggesting that ultimately each “side” was unconsciously uneasy that its opponents might actually be right.

This was especially true because, of course, religious integrity trumped all other matters.  If you were a Protestant pietist schooled to read and write in the context of  humanist rhetorical principles, you nonetheless came to spurn classical rhetoric.  You came to denounce its artifice and subterfuge, and you sought a Christian rhetoric with a “simple” or “plain” style that reproduced the supposedly “plain” techniques of scripture, that is, devoid of the involved, multiple meanings your schooling had taught you to expect.  Whereas secularist rhetorical wit saw a world of complex texts filled with hidden meanings, you aimed for unpretentious, straightforward truth in texts—especially in scripture, so long victimized by Catholic sophistry that corrupted it with the multi-layered meaning of allegorical wit (as opposed to presumably “simple” scriptural allegory) penetrable only by a specially-trained priestly elite.  Indeed, one unconscious reason you needed to renounce your humanist roots may well have been that humanist ways of reading felt Catholic, a sense reinforced by humanism’s origins in Italy, a country which Protestant England made synonymous with vice and corruption.

Similarly, secularists, raised in the religions culture of their times, attending schools no less preoccupied with religion than with rhetoric, could not be entirely comfortable about their criticisms of pietism.  For whatever else it does, schooling seeks to impose—or assumes—common cultural attitudes and expectations.[50]  So it was that as an adult, whether pietiest or secularist, however much you genuinely disagreed with your worst ideological enemies,[51] you shared cultural assumptions with them that blurred the distinctions you both tried to draw.[52]  All of that seems pretty self-evident in cultural history, if not always out in the open.  Less obvious but psychologically just as true is that when you opted for one received value or set of values over another, or when you disagreed about the exact meaning of a common value, you inevitably had some empathy for the position you were opposing.[53]  This was especially true if you were confronting an articulate opponent.  I’m not saying that you disbelieved what you were saying, or that your belief was insincere, or that your opinion was wrong (though is any opinion ever “right”?), but that because your childhood training conditioned you to favor principles embedded in your opponent’s case, some (usually unacknowledged) part of yourself felt drawn to that view, felt some disquieting doubt about the legitimacy of your own position.  The more compelling the issue, the more contempt you and your opponent were likely to display for each other—precisely because you sensed but tried to deny a part of your own psyche in each other.[54]

NOTES

[1] Not all Tudor writers went to universities; and although certain colleges (especially a few Cambridge colleges attended by many Puritans) embraced the new learning, the universities in general were much more resistant than schools to adopting it.  On Tudor educational curricula, see Joan Simon, Education and Society in Tudor England (Cambridge, 1966),  Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965), and T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, 1944).

[2] The source of “barbarian” is Greek, used to identify those who did not speak Greek and appeared to be babbling “bar-bar-bar.”  For an engaging (and so far as I know, unique) Renaissance response to this history, see Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals.”

[3] For example, “…eloquence is so potent a force that it embraces the origin and operation and developments of all things, all the virtues and duties, all the natural principles governing the morals and minds and life of mankind, and also determines their customs and laws and rights, and controls the government of the state, and expresses everything that concerns whatever topic in a graceful and flowing style.”  [De Oratore, III.xx.7]  For the alliance of reason, speech, divinity and the origin of society, see De Officiis, I.iii.4, XXX.cv and cvii, and De Inventione, I.iv.5.

[4]  Horace writes;

When primitive men roamed the forests,
Orpheus, the sacred interpreter of heavenly will,
Turned them away from killing and living like beasts
And hence is said to have tamed wild lions and tigers.
Amphion is said, as founder of the city of Thebes,
To have moved the stones and led them wherever he wished
By the sound of his lyre and the winning appeal of his voice.
This was the wisdom of former times: to distinguish
Public from private concerns and sacred from common,
To forbid impromptu liaisons and make rules for marriage,
To build towns and carve out the laws on pillars of wood.
The poets who taught by expressing these things were acclaimed:
They and their works were considered divine.
[Ars Poetica, tr. Smith Palmer Bovie, in The Satires and Epistles of Horace (Chicago,
1959), 287.]

A “naturalistic” account of the origin of language appears in Lucretius (99-55 B.C.), who
dismissed the notion that a single person invented language or poetry. Of language in general he
wrote, “For why should this particular man be able to denote all things by words and to utter the
various sounds of the tongue, and yet at the same time others be supposed not to have been able
to do so?” [On the Nature of Things, trans. H. A. J. Munro, in The Stoic and Epicurean
Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York, 1957), 183] Poetry and music evolved from
sources that included “imitating with the mouth the clear notes of birds” and “the whistlings of
the zephyr through the hollows of reeds.” [p. 190] Lucretius did, however, see an interrelation
between the rise of civilization and the creation of arts, of which language is one form.

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), chapter 2, has an excellent discussion
of ancient myths about the origin of language, the arts and society in classical and humanist
thought. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York, 1969),
discusses traditions that saw the supposedly real and ancient Hermes Trismegistus as the first
master of wisdom and eloquence.

[5] See, for example, Lactantius, The Works of Lactantius, tr. William Fletcher Edinburgh, 1872), 2 vols., II.29.

[6] Lactantius, for example, argued that pagan philosophers, in introducing “not one origin only, and cause of building a city,” violated the sacred principle that truth is singular.  [Ibid., I.375-6]  More saliently, speech did not begin after the creation of humankind, but at the same time (“that there were never men on the earth who could not speak except those who were infants every one who is possessed of sense will understand” [Ibid., I.377]), and therefore, pagan claims that speech “evolved” are blasphemous:

O wretched and pitiable men, who committed to writing and handed down to men the record of their own folly; who, when they saw that the plan of assembling themselves together, or of mutual intercourse, or of avoiding danger, or of guarding against evil, or of preparing for themselves sleeping-places and lairs, was natural even to the dumb animals, thought, however, that men could not be admonished and learned, except by examples, what they ought to fear, what to avoid, and what to do, or that they would never have assembled together, or have discovered the method of speech, had not the beasts devoured them!  [Ibid., I.376]

You could find an occasional patristic reference to classical accounts of the importance of language, as when Jerome underscored the importance of speech for Christian community by invoking Cicero’s reverence for the social role of language and then hinting at an alliance between the civilizing power of language and the origin of the arts: “What is there so present…when we are absent from each other, as to be able to speak to and to hear those you love through correspondence?  Take even those primitive Italian people whom Ennius calls the casci, who, as Cicero states in his books on rhetoric, hunted their food like wild animals: before papyrus and parchment came into use, they used to exchange conversation through notes hewed into wood or the bark of trees….  Under how great obligation are we, living in a world civilized by the arts, not to discontinue a practice afforded them by men living in a state of stark savagery and, to an extent, ignorant of human ways!”  [Letter 8 in Letters of St. Jerome, tr. Charles Christopher Mierow (London, 1963), 46]

Patristic writers scorned classical myths that linked the origin of society and language.  See for example Chrysostom, who, while not explicitly rejecting the pagan myths, echoes Lactantius’ claim that society is a gift of God.  Speech, society and humanity were coterminous:

Seest thou by how many ways He hath bound us together?…  He…made us stand in need of one another, that thus…He might bring us together, because necessities above all create friendships….  But having set us in need of one another, He on the other hand made the intercourse easy.  Since if this were not so, the matter would have turned out painful and difficult in another way.  For if one that wanted a physician, or a carpenter, or any other workman, had need to set off on a long foreign sojourn, the whole had come to nought.  Here then is why He founded cities also, and brought all into one place.  [The Homilies of Saint John Chrysostom Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, tr. Talbot W. Chambers (Grand Rapids, 1956), 205]

[7] Rather than “Puritan,” I have chosen to use the looser “pietist” to convey a notion of moral rigor without commitment to any given sect.  “Puritan” would be an apt term (though not used until Elizabeth’s reign) if we applied it with M. M. Knappen’s caution to use it in a generalized way.  He cites G. M. Trevelyan: puritanism was “‘the religion of all those who wished either to ‘purify’ the usage of the established church from taint of poetry or to worship separately by forms so ‘purified.’”  [Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1965; original edition 1939), 489]  Even that definition is not sufficiently generalized for my purposes, since high Churchmen with sympathies for much in Catholicism could be thoroughly “puritan” about moral rigor in general and the perniciousness of artful language in particular.  Lawrence Sasek, though echoing Knappen’s generalization (“The term [puritanism] is most useful if we apply it to the great force opposing the established church” [The Literary Temper of the English Puritans (Baton Rouge, 1961), 17]), comes closer to my notion in noting that “A ‘puritan’ opponent of the stage may be an orthodox Anglican who fought the puritans and, conversely, an active puritan opponent of the established church can, in literary history, turn out to be quite unpuritanical.”  [Ibid., 15]

A stern moral rectitude that we associate with puritanism was not unique to England or continental Protestantism but part of a larger consciousness in Western Europe.  Here, for example, is a statement in a 1565 Italian dialogue on country living that could as readily have appeared in an English Protestant polemic against urban vice:

I know many women who are so involved with life in the city that they…want to dress up in the latest fashions, make themselves beautiful and wear perfume.  They go around, bursting with vanity, wishing to be admired and flattered by everyone that sees them, thinking of nothing but dashing here and there wherever their fancy takes them.  They turn up wherever there is a dance, a company, a tragedy, a joust, a feast or a tournament.

Another speaker develops this theme:

People here [in the country as opposed to the city] are not ambitious, envious, proud or underhand; they are not disloyal, hot-tempered, vindictive or murderous; they are not cuckolded by their wives; still less will you find them acting as false witnesses, dishonest notaries, lying officials, false lawyers, unjust judges or devious clerks.

This speaker catalogues city ills (and zealously describes the harsh punishment appropriate to each), starting with streetsweepers, garbage collectors, porters and wine-carriers, whose immorality is in their general demeanor, and then moving to bawds, whores, crooks, sorcerers, soothsayers, diviners, cheats, cutpurses, mercenaries, swaggering soldiers, hypocrites, confidence men, debtors, swindlers, murderers and traitors.  Along the way, he mentions abusers of language and their punishments: “slanderers having their eyes put out, blasphemers having their tongues slit,…false witnesses having their hands cut off.”  [from Agostino Gallo, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura e piaceri della villa… (Venice, 1565); I obtained these passages at a Harvard Center for Literary Studies gathering in March, 1990, conducted by James S. Ackerman, who wrote the translation.]

This text is informative precisely because it is so historically trivial; we may suppose that its criticisms, whether or not held by a majority, were commonly voiced.  The writer, a judge, dotes on images of harsh punishments, which English pietist writings constantly demanded from magistrates.  Gallo writes, for example: “Unfaithful wives should have their eyes gouged out, their tongues cut out, and their hands chopped off—or rather they should be wiped off the faces of the earth altogether—burned alive!”  The misogyny and sexual repression in this text often appear in English pietist writing; the theme of sexual repression, at least, was a common anti-puritan charge of the day and appeared at least as late as Jonathan Swift’s satire in A Tale of a Tub.

Professor Ackerman’s presentation focused on misogyny in a genre of advice to middle-class city folk about the merits of villas and how to run them.  At the good villa:

[Y]ou do not hear people being slandered, as you often do under the loggia in the city, or in workshops or other places.  I am not speaking now of vicious people but of ordinary respectable men and women who have no hesitation in blackening the reputation of honest wives, chaste widows, well-brought-up girls and even nuns!  And they seem to enjoy talking about sordid things…

“Puritan” tendencies everywhere were closely allied with running debates over pastoral vs. urban, country vs. court, contemplative vs. active, ignorance vs. learning, simplicity vs. civilization, nature vs. art, nature vs. nurture, and so on; in many ways, of course, they were all the same debate.  True to their schoolboy training that required arguing both sides of a case, secularists tended to set forth arguments for both positions in these dichotomies (see, e.g., Loves Labours lost or the Pastorella episode in Book VI of The Faerie Queene); pietists tended to press the first argument in each pair (as in stressing Christ’s role as a shepherd and insisting on the “plain” meaning of scripture).

[8] An epitome of secular writing was Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, an elusive, quintessentially rhetorical text steeped in classicism and full of concern for piety by a man who had been a monk.  Written in Latin in 1509 in Thomas More’s house, it was popular throughout Europe.  Erasmus made several trips to England, starting in 1499, and as far as early Tudor humanists were concerned, was practically an honorary Englishman.

[9] In modern America, of course, we see this tradition continuing in Christian fundamentalists who contemn something they call “secular humanism.”

[10] Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1960), addresses the Renaissance challenge to the Renaissance.  The basis of ruling authority became muddy, the heavens appeared to be an extension of the earth rather than an unchanging realm all their own, modern observers seemed capable of discovering things unknown to the ancients.

Here’s a modern example of such a change over a very short period of time: During the 1950s and most of the 1960s in America, there was general agreement among mainstream political parties and the dissenting left that resources for national growth were essentially unlimited; any disagreement was over how to allocate those resources, and who deserved them.  In the late 1960s, a few people on the left—a minority within a minority—began to organize around the idea that resources are not unlimited.  (When I first encountered such people in 1968 at a California Peace and Freedom Party meeting, I thought they were nuts.)  As I edit this note in 2007, only in recent years, and especially since Al Gore’s  film, An Inconvenient Truth, have such notions begun to become widespread, although implementing meaningful change still seems elusive.

[11] The climax of all this came a century later with regicide and a novel, albeit brief, period of rule without a monarchy.

[12] The Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla in 1440 exposed this medieval hoax that purported to be from Roman emperor Constantine in the early 4^th century, “donating” the Roman Empire to the Catholic church.  For details, consult e.g. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05118a.htm.

[13] Eventually, the contemporary, or “modern,” mind came to see itself superior to the ancient, most obviously when natural philosophy re-interpreted nature and exposed fallacies of the ancients: consider, for example, Galileo, who by the personal authority of measuring the speed of balls rolling down inclined planes (not by dropping things from the Leaning Tower of Pisa) repudiated Aristotle’s ex cathedra affirmation that the heavier an object, the faster it falls.  Commentaries on the ancients-moderns controversy include R. F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965) and Hans Baron, “The Quenelle of the Ancients and the Moderns as a Problem for Renaissance Scholarship,” in P. O. Kristeller and P. P. Wiener, eds, Renaissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas (New York, 1968).

[14] This frame of mind is the antithesis of our modern Western penchant for specialization, but we cannot understand Renaissance thought until we can empathize with a habit of thinking that does not see cultural or intellectual topics as discrete but rather as restatements of one another.  For a particularly concise and thoughtful exposition of this way of thinking, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [no translator listed] (New York, 1970), chapter 2.  Arthur O. Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being (New York, 1960) is the classic intellectual history into which the universe of correspondences fits.  The most familiar statement for students of Renaissance English literature when I was in graduate school was E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture (New York, n.d.); My major problem with Tillyard is that he sees this synthesis as firmly entrenched in the “Elizabethan” mind, whereas I believe it is under constant assault from both daily events and the intellectual ferment of the Reformation.

[15] Pico della Mirandola’s most famous work is On the Dignity of Man, for the full text of which see, e.g., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago, 1948).  An on-line edition is at http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/.  An on-line synopsis of Pico’s importance is at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/REN/PICO.HTM.

[16] Nor has it entirely disappeared to this day.  One way in which that universe endured was in evolutionary theory, as Lovejoy describes in The Great Chain of Being.  Another is echoed when we hear claims about AIDS that it is a divine judgment on our sinful society or on a putative “homosexual life style.”

[17] The new philosophy, especially in England, aspired after certainty without expecting to get it—see Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630-1690 (The Hague, 1963)—a problem which reinforced the religious compromise that opposed puritan pietism: as there could be no certainty in the study of nature, so uncertainty in religious doctrine could promote a via media in doctrinal matters.  This conclusion of mediated certainty might have been encouraged by the multiple-truth outlook of the universe of correspondences, but it was also very different, for it strove for a single truth, offered an approximation of one, and lamented any need to fall short of one.

The importance of doubt in the new philosophy’s quest for laws of nature interwove with the rise of the philosophy of scepticism, another product of humanist revival of ancient thought that was congenial to a disposition to re-examine old texts.  Scepticism contributed to the new natural philosophy (by offering Epicurus’ atomism as a mechanical explanation for the behavior of natural phenomena) and to religious hostility to it (because atomism seems to dismiss God by promoting a belief that randomness controls the universe).   On the history of scepticism as it pertains to the Renaissance, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York, 1964).  Studies that variously discuss skepticism, atheism and religious attitudes include George T. Buckley, Atheism in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1932), Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1964), and Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven, 1958).

[18] See “Of Cannibals.”

[19] A typical irony was William Tyndale’s writing a treatise to define Christian obedience in the midst of—because of—rampant disobedience to the old Church.

[20] The Renaissance inherited from medieval educational theory the division of curricula into the trivium and quadrivium.  The former consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric.  Since the later Middle Ages, the primary importance within the trivium had shifted from grammar to logic to (in the Renaissance) rhetoric.  (The quadrivium was made up of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music.)

[21] Standard works on Ramus include Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) and Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1957).  For summaries of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, try http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13333b.htm (Catholic interpretation) or http://www.reformation.org/bart.html (a much less detached, Protestant account).

[22] Ramism reduced Cicero’s five rhetorical divisions to two, integrating the first, second and fourth parts of classical rhetoric (invention, disposition and memory) into the third and fifth divisions (style, on which Ramism put great stress, and delivery).

[23] It is no accident that in seventeenth-century France, the Port-Royal school of logic was founded by Jansenists, the French Catholics most like Calvinists.  A summary of the appeal of logic to Jansenism would apply equally well to sixteenth-century English pietism:

The logician aims to eliminate controversy, since it is a sign of inadequate knowledge; and he distrusts unresolved dialogue, since the truth is one—or, at least, he hopes to make it so.  The rhetorician thrives on controversy; and in moments of leisure—one thinks at once of Cicero—he takes pleasure in dialogue. [Hugh M. Davidson, Audience, Words and Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Rhetoric (Ohio State University, 1965), 100]

Jesuit “casuistry” reflects continuity with a multi-valent universe; depending on where you stand, casuistry may look like flexibility or hypocrisy.

[24] See, e.g., Hiram Haydn’s discussion of the hand-in-the-wound school in The Counter-Renaissance.

[25] See, e.g., Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957) and E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (New York, 1954).

[26] The gender was no accident; see, e.g., Evelyn Fox Keller on Bacon, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven and London, 1985), chapter 2.

[27] A humanist precursor of this notion was efforts of Elizabethan orthographic reformers to create an alphabet in which one letter stood for one sound only. 

The tension within the new philosophy that at once felt bonds with humanist tradition yet trapped by it was a key source of the split in intellectual history between the humanities and sciences, and continues today to reinforce that division.  At first, because of its incompatibility with fundamental religious principles—miracles, for example, seem to disallow regularity in nature; a universe governed by immutable laws destroys the efficacy of prayer, which assumes God’s ability to intervene in the natural order at any time—the new philosophy felt its strongest bonds with humanism and was attacked by religion.  But belief in a singular, unambiguous reality also produced an affinity between Protestantism and the new philosophy that helps account for their rapid reconciliation between the beginning and end of the seventeenth century.  The source of their split never ceased; the Enlightenment’s approach to Newtonianism, for example, appeared to fulfill the dire warnings that the new way of natural philosophy would dismiss an active God from the universe.  We see continuing evidence of religious uneasiness with science in the modern American heirs of Reformation pietism who denounce evolution (which requires considerable interpretive leger-de-main to be reconciled with Genesis) for its contrariness to the plain, direct meaning of scripture.

[28] Citing Oswaldus Crollius’ Paracelsian book on pharmacology and signatures, first published in 1609, Michel Foucault points to the need to read (“decipher”) the world to discover its secrets:

…the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words—with hieroglyphics…  And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book; it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves.  All that remains is to decipher them: ‘Is it not true that all herbs, plants, trees and other things issuing from the bowels of the earth are so many magic books and signs?’  [The Order of Things, 27.  This passage is based on a French translation of Crollius’ Latin text: Traité des signatures (Rouen, 1650), 50.]

[29] Richard Hooker, writing in 1593, sees human law as based on “that high everlasting law…  Not as if men did behold that book and accordingly frame their laws; but because it worketh in them, because it discovereth and (as it were) readeth itself to the world by them…”  [Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1965), 2 vols., I.225; emphasis added]

[30] That art is better with visual perspective than without is not an intrinsic truth (as we have learned, say, from cubism or abstract expressionism).  The visual “distortion” of perspective in medieval painting that Renaissance art seeks to “correct” underscores different truths.  An outsized Christ child, for example, may remind the viewer of the relative importance of Christ over material objects or ordinary human beings.  A painting with multiple scenes, such as the stations of the Cross or key scenes from the life of Christ, can serve as a visual primer for the illiterate.

[31] I am, of course, referring to rhetoric as understood at the time, not its modern use as a synonym for empty language, spoken or written—a usage that likely grows from the anti-rhetorical tradition that I will address in succeeding chapters.

[32] Modern critics have discovered this experience in a variety of ways.  For Paul Alpers, the verse in The Faerie Queene “makes sense only as a rhetorical instrument, a means of modifying the reader’s feelings,” to promote Philip Sidney’s goal of creating “a world of heroic readers.”  [“Narrative and Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” in Alpers, Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), 388]  Stephen Booth, repudiating those who seek straightforward structural principles in Shakespeare’s sonnets, believes that “the individual poems are multiply ordered[;]…the elements of each poem exist in more than one intended order” to keep the reader “engaged and active” in the world the sonnets describe.  [An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, 1969), 1 , 187.  (Cf.: “…in all their details the sonnets set a reader’s mind in motion, demanding intellectual energy as they read, and…that effect, the effect of the actual experience of passing from word to word for fourteen lines, is unusual and valuable.  Each reading of a Shakespeare sonnet is…the experience not of recognizing the mutable nature of the human condition but of participating in an actual experience of mutability.” [49])  Stanley Fish argues that Francis Bacon, by encouraging us to beliefs which he suddenly sweeps away, teaches us in the Essays by a kind of rhetorical behaviorism to shun the Idols of the Mind: “his primary concern is with the experience that form provides, and, further,…this experience, rather than the materials of which it is combined, is what is scientific about the Essays.”  [Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley, 1972), 81]  Fish sees the same principle enduring at least as late as Milton, who wishes “to re-create in the mind of the reader…the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam’s troubled clarity, that is to say, ‘not deceived.’”  [Surprised by Sin (Berkeley, 1971), 1]

[33] This concern appears in Tudor writings about all language matters. 

• Eloquence in general: In 1577, Henry Peacham’s long text on eloquence announced in its extended title that it is “very profitable for all those that be studious of Eloquence, and that read most Eloquent Poets and Orators, and also helpeth much for the better understanding of the holy Scriptures.” [The Garden of Eloquence (Menston, 1971)]

• Rhetoric: In his book on rhetorical devices, published in 1550, Richard Sherry’s title page addressed “all that be studious of eloquence, and in especial for such as in grammar schools do read most eloquent poets and orators.” [A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, ed. Herbert W. Hildebrandt (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961)]  While acknolwedging the value of learning rhetoric to speak “with some grace and elegancy,” Dudley Fenner in 1584 stressed its role of helping us to understand others’ ideas: all men should use the rhetorical arts “with some study as their callings may suffer and strengthen their judgment, to discern of the sayings and writings of other men, to keep better that which they learn.” [The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, in Robert D. Pepper, ed., Four Tudor Books on Education (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 146]

• Reading and writing:The subtitle of Edmund Coote’s primer in 1596 to prepare pupils to enter grammar schools called equal attention to reading and writing: his book was to teach “the most easy, short and perfect order of distinct reading and true writing our English tongue” and show “how any unskillful person may easily both understand hard English words, which they shall in the scriptures, sermons, or elsewhere hear or read: and also how to use the same aptly themselves.” [The Englishe Schoole-Maister (London, 1596; Scolar Press reprint)]

• Logic: Ralph Lever reminded you in 1573 that the person who teaches how to read books, as remains true in British education to this day, bears the title of “reader”:  “Verily it is requisite in all them, which shall be readers to men of noble birth, that besides knowledge and diligence to teach, they have also a certain sleight and cunning to cause their scholars to delight in learning: and so to use the matter, that personages of high estate be neither drawn from the love of their book.”  [The Art of Reason, Rightly Termed Witcraft, Teaching a Perfect Way to Argue and Dispute (London, 1573), i4]

• Spelling and grammar: Good orthography, William Bullokar’s title page insists, is crucial “for the easy, speedy, and perfect reading and writing of English” [Booke at Large in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds, 1970); original edition 1580] and obedience to grammar rules will ensure that “each volume, [in] time to come, may be read as it was”—that is, for its original meaning [Pamplet for Grammar, in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner (Leeds, 1980), vol. II, A4^r; original edition 1586]

Prefaces to works of imaginative literature equally showed concern with their readers’ comprehension: in his translation of Homer, published in 1598, George Chapman not only penned a section “To the Reader” but also one “To the Understander,” a member of an elite within an elite: “You are not everybody; to you (as to one of my very few friends) I may be bold to utter my mind. But idle capacities are not comprehensible to an elaborate Poem.” [In G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London, 1904), 2 vols., II.304]  Chapman highlighted the close interaction between reader and text through the syntax of “are not comprehensible” to make it sound as though the text “reads”—passes judgment on—the reader.

[34] From classical times poetry had been categorized as a form of rhetoric.

[35] This point of view, as I am addressing it, has nothing to do with theories of reading that make the reader a creator of meaning in the text.  Renaissance writers speak to readers with minds trained to sense and extract embedded messages, even if those messages involve paradox or ambiguity.

[36]English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), somewhere between 45 and 65.

[37] Our modern critical insistence on the fusion of form and content has its roots in a view that words and what they identify are exact and inseparable reflections of each other.  Discussing them separately, which we do all the time, is akin to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle problem of isolating speed or mass of an electron.

[38] This attitude easily blends with Renaissance distaste for novelty and newfangledness or theories that art must be an “imitation” (a term of great complexity reflected, for example, in plays’ “re-writing” history and old stories) of nature

[39] Foster Watson, ed. and tr., Vives: On Education (Totowa, NJ, 1971), 45.  Vives was almost as popular in England as Erasmus; he befriended Henry VIII in 1521, tutored Princess Mary and taught at Corpus College, Oxford, in 1523.  He visited England again in 1527, was jailed by Henry for siding with Catherine in the divorce, and then offended Catherine by recanting.  The De Tradendis was first published in Latin at Antwerp, 1531, and was translated as The Transmission of Knowledge.  Vives adds here that you should not just list books, but the relevant parts in them: “But such an one must not be satisfied with merely making a note of the worth of the books, but he should also indicate the passages in the books where topics one by one should be sought.”  Since Vives’ book was about to set forth such readings, he is anticipating praise for himself.

[40] See Puttenham for “deceive,” “trespass,” “guileful” (all in Smith, II.160), “abuse” and “estrange” (both in II.165).  See Puttenham (II.165), Peacham (Bi^v ) and Sherry (Ciiii^r) for “alteration,”  Wilson for “translation” (Ziv^r ) and “transmutation” (Aai^r ).  In Peacham, Bi^v , see also “removed from common custom” and “change of signification.”

[41] European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1953), 44-45.

[42] The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1962), z iii^v.

[43] While William Bullokar may have yearned for standard spelling (see note 33 re grammar and spelling), the reality was otherwise.

[44] Even the term “figure” was used differently by different writers.  In 1550 Richard Sherry rejected “figure” in favor of “scheme,” “a Greek word…taken for the form, fashion, and shape of anything expressed in writing or painting: the fashion of a word, saying, or sentence, otherwise written or spoken than after the vulgar and common usage.”  “Figure” is here one of three general kinds of scheme, “a behavior, manner, or fashion either of sentence, oration, or words after some new wise, other than men do commonly use to write or speak.”  Sherry complained that tropes have often been included under “figures” but should not be. [Bv^r , Ciiii^r]  Henry Peacham suggested the same three general rhetorical categories as Wilson and Sherry, though he violated the latter’s warning not to categorize tropes as figures. [Bi^r-v, Ei^v]  Similar divisions held in poetic theory.  See also George Puttenham, in Smith, II.160.  Modern literary scholars retain much of this general attitude.  We devote an enormous amount of our own literary criticism, from courses in freshman literature on, to probing the full potential of “figures” or “tropes” or whatever we choose to call them.  That our rhetorical vocabulary is rarely as detailed as a Renaissance scholar’s does not change the fact that we have inherited a powerful propensity to seek out hidden mysteries in texts.  From writing a term paper to preparing for a seminar discussion to giving a lecture to colleagues to writing an essay like this one, we tend to be highly conscious of having our own ingenuity recognized by what we can expose of hidden meanings in the texts we analyze—and often by doing so via specialized vocabulary, occult allusions and witticisms that we expect only the cognoscenti like ourselves to understand.

[45] As Thomas P. Roche explains, allegorical reading “postulates a verbal universe at every point correspondent with the physical world in which we live.”  [“The Nature of the Allegory,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), 404]  Because it juxtaposed disparate, often contradictory perspectives on the same subject, allegory inevitably appealed to the humanist mind that delighted in multiple realities. In its broad Renaissance meaning, allegory used (among other things) symbolism, scriptural and classical allusions, wordplay, rhetorical games.  You could only fully experience its literary character if you opened yourself to a holistic impact: the author did not expect a reader to catalogue the multiple levels in the text (though that might be helpful towards gaining full appreciation), but rather to experience all levels at once, to become infused with the moral truth that the rhetoric intends to convey.

[46] The Veil of Allegory (Chicago, 1969), 48.  Rosemund Tuve warns us that we misconstrue allegory when we separate its literal and symbolic level (see “Imitation and Images,” reprinted from her Allegorical Imagery, in Alpers, Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, especially 510 and 512). Cf. Roche:

As soon as the critic begins to talk about poets telling stories on the allegorical level, he confuses the tenor and vehicle of this continued metaphor and misses the beauty and economy of the allegorical mode.  To leap at random from the concrete embodiment of the universal in the narrative to an abstract statement of it can only flatten out the narrative and dull the experience that the allegorical narrative is attempting to create in the reader. [“The Nature of the Allegory,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, 403]

[47] Foucault makes a similar point when explaining aemulatio, one of the four categories he assigns to correspondences:

There is something in emulation of the reflection and the mirror…  But which of these reflections coursing through space are the original images?  Which is the reality and which the projection?  It is often not possible to say…  [The Order of Things, 19]

[48] For a good summary of the history of allegory, see  Curtius, 204ff.  For the imprecise meaning of allegory in the English Renaissance, see Joshua McClennen, “On the Meaning and Function of Allegory in the English Renaissance,” The University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology (April, 1947: No. 6).

[49] The XV bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (London, 1567), biii^v.

[50]  Such an assumption has always been present, as we have seenin recent decades in the U.S., for example, in wranglings over school prayer or the proper content of biology courses.  Details of curricula may vary from region to region and even school to school, and we may think there are fundamental differences if one school bans books that another doesn’t, or if one school has 50 kids in a class or guns carried into the school while another averages 15 per class and the worst discipline problems are occasional fistfights.  Certainly no decent society can countenance such differences, which have compelling consequences for each person’s quality of life both as a child and adult.  But the differences mask an underlying commonality across the nation’s schooling, a kind of collective unconscious for the cultural moment: everyone is exposed to some kind of reading and writing and arithmetic and basics of State and national government and history; after-school sports or language clubs or music are (or used to be not so many years ago) available; you raise your hand if you want to speak; you know there will be vacations at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter; and so on.

Schooling is not, of course, the only way members of a society develop common attitudes; home life, peer values and media images, for example, are also important.  But schooling presents a kind of “official” set of social norms that I am choosing to stress in this essay.

[51] “Ideological” here identifies any social or political attitude, even if based on ignorance.  For example, a school dropout who looks forward to drunken brawls at the weekend is being ideological when opposing gun control or voting against taxes (or the opposite).  While this essay focuses on a small, educated elite in Tudor England, there were plenty of members of that elite who gained little from their schooling yet shared a range of experiences not available to illiterate or barely literate people in their culture.

[52] Whether you favor or oppose social welfare programs, you debate the case in terms of equality of opportunity, the state’s duty to its citizens, individual responsibility and initiative, rights of the majority, and so on.  Disagreements expose ambiguous meaning of a value you have always taken for granted, or highlight how one principle you especially favor is incompatible with others you were equally conditioned to embrace.  Do you promote peace and security by building up arms, or by negotiating with your “enemies”?  Which weighs more heavily—your right as a taxpayer to the fruits of your labor (or your inherited wealth), or your need as an indigent AIDS sufferer for drugs that can prolong your life?  Should free speech or a child’s security take precedence if a magazine or internet site promotes pederasty?  And so on.

[53] The general principle to which I’m pointing is the way key childhood conditioning never stops affecting us, as in the way we now take for granted that we can find psychological roots of adult problems in childhood experiences.  We can become aware of what these experiences were and how they affect us, and we can teach ourselves to stop letting them control our lives, but we are never completely free of the feelings they produce within us.

[54] For the theater, Jonas Barish has established self-doubts among playwrights.  See, for example, “The Antitheatrical Prejudice,” CQ (vol. 8, 1966), pp. 329-48, “Exhibitionism and the Anti-Theatrical Prejudice,” ELH (vol. XXXVI, No. 1, 1969), 1-29, and “Jonson and the Loathed Stage,” in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blisset, Julian Patrick and R. W. Van Fossen (Toronto, 1973), 27-53.  In fact, as I shall argue in succeeding essays, the same uneasiness finds its way into all imaginative literature—theater, poetry, prose fiction—as well as pietist writing.99999

The blurred line between English humanism and Protestantism is evident in the keen scholarly interest to establish accurate usage of ancient tongues for both secular and ecclesiastical ends.  Hebrew, though rarely learned, is of special importance for its supposed religious role as God’s language in the Old Testament.  The value of Greek is both its secular importance as the language of one of the two great classical cultures and its religious role in composition of the New Testament.  Latin, the language of the Vulgate, the Church Fathers, much of Church history and numerous great classical thinkers, has undergone the most corruption of all three languages, especially because of scholastic attitudes, and so here above all we must learn to purify valid ancient texts and expose spurious ones.   

Paradoxically, however, attention to ancient languages actually reduces their ultimate value, for it enables their replacement by the modern vernacular.  The special nature of the English Reformation, viewing Church and State as reciprocal entities, makes religious and political support for the vernacular mutually reinforcing.  Translation, first of religious documents, then of secular ones, becomes an increasingly common Reformation occupation.  Dedication to purifying ancient languages easily prompts similar patriotic purification of English: etymological analyses applied to ancient tongues now become tools for reforming and expanding English vocabulary; establishing correct spelling and pronunciation of ancient speech provides the basis for cleaning up English orthography to clarify the meanings of modern words.  Cries go up, especially after Elizabeth ascends the throne, for English writers to enhance the nation not merely by translating foreign texts but also by producing native works of imaginative literature.  Where at the start of the Reformation, most educated people held English in poor repute, by Elizabeth’s death English is widely and vigorously affirmed as a great tongue in a direct line with Hebrew, Greek and Latin–and sometimes even greater than they.

Purifying ancient languages

Following the lead of continental humanism, English writers throughout the sixteenth century lament the decline of ancient languages (most commonly Latin, often Greek) from an ancient rectitude and stress the importance of returning them to “pure” states.  Thomas Smith in 1542 offers a typical history of this decay.  Both Latin and Greek “first brought forth stout and rough orators and somewhat uncouth words…, [then] in their prime…displayed all that is tender, clever, sweet, elegant, pleasant, pure, and ornate,” and finally in “old age”–the late Middle Ages–yielded “over-ripe fruit, idle words, awkward metaphors, a stammering and half-barbarous language,” the rotting having been speeded by barbarians like the Turks and Vandals.^[1]  To their credit, certain late medieval scholars made an effort to revive Latin (most notably, the scholastics, towards whom Smith is being much less harsh than most of his contemporaries) and Greek, but their classical usage was “still barbarous, neither Latin nor Greek except in name.”^[2]  Scholastics failed because they had not found “the real sources and hiding-places”^[3] of pure ancient tongues, stored by “learned and diligent men long before,…some preserved in sweet and pleasant treatises, others in bitter and violent controversies…; some in small and slender pamphlets…others shut up in great volumes.”  These secret storehouses “have reached us entire, unhurt, untouched, pure and clean,”^[4] finally discovered through the courageous diligence of humanist scholars.  The trailblazer of this recovery, Lorenzo Valla, proved that recent use of Latin “was of adulterous and base birth, and deprived of all honour and dignity.”  Other scholars, including the English humanist Thomas Linacre, “undertook the task of cleansing the Latin tongue and restoring the true elegance of speech,” though “with much opposition everywhere.”^[5]  Implicitly, Smith himself, who is writing as a combatant in a dispute over Greek spelling and pronunciation, is another of these humanist knights of pure speech.

In Tudor thought, the idea that pure language is the foundation of learning and virtue most commonly centers on Latin.  Thomas Elyot warns in 1531 that a nobleman’s child must from infancy “have with him continually only such as may accustom him by little and little to speak pure and elegant Latin.”^[6]  For Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster, published posthumously in 1570, the mere fact of speaking a language contributes to its decay; a dead language, by unchanged, is pure and so paradoxically the most alive with truth.  Thus Latin (which, Ascham tells us, had only a one-hundred year period of purity that ended in the reign of Augustus^[7]) would certainly benefit us if it “were properly and perfectly spoken.”  In fact, however,

now, commonly in the best schools of England, for words, right choice is smally regarded, true propriety wholly neglected, confusion is brought in, barbariousness is bred up so in young wits, as afterward they be not only marred for speaking, but also corrupted in judgment, as with much ado, or never at all, they be brought to the right frame again.^[8]

The reflex to invoke barbarism–the reverse of civility and its grounding in eloquence–as linguistic devil underscores the urgency felt by Tudor writers to purify any tongue at all, and especially the most civil of tongues.^[9]  Ascham continues: Latin and the even greater Greek^[10] are “the only two learned tongues which be kept not in common talk but in private books, [and in which] we find always wisdom and eloquence, good matter and good utterance, never or seldom asunder.”^[11]  The point is the same as Thomas Smith’s about “hiding-places” of pure Latin and Greek: we can recapture the true forms of the classical tongues because they were written down during their greatness and the texts have been preserved, in principle, unchanged.

These relatively secular perspectives easily blend with more explicitly religious arguments that pure language is crucial for restoring pure Christianity, that corrupt language promotes false religion, and that the decay of language is connected with Eden or Babel or both.  We can see the bridge between secular and religious perspectives in the Catholic humanist, Juan Luis Vives, who left England in 1528 (for having supported Catherine of Aragon against Henry VIII in the divorce controversy) after having lived there six years, during which time he taught at Oxford and was involved at court.  In 1531 Vives specifically identifies Latin as an appropriate modern replacement for the universal tongue before Babel, which was also the Edenic language.  Linking an echo of classical myths about speech (language “is the treasury of culture and the instrument of human society”) with Christian concern for the loss at Babel (the human race would benefit from “a single language, which all nations should use in common”), Vives proposes that the pre-Babel language, lost as “punishment of sin,” be replaced by a tongue that is “sweet, learned and eloquent” with “variety and abundance of words and formulae,…the capacity to explain most aptly what [its users] think,” and the development of “much power of judgment.”  That language “it seems to me is to be found in the Latin tongue, above all those languages which men employ…  For that language, whose words should make clear the natures of things, would be the most perfect of all; such as it probably was that original language in which Adam attached the names to things.”  Were Latin to be lost, “there would result a great confusion of all kinds of knowledge, and a great separation and estrangement of men on account of the ignorance of other languages,”^[12] a state that sounds exactly like that immediately after the punishment at Babel.  The loss of Latin, the modern universal language for the intellectually elite, would not only destroy secular learning but, as we saw in Luther’s lament over the division of tongues for its damage to religious unity, would also cause religious decay, since “for the spreading of piety it is most useful that men should understand one another.”^[13]

Protestant insistence that English replace Latin in public worship and scripture does not attack Latin itself but putative Catholic abuse of Latin.  In 1530, William Tyndale, the most notable early English Reformation acolyte of vernacular scripture, tells us, while presenting a religious version of the more secular “history” Thomas Smith will offer twelve years later, that Catholics, in fact, are ignorant of Latin:

Remember ye not how in our own time, of all that taught grammar in England, not one understood the Latin tongue?  How came we then by the Latin tongue again?  Not by them [Catholic clerics], though we learned certain rules and principles of them, by which we were moved and had an occasion to seek further; but out of the old authors.  Even so we seek up old antiquities, out of which we learn, and not of our church.^[14]

This ignorance highlights the hypocrisy of Catholics, since a priest, spouting Latin phrases to confuse the congregation, does not even know what he is saying: “Yea, and I dare say that there be twenty thousand priests, curates, this in England, and not so few, that cannot give you the right English unto this text in the Paternoster, Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and answer thereto.”^[15]  The example is not random; ironically, true understanding of Latin exposes false belief, since those readers who can understand the Latin phrase (which, we are told, Catholics cannot) appreciate that Catholic ignorance of Latin has made its clerics unable to grasp even the most basic of Christian tenets, literally and symbolically, so that they plunge themselves into sin: they cannot understand God’s will, neither in earth nor in heaven, neither in what he expects of a human being nor in how he has made our own will totally subservient to his.  Some Catholics, Tyndale warns, have even gone so far as to condemn use of ancient languages altogether:

…the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin and Hebrew; and what sorrow the schoolmasters, that taught the true Latin tongue, had with them; some beating the pulpit with their fists for madness, and roaring out with open and foaming mouth, that if there were but one Terence or Virgil in the world,…they would burn them therein, though it should cost them their lives; affirming that all good learning decayed, and was utterly lost, since men gave them unto the Latin tongue.^[16]

The joke here is that the Scotists, in attacking humanism’s return to Latin sources as a “decay” of good learning, really sought only to forestall questioning of Catholic dogma and to hasten the decline of true religion by making sure that Latin was left to decay.  (The unwitting joke is that Tyndale’s pietist successors will themselves find reason to condemn the content, though not the Latin, of pagan literature.)  Tyndale’s ploy is a reply to Catholic charges that Protestants were innovators in religion: he is implying, as Protestant writers often did, that Catholics have been the real innovators while Protestants are merely trying to restore ancient verities.

For Protestants, all this Catholic misuse and dismissal of Latin adds up to the vice of worldliness, reliance on human authority regardless of whether we understand or agree with it.  John Jewel in 1562, for example, condemns Catholic favor for modern (corrupt) Latin usage over ancient as a mirror of the wicked Catholic doctrine that places faith equally in Church (= human) and scriptural authority rather than scripture alone:

Pighius [a Catholic] also is not afraid to say, that we ought not to believe any text of the scripture be it never so plain, unless we have our warrant from the Church of Rome.  Much like as if…it were a mockery, now after so long continuance, to trouble the world with a new kind of speech, and to call home again the old pureness and elegancy in speaking, which Cicero or Caesar used in their days.  Such is the duty forsooth that these men do owe unto the ignorance and darkness of the times past.^[17]

Yet Catholic polemicists–especially since to some extent they, even more than Protestants, can embrace Italian humanist tradition (Italy remained Catholic, after all) with its stress on classical studies–share the beliefs that ancient tongues are essential to the highest virtue while also needing purification.  At the start of the Reformation, despite the bitterness between himself and Tyndale, Thomas More acknowledges that Latin has become corrupt–though of course he denies any comparable decay in Catholicism: 

These things [allegedly lost Christian principles] have they now restored and brought up again by antiquities and old stories, like as master Lyly late master of Paul’s school brought up in London the right order in teaching of grammar and learning of the Latin tongue.IP13,8

But now good readers we must tell him [Tyndale] again that his example of grammar and the Latin tongue, is nothing like the matter of faith that he resembleth it unto.  For the Latin tongue was no thing that ever our lord promised to preserve for ever, and therefore it might by chance & occasions of battle and war, perish and might be lost, and the countries compelled to leave it receive some other language in the stead thereof.  But as for the faith can never fail, no more than can the Catholic church, against which our savior hath him self promised that all the heretics that rebel against it, nor all the tyrants upon earth that insurge and oppugn it,…shall never obtain and prevail.^[18]

[The reader should not] interpret me in any thing which I have spoken, as though I coveted to disgrace the study of greek and hebrew…& condemned those languages, which I confess to be great helps to the attaining of the true sense in sundry places of scripture, & condemn myself for knowing so little as I do in either of them.>  A marginal note adds, “The hebrew and greek knowledge much advanced by Catholics,” but another note, a page later, warns, “A man must have a settled faith before he come to confer greek and hebrew else shall he never have any faith.”  [A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 439-440, 441]

The example of Lyly’s grammar is telling, and underscores the increasing difficulty of juggling religious and social beliefs.  It was inconceivable that proper education could occur without promoting religious goals, and it would be emotionally untenable to separate, as More does, religious from secular use of Latin.  Rather, it would be a reflex to see the appearance of Lily’s Grammar, and the principles underlying it, as contributing to the proper religious state of the nation.  Indeed, by the end of the century, when the English Reformation is far more secure than during its early decades, we find Thomas Campion on the one hand identifying the campaign to purify Latin as a quest for truth by both Protestants and Catholics alike, on the other hand carefully aligning the move to purify Latin with repudiation of Catholicism, so that Catholics in the movement for linguistic purity were actually of the Protestant party without knowing it:

Learning, after the declining of the Roman Empire and the pollution of their language through the conquest of the Barbarians, lay most pitifully deformed till the time of Erasmus, Reuchlin, Sir Thomas More, and other learned men of that age, who brought the Latin tongue again to light, redeeming it with much labor out of the hands of the illiterate Monks and Friars.^[19]

Purifying the vernacular for salvation

For Protestantism, Catholics, in addition to ignorance and abuse of Latin, misapply it in both ancient and modern contexts: they prefer Latin to languages that preceded it (by elevating the Vulgate above original scriptures) and that followed it (by preferring it to local vernaculars in scripture and church services).  As Miles Coverdale tells Catholics in 1547, repeating one of the most hackneyed and heartfelt of Protestant statements, they use Latin in church to assure that the congregation “understand not, and roll them in darkness, that ye may lead them whither ye will,” which is to reverse the civilizing process that restrains bestiality in human beings: “It is verily as good to preach…to swine as to men (if thou preach…in a tongue they understand not).”^[20]  A few pages later, the translator points out that modern Jews have their scripture in their vernacular, and that if Jews are given such a privilege, it must be even more proper to Christians.  Anyway, other nations received their own vernacular Bibles after Christ’s departure: “And after ascension many translated all the bible in diverse languages / as into spanish tongue french tongue / and almayne (sic) / italy and by many years have made it.”  [Aiii^v-Aiiii^r]

In 1562, John Jewel speaks similarly.  Catholics, he observes, claim that “Christ, the Apostles and holy fathers did not pray in that tongue which the people did understand” only as a ruse; in truth, “lest the people should understand somewhat, [Catholics] do whisper all their holy mysteries, not only with an uncertain & a low voice, but also in a strange and a barbarous tongue.”  [Apologie, 18^v, 43^v]  (Calling Latin “barbarous” reflects the tension Protestants experience in honoring Latin based on both secular and sacred traditions while repudiating its use in Catholic worship.  William Whitaker confronts the same problem in 1585 by trying to condemn the corruption of the Latin Bible while revering the its antiquity, calling it “an old rotten translation” and then clarifying “(as I may boldly call it, being compared with the original word of scripture, although otherwise I give to it that reverence, that the qnitquity thereof deserveth).”  [An Answere to a Certeine Booke…, 13])

Like Coverdale, Jewel writes that by insisting on a language incomprehensible to worshippers, Catholics pervert the divine gift of speech, here turning it into gibberish and unedifying noise: “These men pour out in the churches unknown and strange words, like unto the noise of sounding brass, without any understanding, without sense, without judgment, and this is their only endeavor, that the people should not be able to understand any thing at all.”  [Apologie, 50^v] 

Catholic opponents of vernacular worship warn that it will promote heresy.  In reply, the 1530 translation of a medieval justification of the vernacular comments that we should recall “that we find in latin language more heretics than of all other languages.”  [Compendious olde treatise, Avi^r]  In the middle ages, this statement could refer to general paganism among ancient Romans, but in the year of the translation, with the English Reformation struggling to entrench itself, it is also a clear reference to Catholic devotion to Latin. <old V.95>

To reform this perfidious practice, we must follow the scriptural advice of St. Paul, who tells us that parishioners should hear a language they understand.^[21]

The arguments in favor of the vernacular, however, also conjure up nostalgia for the lost unity and integrity of a common, spiritual human tongue.  Thus, for example, one of the primary scriptural supports for vernacular worship is the same New Testament image that offers redemption from the division of languages–speaking in tongues, now taken as not just suspension of the sin at Babel but also as a reminder that the word must be preached so that all souls can understand it: “God gave unto [the apostles] the gift of tongues that they might deal with all nations in their own languages,”^[22] And upon whitsunday god gave knowledge of his law to diverse nations without any exceptions in their mother tongue, by the understanding of one tongue.  And of this it is notable sithen the lay people in the old law had their law in their mother tongue, yet the lay english people in the new law have it as all other nations hath, sith Christ bought us as he did other and hath given to us that same grace as to other.  [“A compendious olde treatyse shewynge howe that we ought to have ye scripture in Englysshe,” in Bible, appendix (Marlborow, Hessen [Antwerp], 1530), Aiii^v] <old V.97> as John Jewel observes in 1565 while confuting Catholic support for holy services in Latin.

When Protestants invoke the Pentecost to justify vernacular worship,^[23]  they are implying that redemption from the sin at Babel was not a temporary miracle but an ongoing possibility that Catholicism has subverted.  Christianity–the Word and the word–becomes a kind of inner word, to use Augustine’s terminology, that offers a universal “language” of spiritual truth.  Although the world has a multiplicity of outer words (all the languages on earth), the sacrifice of Christ has contributed a single truth that may be captured in these disparate tongues.  One inference of this argument is that Jerome’s Bible, revered by Catholic theologians, was not the final word in scripture, but only a vernacular version for Latin speakers: “it was never [Jerome’s] intent,” insists the 1530 translation of a medieval argument for vernacular scripture, “to bind the law of god under his translation of latin but by his own deed [he] giveth leave to translate it into every speech[;] for Jerome writeth in his .lxxviii. epistle to this man Atleta that he should inform his daughter in the books of the old law and the new.”^[24]

 Translation does not become just an option but a religious necessity, as we can hear in Thomas Cranmer’s joy at the success of Reform under Edward VI: IP8,8

[Now] the scripture is restored unto the proper & true understanding.  The people may daily read & hear God’s heavenly word, & pray in their own language which they understand, so that their hearts and mouths may go together, and be none of those people of whom Christ complained, saying: These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts be far from me.^[25]

Without vernacular scripture, most Christians are cut off from Christianity, since few can read or understand Latin but all must judge doctrine for themselves.  The solution is not to train everyone in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but for modern Jeromes to become versed in scriptural languages and, with God’s help, to produce vernacular translations of scripture that make its inner word available to all.  Translating that inner word demands attention to an underlying spirit in the original scriptures, a principle we may infer from the actions of Christ, the Evangelists and other Apostles, who, according to the Calvinist divine William Whitaker in 1585, never swerved from the true word, regardless of their different languages: “They cite not always the words, but they keep most truly the sense and meaning ever more.”  The specific language in which scripture appears is irrelevant so long as the sense is accurate: “The word of God I know may be uttered in other languages, than wherein first it was by writing delivered to the Church: and translations agreeing with the original text are the word of God.  For God’s word is not the language, but the doctrine.”^[26]

 Catholics, however, John Knewstub tells us in 1579, act “as if the spirit could be divorced from the written word, which it was sent to teach and confirm.”^[27]

 Punning on a central doctrinal dispute, Knewstub insists that Catholic use of Latin both hides truth and distorts doctrine by corrupting language itself: “the Papists…do transsubstantiate the word, both into a foreign tongue, and also into a strange sense.”^[28]

Secular proposals to enhance the vernacular are also put forth with a sense of producing spiritual gain.  John Hart, urging spelling reforms in 1569, seeks to restore the “ancient and sole sounds of the five vowels” by studying the history of their (Latin) pronunciation, and lo! all five are wonderfully embedded in the primal Christian truth about the Word: “In principio erat verbum.”^[29]

 The quest to determine pure, original pronunciation is explicitly part of the struggle against sin: those who deny “the vices in the corruption of the sound of letters, which we have in use” must equally favor silence in the face of “all sin and vice which is naturally in the flesh, and of longest used.”  But like sin’s effect on the soul, “an abused and vicious writing bringeth confusion and uncertainty in the reading,” and so “the vicious parts thereof [should be] cut away.”^[30]

Elevating the vernacular for civil good

Sixteenth-century England, especially during Elizabeth’s reign, also experiences considerable agitation to enhance the vernacular for patriotic, worldly gains.  Where the sacred merit of English is largely a pietist interest, both pietist and secular writers testify to the social benefits of the vernacular.

We can see this interest, for example, in the growing interest in translations of both sacred and secular texts as patriotic activities.  In 1530, against contemporary clerics who actually burn vernacular Bibles, the anonymous translator of the 1400 text promoting vernacular scripture invokes the prophecy of “saint Edward the king and confessor” that such actions will mean England’s collapse^[31]

and demands, “Where is that ancient blood that was in england in these days?”^[32]

to stir nationalistic zeal to face down the enemies of an English Bible.  To one T.N. in 1566, translation of secular texts into English is equally patriotic:  IP8,8

the translating of Latin, or other Books of other languages, into our mother tongue, doth either profit the common wealth, or the writer…  [T]he young sprung writers…[should] hereafter employ their labor to more serious and weighty matters, both to their own commodity and thy learning, and especially to the profit of our native country.^[33]

Henry Peacham in 1577, promoting the interdependent values of wisdom and eloquence,^[34]

prepares a translation of a text on eloquence “to profit this my country, and especially the studious youth of this Realm, and such as have not the understanding of the Latin tongue.”^[35]

Ultimately, not just translations but vernacular use of any kind is praiseworthy.  In urging vernacular skills in his Academy, proposed about 1563, Humphrey Gilbert envisions practical, largely worldly skills as the result, since “in what language soever learning is attained, the appliance to use is principally in the vulgar speech, as in preaching, in parliament, in Counsel, in Commission, and other offices of Common Weal.”^[36]

I omit to show what ornament will thereby grow to our tongue, and how able it will appear for strength and plenty when, by such exercises, learning shall have brought unto it the Choice of words, the building of sentences, the garnishment of figures, and other beauties of Oratory.  [Ibid.]

The measure of tenure in the Academy is vernacularization of the classics (though the curriculum itself is based on sound humanist principles of classical studies): a teacher must “once every three Years publish in print some Translation into the English tongue of some good work, as near as may be for the advancing of those things which shall be practiced in the said Academy.”  [9]  “Good” to qualify the text reminds us that aesthetics and morals are inseparable; the implication is that a translation will somehow enhance the virtue of the modern tongue.

 William Bullokar in 1580, insisting that “the wealth and strength of our country, is chiefly maintained by good letters,”^[37]

issues a proposal to reform orthography “for the easy, speedy, and perfect reading and writing of English,” an achievement which will provide “no small commodity of the English Nation, not only to come to easy, speedy, and perfect use of our own language, but also to their easy, speedy, and ready entrance into the secrets of other Languages.”^[38]

C8. The need to reform English

Reciprocal with increasing support for the vernacular are widespread admissions that modern English, like Latin and Greek, has undergone considerable decay from a putative ancient purity; and as with classical languages, programs arise to enhance English by expanding and purifying its rhetorical fitness, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation.

Consciousness of the need to deal with vernacular deficiencies grows through the Reformation.  Translating a work on rhetoric in 1524, Leonard Cox, a humanist schoolmaster and friend to Erasmus and Melanchthon, sounds as though using English is a sign of the decay of civilization itself: the unhappy necessity of the translation is “to do some pleasure and ease to such as have by negligence or else false persuasions been put to the learning of other sciences or ever they have attained any mean knowledge of the latin tongue.”^[39]

 In 1528, Pierre Valence produces an English work that tries simultaneously to purify French and ease the learning of it; he tells us that he must draw a premature halt to his primer but hopes “some day another shall hap come that is more convenient & sufficient than I that shall restore a good part of this language in to the first cleanness.”^[40]

 In 1550, Richard Sherry observes that English “for barbarousness and lack of eloquence hath been complained of” but insists that the shortcoming is not intrinsic to his native tongue, coming rather from “slackness of our countrymen, which have always set light by searching out the elegance and proper speeches that be full many in it.”^[41]

 We need not, however, despair.  Thomas Elyot’s Latin-English dictionary of twelve years earlier is noteworthy for its expansion of English vocabulary in searching out “the copy of our language in all kind of words and phrases,”^[42]

and Sherry’s own book is applying rhetorical techniques to English in pursuit of reform.  Ralph Lever in 1573 is intent on purifying English vocabulary of “inkhorn terms” which “an englishman born…shall neither understand…by himself: nor keep…in remembrance when he is taught their signification of others, because the word can make no help.”   Reformers of English vocabulary “that devise understandable terms, compounded of true & ancient english words” can save the day, for they “do rather maintain and continue the antiquity of our mother tongue: than they, that with inkhorn terms do change and corrupt the same, making a mingle mangle of their native speech, and not observing the property thereof.”^[43]

The “movement” to reclaim and magnify English for the greater glory of the nation couches its goals in the same terms that make language the basis for all spiritual and worldly values.  Decay of rule and national power, banishment from the homeland to barren land–all go hand in hand with the decay of language.  In the same year that Sherry is advancing the rhetorical capacity of English, William Salesbury seeks to redeem a different British vernacular, his native, beloved Welsh.  Reluctantly, he admits that English, though merely a derivative of Welsh, has outstripped it in key areas: IP8,8

as for the Welsh tongue even as it is not now to be compared with the English language, so is it not so rude, so gross, nor so barbarous, as strangers being therein all ignorant and blind do adjudge it to be: nor yet (to speak indifferently without all affections) is it not all so copious, so fine, so pure, nor so fully replenished with elegance, graces, & eloquence, as they them selves suppose it.

He hearkens back to a time of pure Welsh, as others show nostalgia for days of pure Latin or pure Christianity: IP8,8

Howbeit when the whole Isle was commonly called Britain,…their tongue then was as copious of fit words, and all manner of proper vocables, and as well adorned with worshipful sciences, and honorable knowledge, as any other barbarous tongues were.  And so still continued (though their Sceptre declined, and their kingdom decayed, and they also were driven into the most unfertile region, barrenest country, and most desert province of all the Isle) until the conquest of Wales.^[44]

Perhaps unconsciously, the description in the final parentheses evokes the expulsion from Eden.

Conversely, reforming the vernacular undoes the incivility represented by uncouth speech.  Sherry, expounding on the general lack in English of key rhetorical terms like scheme and trope, describes patriotic modern givers of tools for eloquence (among whom he presumably numbers himself) who sound similar to the masters of eloquence in Cicero: IP8,8

Good cause have we to give thanks unto certain godly and well learned men, which by their great study enriching our tongue both in matter and words, have endeavored to make it so copious and plentiful that therein it may compare with any other which so ever is the best.^[45]

In making his recommendations for spelling reform in 1569, John Hart underscores the sorry state of contemporary orthography^[46]

and offers an antidote that similarly makes the modern master of vernacular reform kin to the first great orator who brings humanity from rudeness to civility: Hart sees himself battling with opponents who are like early humans “contenting themselves with Hides and Felles for their clothing, and Aprons to gather their acorns in, and dwell in their dens” before the invention of arts like clothing, agriculture and building.^[47]

Ancient guidelines for vernacular reform: etymology and orthography

To attain purity in the modern vernacular we must paradoxically turn to the humanist source for all truth: ancient precedent.  Richard Sherry in 1550 insists on this perspective for infusing English with rhetorical greatness when he erects the purity of Latin as a model towards which we should strive in English: “Barbaraieris [is] when a rude word or of a strange tongue is brought into the Roman tongue.  In the English speech there be so many, that some think we speak little English or none at all…  Contrary to barbarous is pure Latin, which standeth by rule, authority, & custom.  For to speak Latin is no law, but an observation of excellent men, whose judgement standeth for reason.”^[48]

 The same principle holds for purging corruptions from English vocabulary, which requires us to produce a congruence among the interlocking triad of meaning, sound and appearance of a word.  We must determine what words “really” meant and looked like in the faded past, by using etymology to trace the evolution of meaning, by creating an orthography that makes a word look and sound like what its etymology proves it to mean.  Sometimes scholars who concern themselves with such matters seek a return to the original, “pure” meanings of words, sometimes they make a word combine all meanings in its history.

Etymological consciousness^[49]

On the broad meaning of grammar, see, e.g., William  J. Bouwsma, “The Culture of Renaissance Humanism,” American Historical Association Pamphlet #401 (Washington, D.C., 1973), 8, and Craig R. Thompson, “Schools in Tudor England,” in Wright and LaMar, eds., Life and Letters in Tudor and Stuart England (Ithaca, 1962), 302.  Polydore Vergil defines grammar itself as a function of its own etymology [An Abridgement of the notable worke of Polidore Vergile, conteygnyng the devisers and first finders out aswell of Artes, Ministeries, Feactes & civill ordinaunces, as of Rites, & Ceremonies, commonly used in the churche… (London, 1546 o.s.), xv^r-v].

is a lifetime habit of the educated Tudor mind that begins early in life, as William Kempe reminds us in 1588 in prescribing it as part of a pupil’s first Latin lessons.^[50]

 Graduates of the Tudor educational system have a reflex that expects to know a fact by understanding the history of the word that labels it.  Today we know this attitude best from Tudor imaginative literature, which teems with etymological puns that emerge as spontaneously and “naturally” as the application of the rhetorical principles writers imbibed in their schooling; the more educated and witty the audience, the more levels of meaning it will recognize in a given pun.

Attention to the history of meaning is central to Reformation doctrinal disputes.^[51]

which are typified by English wrangles over the translation of key scriptural terms.  Catholics must ridicule Protestant devotion to etymological purity, an attitude that readily grows from the Reformers’ desire to return to supposedly ancient truth unmediated by clerical authority; thus, the Catholic William Rainolds’ sarcasm in a 1583 defense of a Catholic translation of the New Testament into English: “Only resting myself upon the Protestants’ common and vulgar kind of disputing, that is, upon the first and original derivation and signification of Eccelesiastical words, I will…show how absurd and unreasonable their dealing is.”^[52]

 The Catholic view holds that a word is a function of its current usage, a notion that can take two forms.  The word may be arbitrarily defined in the present without reference to its history, as Thomas More is forced to insist when arguing against Tyndale (though this argument must have done violence to More’s humanist temperament that was established long before the Reformation strained it): IP8,8

the English tongue, by the common custom of us English people,… is the only thing by which we know the right and proper signification of any word, in so much that if a word were taken out of the tongue from whence it came, used for another thing in English than it was in the former tongue: then signifieth it in England none other thing than as we use it and understand thereby, whatsoever it signify anywhere else?^[53]

Or a word may be the sum of the meanings in the history of its use, a parallel to the idea that true faith is a mixture of scripture and its interpretations by clerical authorities.  Rainolds, echoing a sentiment on both sides of Catholic-Protestant disputes over scripture in insisting that “the abuse of ecclesiastical words [is] the ruin of religion,”^[54]

levels a common Catholic charge of paradoxical novelty against the Reformers’ efforts to return to original sources: “For look what old words you have upon newfangledness (as it might seem) altered and taken out of the Bible by the working of Satan.”^[55]

 What is newfangled is the dropping of meaning that the Catholic Church has gradually attached to sacred words over the centuries.  Relying solely on “pure,” ancient meanings of words, Rainolds argues, means losing all the Christian content that the Church has wisely and piously added to those words.  To illustrate his point, he reminds us of some key novel translations the Protestants have made in certain contexts–e.g., “lord” for “Baal,” “wind” instead of “spirit” for pneuma, “synagogue” as opposed to “church”–and offers consequent Catholic and “Protestant” versions of the same religious statement.  Italicizing the controversial words, he offers this start to the Catholic version:  IP8,8

I that am your priest and bishop, placed in this church by the holy Ghost for the feeding of your souls, do denounce unto you the name of Christ our Lord…^[56]

Assuming that consistency demands Protestants always use a given meaning they have assigned to a particular word, Rainolds then underscores the ludicrousness of his enemies’ newfangledness by replacing the underlined words with equivalents that Protestant have used one time or another in scripture: IP8,8

I that am your elder or surveyor and superintendent, placed in this synagogue by the holy wind for the feeding of your carcasses, do denounce unto you in the name of our Anointed our Baal…^[57]

For neither Beza nor Musculus in this tossing and turning ever consider what St. Luke wrote, what sense the Apostolical Church gave, and the holy Ghost in the same hath always continued, what the very letter of the greek requireth as now it standeth: but how it may possibly be wrested, if a man will follow the spirit of contention, if he will fetch the pointing of the sentence from Geneva, the meaning of one word from Dorica in one corner of the world, of an other from Jerusalem, of a third from Switzerland, the entire sum of all from the deep pit of hell.  For except the devil himself stood by them, & suggested to them such construction, I think the nature of man having some regard of honesty, of learning, of modesty, of Christ & his Evangelists, could never break forth into so much monstrous absurdity.  [427-8]

Such Protestant perversions of meaning will finally “with the words take away the things signified,…and so instead of Christians make us again Pagans.”^[58]

Protestantism, on the other hand, intent on redeeming religion from corruptions accreting over the centuries since the time of Christ, turns its heritage of etymological consciousness to the service of reform by trying to work backwards in the history of human speech and redeem language from the non-spiritual dross it has accreted over time, both by general decay from Adamic purity and specific perversions of Catholicism.   William Tyndale typifies this Protestant approach when he answers More by stressing the spiritual origin of words.  Though not referring specifically to Edenic language, Tyndale has a clear sense that God’s language in scripture possesses spiritual content that will be lost if not translated in its original spirit: “the letter signifieth not the literal sense, and the spirit the spiritual sense.  And, Rom. ii., Paul useth this term Litera for the law; and Rom. vii. where he setteth it so plain, that if the great wrath of God had not blinded them, they could never have stumbled at it.”^[59]

 “Letter” does not imply literalism, Tyndale is arguing, but writing; words themselves are a function of their spiritual content: “God is a Spirit, and all his words are spiritual.  His literal sense is spiritual, and all his words are spiritual.”^[60]

 This attitude allows Tyndale–indeed, requires him–to purge meaning of earthly additions, which is to say for practical purposes, Catholic tradition.  For example, Greek ecclesia and English congregation should be equated because a study of the history of “ecclesia” reveals its true meaning: “Now is ecclesia a Greek word, and was in use before the time of the apostles, and taken for a congregation among the heathen, where was no congregation of God or of Christ.”^[61]

 Tyndale is not promoting devotion to the superiority of ancient tongues over modern, but rather adherence to a method of infusing contemporary language with the inner word of ancient, spriritual meaning–which in turn is to make the vernacular at least as valid as any ancient language, even one in which scripture was originally written.

Etymological “truth” underpins secular as well as religious principles.  To explain good government, Thomas Elyot in 1531 begins by careful interpretation of the Latin root (respublica) of what it is that is governed (the commonwealth).^[62]

 Similarly, aesthetic principles may be enhanced by etymological examination, as in the way literary theorists examine the meanings of “poet” to explain what poetry should do.^[63]

 Law, the principle on which civil order relies and always dependent on subtle distinctions in words, equally benefits from etymology: in a 1588 Ramist book on law, Abraham Fraunce, repeatedly defines legal terms by appealing to etymology (or “notation”), which reveals “reason” embedded in words: “Notation or Etymology is the interpretation of the word.  For words be notes of things, and of all words either derivative or compound, you may yield some reason set from the first arguments, if the notation be well made.”^[64]

I would make it plain, how the notion of the thing is oftentimes expressed by the notation of the word, contrary to the prejudicate opinion of some silly penmen, and illogical lawyers, who think it a fruitless point of superfluous curiosity, to understand the words of man’s own profession.  [56^v]

We may understand murder, for example, by grasping the link between breath and life:IP8,8

Et le paroll, Expiration, est proprement breathing up, ou yeelding up the breath, come le seigniour Dyer dit, et est apply al home of auters choses animate: et est use pur le mort d’un home, car quant il yeelde up his breath, adonques il morust, car sans son breath il ne poet viver.  [53^r]

(This passage is typical of sixteenth-century legal texts, which made a hodge-podge of French and English.  “And the word, expiration, is properly ‘breathing up,’ or ‘yielding up the breath,’ as Master Dyer says, and is used for the death of a man, because when he yields up his breath, then he is dead, since without his breath he cannot live.”)

From the same perspective, Fraunce delineates various technical terms concerning property, noting that mistakes in understanding them arise in lawyers “who be of great wit and learning, yet not seen in many tongues, or mark not the deduction of words which time doth alter” and condemning “some uncunning lawyers that would make a new barbarous Latin word to betoken land given in fidem, or as the Italian sayeth, in fede, or fe, [and so] made it, in feudum, or fedum.”  [54^v]  To try to create a false etymology, or to alter the spelling of a word while claiming the etymology of the unaltered word, is to corrupt language–indeed, to corrupt the Latin we have seen Tudor writers so eager to keep pure–and so undermine the law, which is the basis of social order.  Without a history, a word is “barbarous,” unfit for civil society, presumably because truly civil language has a spiritual content that could only come from an ancient source which, if incapable of complete recapture, has at least left its traces through its history.

In a text on logic, Thomas Blundeville in 1599 cites the paragon of antique oratory, Demosthenes, to reveal how the ancient meaning of the very word “law” ties together divinity and worldly virtue:

Lo here the example of Demosthenes in defining what law is.  Law (saith he) is the invention and gift of God, and the decree of wise men, the correction of crimes either rashly or advisedly committed, and a common covenant or consent of the City, according to the which all men ought to live.  [The Art of Logike Plainely taught in the English tongue… (London, 1599), 49]

Whatever syllables we pronounce to communicate the idea of law, the qualities specified by Demosthenes must be inherent in our term or the word has no true meaning. The etymology of Fraunce’s very subject–logic–goes back, he tell us on the first page of his book, to Greek logos and “therefore in Greek signifieth Reason”^[65] by its identification with logos, logic implicitly becomes coincidental with the center of Christianity, not a secular study alone but a secular means to link civil virtue with divine truth, so that The Word, etymology, reason, law, social equilibrium and truth are inseparable from one another.

Reformers of spelling and pronunciation similarly look to ancient precedent, now to establish the correct sounds and uses of letters.  In his effort to revive Welsh, Salesbury gives the sound of each letter in the modern tongue by using Latin, Greek and Hebrew letters as standards, and he elevates the value of Welsh not in its own right but because it is close to those three tongues, most importantly the rhetorical power of Hebrew, glossed as “the holy language”:

I will not once speak a word in praise of it [Hebrew]…but willingly will pretermit to set forth what select words, what consonant and fine terms, and what sententious and net [i.e., clean, pure] adages, which the old, sage, & learned fathers have not only invented, but also of the Greeks and the Latins most prosperously have taken, translated, accepted, and until this day still retained: I will omit to declare any while of the manifold rhetorical phrases, I will wink at the tropes, metaphores, & translations, and such manner of speeches which the British tongue [i.e., Welsh^[66]  hath as common, yea rather as peculiar or sisterlike with the holy language.^[67]

The three major Elizabethan orthographical reformers–Thomas Smith in 1568, John Hart a year later and William Bullokar in 1580–argue that vernacular meanings are corrupted by the confusion of received spelling and pronunciation standards.  Whereas a given letter of the alphabet should stand for a single speech sound, many English letters are used for more than one sound, and contemporary spelling consequently varies widely.  Smith, Hart and Bullokar, therefore, all present schemes to expand the current alphabet by first ascertaining the original, pure sounds of English letters as they were used in classical Latin and Greek, then adding letters, or diacritical marks to existing letters, to differentiate among modern speech sounds.^[68]

Triumph of the vernacular

From support for translating the wisdom of other languages into English, commentators move to making patriotic calls for expansion of English literature itself.  Near the end of Queen Mary’s rule, Tottel presents his edition of the Songes and Sonettes to aid the nation by both ennobling the English language and promoting learning and eloquence: “It resteth now (gentle Reader) that thou think it not evil done, to publish, to the honor of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence, those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure, have heretofore envied thee.”^[69]

Under Elizabeth, we find a particularly strong concern with legitimizing English for imaginative literature; and the more vernacular literature that appears, the more critics comment on its supposedly sorry history.  Such laments reach a peak in the 1580s.  At the start of that decade, 1580 Gabriel Harvey goes on at length about the national disgrace resulting from the paucity of great literature in English in contrast with the flourishing of other national literatures:

What though Italy, Spain, and France, ravished with a certain glorious and ambitious desire (your gallantship would peradventure term it zeal and devotion) to set out and advance their own languages above the very Greek and Latin, if it were possible, and standing altogether upon terms of honor and exquisite forms of speech, carrying a certain brave magnificent grace and majesty with them, do so highly and honorably esteem of their country poets, reposing on great part of their sovereign glory and reputation abroad in the world in the famous writings of their noblest wits?…  What though it hath universally been the practise of the flourishingest States and most politic commonwealths, from whence we borrow our substantialest and most material precepts and examples of wise and considerate government, to make the very most of their vulgar tongues, and together with their seignories and dominions by all means possible to amplify and enlarge them, devising all ordinary and extraordinary helps, both for the polishing and refining of them at home, also for the the spreading and dispersing of them abroad?….  Dost thou not oversensibly perceive that the market goeth far otherwise in England, wherein nothing is reputed so contemptible, and so basely and vilely accounted of, as whatsoever is taken for English, whether it be handsome fashions in apparel, or seemly and honorable in behavior, or choice words and phrases in speech, or any notable thing else in effect that savoreth of our own country and is not either merely or mixedly outlandish?  Is it not clearer than the sun at noondays that our most excellent English treatises were they never so eloquently contrived even hereafter, be sib to arithmeticians or merchants counters, which now and then stand for hundreds and thousands, by and by for odd halfpence or farthings, and otherwhiles for very nihils.^[70]

In 1582 Richard Stanyhurst, translator of Virgil and disciple of Harvey (and, incidentally, eventually a Catholic exile), invokes the great classical proponent, Ascham, in support of vernacular poetry: Ascham “doth wish the University students to apply their wits in beautifying our English language with heroical verses.”^[71]

The problem is not just a shortage of vernacular literature but the very legitimacy of writing in English.  As late as 1584 we find Dudley Fenner defending secular English on grounds used all century long by Protestants to support vernacular worship.  Identifying ancient languages not as classical but as vernacular, Fenner insists that since ancients used their vernaculars, moderns should equally be able to use theirs:

what will they [who oppose the vernacular for use in serious matters] answer unto the knowledge and learning of the Egyptians, wherein Moses excelled, before the Greek or Roman tongues became general?  were not their writings, think they in their own tongue?  yea after that, were not Solomon’s treatises and discourses (whether written or unwritten) both of natural things, and of all that is done under the sun,…were they not done in most ancient and worthy tongue of the Hebrews?  Nay even their chief masters now, Plato and Aristotle, Tully and Quintilian, wrote they not in their own tongues.^[72]

Constantly, writers feel they must “prove” the worth of the vernacular by rummaging through what they sense as a meager heritage of English literature to glean evidence that the vernacular really does have literary merit.  William Kempe in 1588 notes that royalty has a tradition of enhancing English literature: King Alfred “translated diverse books into the vulgar tongue, and wrote many new of his own.”^[73]  In trying to find English works that will give vernacular literature the same stature as classical, Stanyhurst in 1582 calls Chaucer “our Virgil” who manages “to ferret out the secrets of Nature, with words so fitly couched…as in truth he hath in right purchased to him self the name of a surpassing poet, the fame of an odd oratoure [sic], and the admiration of a profound philosopher.”^[74]   William Webbe in 1586 cites Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate and the supposed author Piers Plowman as early examples of great English poetry,^[75]  then Skelton, then a gap before Surrey, Tusser, Haywood and several (now) lesser lights with names like L. Vaus, Norton of Bristow, “S. Y.” and “M. D.”^[76]  He adds a recent translator of the Aeniad, Phaer, along with Golding, Goodge, Whetstone, Sidney, Spenser and Harvey.^[77] For Spenser in particular Webbe has great hope:

if it would please him or his friends to let those excellent Poems, whereof I know he hath plenty, come abroad, as his Dreams, his Legends, his Court of Cupid, his English Poet, with other, he should not only stay the rude pens of my self and others, but also satisfy the thirsty desires of many which desire nothing more than to see more of his rare inventions.^[78]

Yet within another decade or so–by the end of the century–all this defensiveness has changed.  Late Elizabethan writers seem to have been as conscious of the sudden explosion of their literature as modern critics are.  Thomas Nashe in 1589 praises “divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit,” as the equal of any poet in “Spain, France, Italy, and all the world.”^[79]  By 1593 even Harvey, whom we saw so critical of English literary heritage in 1580, has become extremely optimistic about the state of English literature, though his list does not differ much from Webbe’s of seven years earlier:

Is not the Prose of Sir Philip Sidney in his sweet Arcadia the embroidery of finest Art and daintiest Wit?  Or is not the Verse of M. Spencer in his brave Faery Queene the Virginal of the divinest Muses and gentlest Graces?  Both delicate Writers, always gallant, often brave, continually delectable, sometimes admirable….  Sir John Cheeks style was the honey-bee of Plato, and M. Ascham’s Period the Siren of Isocrates.^[80]

In 1598, Francis Meres can include among great English writers such recent figures as Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman, along with lesser lights,^[81]  in addition to the traditional triumvirate of Chaucer (whom he elevates above the Virgilian rank assigned by Stanyhurst, paralleling Chaucer with Homer and Petrarch and calling him “the God of English poets”), Gower, and Lydgate.^[82]

In the 1590s, in fact, English becomes more than just a successful substitute for ancient language; it also becomes an appropriate vessel for the spiritual power available to language, for recapturing ancient meaning when word and thing supposedly were united or at least close. This sense was emerging throughout the Reformation  We see a hint of it in William Tyndale’s assertion of the aptness of English for scripture by its affinities with the two great tongues of the original scriptures:

the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin.  And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.  The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favoredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew.  A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.^[83]

Implicitly, English becomes the closest modern language to God’s, and closer even than the great classical languages after Hebrew.  English becomes a kind of modern universal tongue, or at least the closest modern approximation to it.  Ralph Lever in 1573 suggests that English has a special facility of expression that surpasses other tongues:

As for devising of new terms, and compounding of words, our tongue hath a special grace, wherein it excelleth many other, & is comparable with the best.  The cause is for that the most part of English words are short, and stand on one syllable apiece.  So that two or three of them are often times fitly joined in one.^[84]

“Grace” may play on a relation between English and divinity, referring temporally to especially refined and well-born people and celestially to God’s gift to humankind.^[85] We have already seen Nashe in 1589 referring to Spenser as “divine” and “a miracle of wit,” terms which remind us of the spiritual power of great literature; by setting Spenser’s poetry against that of “Spain, France, Italy and all the world,” Nashe hints that God has chosen English as the modern receptacle of his truth.^[86]

William Rainolds’ Catholic view in 1583–that a word is the totality of its meanings through history–now gets taken over for general secular honoring of English as a suitable modern universal tongue, as we find in Richard Carew in 1596.  For one thing, Carew writes, English fuses a variety of meanings into single words:

Yea so significant are our words, that amongst them sundry single ones serve to express diverse things; as by Bill are meant a weapon, a scroll, and a bird’s beak: by Grave, sober, a tomb, and to carve; and by light, mark, match, file, sore, & pray, the semblable.^[87]

English names similarly carry within themselves a history of meaning that tells us about the family’s nature and history:

in a manner all the proper names of our people do import somewhat which, from a peculiar note at first of some one of the Progenitors, in process of time invested itself [in] a possession of the posterity, even as we see the like often befall to those whose fathers bare some uncouth Christian names.^[88]

Time accretes new meanings to old words; ancient languages could not have as much meaning as modern ones (and other modern ones do not show accumulated meaning as well as English does).  In a parallel way, English contains all speech sounds: 

For easy learning of other Languages by ours, let these serve as proofs; there are many Italian words which the Frenchmen cannot pronounce, as accio, for which he says ashio; many of the French which the Italian can hardly come away withal, as bailler, chagrin, postillon; many in ours which neither of them can utter, as Hedge, Water.  So that a stranger though never so long conversant amongst us carryeth evermore a watch word upon his tongue to descry him by, but turn an Englishman at any time of his age into what country soever, allowing him due respite, and you shall see him perfect so well that the Imitation of his utterance will in nothing differ from the pattern of that native Language: the want of which towardness cost the Ephramites their skins.^[89]

If we can set aside the silliness of this claim, we can see that Carew’s point is no idle or theoretical one, but focuses on the most practical of consequences that echo the problems seen by commentators on Babel: national security (for foreigners will be betrayed by their inability to speak all English sounds) and personal survival (the English, who can make all speech sounds, will not be undone by their tongues, as the Ephraimites were for being unable to pronounce “shibboleth”).

No less an authority than the soon-to-be-head of the English language and nation, King James VI of Scotland, assures us of the spiritual and worldly greatness of English as he pens advice to his infant son in 1599: “I would…advise you to write in your own language: for there is no thing left to be said in Greek & Latin already, & enough of poor scholars would match you in these languages.  It best becometh a King to purify & make famous his own language, wherein he may go before all his subjects.”^[90]  That Latin and Greek have nothing more to say indicates a radical departure from inherited sixteenth-century attitudes towards the classics.  Once, it was a Renaissance homily that the ancient languages contain all knowledge–indeed, they were the foundation of the many schemes for education of children in general and of the prince in particular; now, as a new century and ruling house are about to arrive, whatever knowledge we do grant classical tongues, this regal prescriber of a prince’s education reports that they have reached their limits of usefulness to us.  For James, the universalizing power of the vernacular, finally, is its prospect for attaining that great and elusive human goal, captured briefly long ago to herald the immanence of Christ’s coming to redeem humankind from all sin, including linguistic pride–civil peace, which “may easily be done in this Isle of Britain, being all but one Isle, and already joined in unity of Religion, and language.”^[91]  In the same year that James writes those lines, Samuel Daniel offers a vision of English as the world’s language in the near future when British influence will spread throughout the globe:

              And who in time knows whither we may vent

              The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores

              This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

              T’enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?

              What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident

              May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?

Or who can tell for what great work in hand

              The greatness of our style is now ordain’d?

              What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,

              What thoughts let out, what humors keep restrain’d

              What mischief it may powerfully withstand,

              And what fair ends may thereby be attain’d.^[92]

Daniel’s diction–“powers,” “spirits,” restraint of excess humors and “mischief”– suggests a spiritual power in English, which is exactly what a replacement for Edenic language should possess.  While occupied colonials might take vigorous exception, to the English patriot these words border on divine prophecy, given the history of English colonialism in the coming centuries.  In any event, they portray a view as Tudor history comes to a close of not just power in language generally but of a special power in the nation’s very own language and literature.

^[1] Thomas Smith, On the Correct and Improved Pronunication of the Greek Language, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm, 1978), 47.

^[2] Ibid., 49-53.

^[3] Ibid., 51.

^[4] Ibid., 47-49.

^[5] Ibid., 55-57.  Reversing the decay of language, however, is a complex business, for, as John Colet informs us in his Latin grammar of 1527, “To speak and to write the clean Latin” we must first know “all the varieties and diversities and changes in Latin speech (which be innumerable).”  [Aeditio, (1527; Scolar Press reprint), Dviv.]

^[6] The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 18.  Cf. Vives, TRANSMISSION, 110.

^[7] The Scholemaster, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Don Mills, Ontario, 1966), 123.

^[8] Ibid., 22.

^[9] Cf. Edward Hake, who counsels in 1575 that “love unto the Latin tongue should grow” in pupils but warns that it is nonetheless better to learn no Latin at all than to learn it filled with the “foul barbarous words” so common in his day.  [A Commemoration of the Most Prosperous and Peaceable Raigne…of Elizabeth (London, 1575), G4^r, G5^r]

^[10] Learning [is] chiefly contained in the Greek and in no other tongue.”  [Ibid., 49 margin]  Cf. Vives, 144: “The Greek language remained untouched and pure longer than ours [i.e., Latin] because it was less exposed to the attacks of the barbarians than the language of the West.”  Vives identifies the peak of Greek as coinciding with the flourishing of Athens, from Pisastratus to the death of Demosthenes, and so recommends Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle as models of proper use of Greek.

^[11] Ibid., 100.  Cf. Vives, TRANSMISSION, 94: “If anyone has joined Greek to the Latin language, from the two he will receive many seeds of the material of knowledge remaining to us.” 

^[12] Vives, De tradendis disciplinis, 91-2.

^[13] Vives, De tradendis disciplinis, 91-2.

^[14] An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue…, ed. Rev. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1850), 55.

^[15] Ibid., 75.

^[16] Ibid.  It is especially noteworthy here that Tyndale, and early Protestant pietist, finds no problem in approving pagan writers like Terence and Virgil.

^[17] An Apologie or Aunswer in Defence of the Church of England (London, 1562; Scholar Press reprint), 47^r-v.

^[18] The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, in The Complete Works of Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, James P. Lusardi and Richard J. Schoeck (New Haven, 1973), VIII.807.  Writing in 1583, William Rainolds, answering Protestant criticisms of the Vulgate, sets its authority above the “original” scriptures as the highest scriptural authority while insisting on his reverence for the Hebrew and Greek scriptures:IP8,8MDSD

^[19] In Elizabethan Critical Essays, II.329.  It is interesting that Campion dates the reform of Latin from Northern European humanists immediately close to the Reformation rather than from the slightly earlier and Italian Valla.

^[20] The Christen rule or state of all the worlde from the hyghest to the lowest… (1547), 40^v, 41^r.  Since the Old Testament was in the languages of its writers, Tyndale asks, why can we not have scripture in our own vernacular?  [Doctrinal Treatises, 144-5]  Similarly, if the Apostles preached sermons in the vernacular, “Why then might they not be written in the mother tongue?”  [148]  The 1530 translation of a medieval justification of vernacular scripture similarly explains that the ancients generally had scripture in their vernacular: “For when the law was given to Moses in the mount of Sinai, god gave it to his people in their mother tongue of Hebrew that all the people should understand it and commanded Moses to read it to them until they understood it…  And Esdras also read it in their mother tongue.”  [Compendious olde treatise, Aii^v-Aiii^r]  How can modern Christians, then, be denied this favor? IP8,8Then sithen the dark prophesies were translated among the heathen people that they might have knowledge of god and of the incarnation of Christ / much more it ought to be translated to english people that have received the faith and bounden them self to keep it upon pain of damnation / sithen Christ commanded his Apostles to preach his gospel unto all the world and excepted no people nor language.  [Ibid., Avii^r.]

^[21] He that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men,” Paul says, for example, and “if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.” [I Cor. xiv.2 and 14]  (N.B. that “unknown” is an interpolation of the King James Bible.)  Coverdale (“And yet Paul ii. Corinthi. xiiii. forbiddeth to speak in the Church or congregation save in the tongue that all understand.  For the lay man thereby is not edified or taught[,]…but woteth not whether thou bless or curse.”  [The Christen rule or state of all the worlde from the hyghest to the lowest…, 40^v-41^r]) and Tyndale (“Paul commandeth that no man once speak in the church, that is, in the congregation, but in a tongue that all men understand, except there be an interpreter by.”  [Doctrinal Treatises, 29]) are typical in the way they cite Paul in support of vernacular worship.  @comment<old V.96>

^[22] The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, The First Portion, ed. Rev. John Ayre (The University Press: Cambridge, 1845), 268.  Cf. the 1530 translation of a medieval justification of vernacular scripture:  IP8,8

^[23] We should note that the dispute over the intrinsic value of vernacular scripture is peculiar to England, where English Bibles had been heavily controlled since 1408 in response to Lollardry.  France and England both produced vernacular Bibles during the second half of the fifteenth century.  Cf. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York, 1964), 9.  For a history of English scriptural translation in the sixteenth century, see the same volume, 28-138, 189-193, and … CRAIG THOMPSON; JOHN KING? ANYONE ELSE?

^[24] Ibid., Avii^v. 

^[25] A Defence of the True and Catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ… (1550), *iii^r.

^[26] An Answere to a Certeine Booke…, 117.

^[27] Ibid., 34^v.  In this passage, Knewstub lumps libertines and Anabaptists with Catholics.

^[28] A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Fryday before Easter, 1579 (London, 1579), 8^v-9^r.

^[29] Ibid., 31^r.  Further to associate his project with piety, Hart later offers a French version of the Lord’s Prayer using his proposed orthography.  [Ibid., fols. 65-66]

^[30] Ibid., 11^v-12^r.  In 1590, Antonio de Corro justifies retention of unpronounced letters in French with a similar sense that sounds have spiritual content: he writes of “the power which each letter hath, and how it ought to be pronounced” and describes Spanish pronunciation by comparing each letter with a counterpart in Hebrew or Greek or both, so that modern pronunciation relies on ancient precedent.  [The Spanish Grammer… (London, 1590; Scholar Press reprint), 1-13]  According to Hart, the origin itself of the word “orthography” reinforces the spiritual importance of accurate spelling.  [“Epistle,” unnumbered, first page]

^[31] Compendious olde treatise, Av^v.

^[32] Ibid.

^[33] In T.N., Aiiii^r.

^[34] Aii^v.

^[35] Aiii^v.  William Salesbury’s elevation of Welsh is “to edify” English people “as well in civil institutions, as in godly doctrine.”  [Brief and plain introduction, Aiii^v]

^[36] Queene Elizabethes Achademy, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1869), 2.  If the pupil will benefit from mastering English, English will also be enhanced by using it in education: IP8,8

^[37] William Bullokar, Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, 40.

^[38] William Bullokar, Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, title page.  Cf. Hart, who seeks to teach “the natural [i.e., ignorant] English knowing no letter, to be able to learn to discern and easily to read.”  [An Orthographie (London, 1569: Scolar Press reprint), 4^r]

^[39] Aiii^r-v.

^[40] Q3^v.  Valence draws attention to the “lowness” of the mother tongue: “our intention was to make up this work with some short vocabulary of nouns or words which be most common & vulgar, & belong to the daily speech.”  [Ibid.]  “Common & vulgar” in one sense are merely descriptive redundancies identifying the vernacular as the speech of everyday life.  But in the elitist society of the times, they also contrast unfavorably with the uncommon, superior speech of pure language.

^[41] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aii^v-Aiii^r.

^[42] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aiii^r.

^[43] vii^r.<6n.31>

^[44] Brief and plain introduction, Ei^v-Eii^r.

^[45] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aii^v-Aiii^r.

^[46] “[In] the modern & present manner of writing (aswell of certain other languages as of our English) there is much confusion and disorder, as it may be accounted rather a kind of ciphering, or such a dark kind of writing, as the best and readiest wit that ever hath been, could, or that is or shall be, can or may, by the only gift of reason, attain to the ready and perfect reading thereof, without a long and tedious labor.”  [2^r]

^[47] Hart, An Orthographie (London, 1569: Scolar Press reprint), 46^v-47^r (misnumbered 42 and 43).  Eleven years later, William Bullokar speaks of the “savage, rude, and barbarous” nature of the illiteracy his own orthographical scheme will amend.  [Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, Ci^v]  With the carping of his opponents in mind, Bullokar identifies himself with that elect whom God has chosen to aggrandize the English nation: “that creature, by whom God ministreth his goodness towards us, deserveth to be wished well unto.”  Recalling either the Reformation or Elizabeth’s accession or both (“Neither ought we to forget the manifold blessings of God showed to this our Nation in this last age”), he includes among the consequent blessings his own spelling reform, a “change…not of the least importance, though it seem a trifle in some men’s judgments.”  [Ibid., “Bullokar to His Country,” 5th page]

^[48] Treatise of the Figures, v^v-vi^r.

^[49] Etymology at this time can mean much more than in the twentieth century; it may include a wide range of language study that covers anything to do with meaning and requires tools of scholarship for fields superficially outside language.  In a 1593 translation of a Hebrew primer by Peter Martinius, for example, etymology encompasses all of grammar other than arrangement of words: “Grammar hath two parts, Etymology and Syntax.  Etymology is that part of Grammar which giveth rules concerning words.”  [The Key of the Holy Tongue, trans. John Udall (London, 1593; Scholar Press reprint), 5]  “Rules” implies that studying the history of a word teaches us how to “fix” its usage and meaning by stripping it of any corrupt meaning, as if the “true” meaning is mysteriously buried within the sound or spelling or history of the word.  For Martinius, numerous details of language enter etymology: he examines accent, vowels and consonants, whether the words are “primitive” or “derivative,” and what part of speech the word is.  If, in addition to all this, he also intends the usual meaning of grammar at this time–literary studies in general–when he makes etymology part of grammar, then “etymology,” learning “rules” about words, assumes that truth embedded in language emerges only from wide knowledge, in context, of all the great compositions in history from the Iliad to the present, and even demands studies like history and Renaissance equivalents of archaeology and anthropology to supplement more traditionally literary ones.

^[50] The Education of Children in Learning (1588), in Four Tudor Books on Education, ed. Robert D. Pepper (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 226.

^[51] We may recall Montaigne’s lament that “most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical” and his dismay over how a mere relative pronoun (this in “this is my body,” the basis for the debate over transsubstantiation) can produce the most dire consequences: “How many quarrels, and how important, have been produced in the world by doubt of the meaning of that syllable, Hoc!”  [Apology for Raymond Sebond in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1958), 392]  @comment<quote is 53.6% through the essay>.  These lines first appeared in French in 1580.

^[52] A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 264.  Rainolds is defending Jerome’s Latin Bible, officially declared by the Council of Trent in 1545 as the higher authority when it disagrees with received scriptural texts in the original languages.  The rationale behind this position is readily supported by basic philological principles now well established by humanist scholarship: the inherited Greek and Hebrew scriptures are relatively recent, corrupted copies of the pure scriptures (copied, incidentally, by Jewish scribes, who, like all Jews, cannot be trusted), whose real meaning God inspired Jerome to perceive.  For Rainolds, therefore, any kind of historical examination, etymological or otherwise, is beside the point.

^[53] The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, 167.

^[54] A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 270, margin.

^[55] Ibid., 277.

^[56] Ibid., 268.

^[57] Ibid., 269.  By ignoring tradition, Protestants have made a thoroughgoing, disorganized linguistic melange of scripture:IP8,8

^[58] Ibid., 277.  Cf. Rainolds’ sarcastic jibe at Protestant justification by faith: “these good Gospellers have a faith, and a justifying faith, whereby they apprehend eternal life, without father, son, and holy Ghost, without Christ and his passion, or any of these other matters, which are rather subtle points of the papists’ historical faith, than of the lively, justifying faith, wherewith these Evangelical brethren in all security are warranted of the certain favor of God in this life, and assured glory in the next.” [280]

^[59] Doctrinal Treatises, 309.

^[60] Ibid.

^[61] An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue…, 15.

^[62] The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 1.

^[63] See, for example, Thomas Elyot (The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 46-47) and Philip Sidney (In Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904) 2 vols., I.154) on the meaning of “poet,” George Puttenham on “theater” (Ibid., II.38) and “tragedy” (II.36), Thomas Lodge (Ibid., I.80-81) and Polydore Vergil (An Abridgement of the notable worke of Polidore Vergile…, xviii^r-v) on “tragedy” and “comedy,” and Polydore on “satire” (xix^v).  @comment<VI.6n.8,7,6>

^[64] The Lawyers Logic, (London, 1588; Scolar Press reprint), 51^r.  He adds an unclear statement–“To whom the interpretation of the name agreeth, to that also the name it self and contarily”–which seems to mean that a word and its definition have a reciprocal relationship, so that a word is never arbitrarily chosen.  He then makes it clear that knowledge of “notations” is crucial to legal rectitude:IP8,8

^[65] ý_ß_ý_ß_Ibidý_Ü_., 1ý_â_rý_Ü_.

^[66] A marginal note reminds us: “British misnamed walsh.”  [Brief and plain introduction, Eiii^v]

^[67] Brief and plain introduction, Eiii^v.  Edmund Coote in 1596 affirms the value of learning English and writes a textbook on the language, but also falls back on Latin as a model for English, as when he surveys Latin vowels and pronounces that “these three vowels, e, i, u, are very corruptly and ignorantly taught, by many unskillful teachers, which is the cause of so great ignorance in true writing in those that want the Latin tongue.”  [35]

^[68] Accurate capture of ancient spelling and pronunciation can lead to the opposite conclusion–that we should not change contemporary spelling.  With the same goal of enhancing meaning, Claude Desainliens in 1576 includes among arguments for exact spelling that “the orthography showeth the derivation of the diction” and that we will retain understanding of “the ancient monuments written so many years past, which could not be understood hereafter if the writing were altered.”  [The French Littleton, ed. R. C. Alston (London, 1576; Menston, 1970), *ii^v-*iii^r]  Antonio De Corro in 1590 counsels retention of unpronounced letters in French words “to the end that every one might the plainlier see from what tongue the vowels descended: and that the writing of the words might show the right etymology of them.”  [The Spanish Grammer, 14]  It is interesting that the division of opinion on spelling in these examples is between commentators on English and those on other modern vernaculars; I don’t know if this is consistently true in other Renaissance discussions of orthography.

^[69] Songes and Sonettes, Ai^v.

^[70] In Smith, I.123-4.  William Webbe in 1586 shares Harvey’s disbelief at the dearth of great English literature, and pleads for patriots to come to the fore [in Smith, I.223 and 228-9].  He cites Spenser in support of this view: “I doubt not…to adjoin the authority of our late famous English Poet who wrote the Sheepheards Calender, where [he laments] the decay of Poetry at these days.”  [I.232]

^[71] In Smith, I.137.

^[72] The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, in Four Tudor Books on Education, ed. Robert D. Pepper (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 145.

^[73] In Pepper, 209.

^[74] In Smith, I.135.

^[75] In Smith, I.241-2.

^[76] In Smith, I.242.

^[77] In Smith, I.242-6.

^[78] In Smith, I. 246.  His last reference to Spenser suggests that all that keeps English literature from greatness is that not all of Spenser’s works have yet been published.  In this essay, Webbe also discusses what he does not like in English literature, but this does not nullify his intent both to improve vernacular literature and seek out favorable examples of English authors.

^[79] In Smith, I. 318.

^[80] In Smith, II. 282.  Harvey refers to “the English Ariosto,” presumably Spencer, but laments that we have no “English Tasso” or du Bartas.  [283]  Nonetheless, his vision is far rosier than in 1580, and he seems really to have little doubt that England will produce its Tasso and du Bartas–and in the very near future. His tone is that English will now actually progress faster than other vernaculars and soon permanently surpass them.

^[81] In Smith, II.315-23.

^[82] Ibid., 314.

^[83] Doctrinal Treatises, 148-9.

^[84] v^r-v

^[85] The language connection is no accident: well-born people should be spiritually superior; calling someone “your grace” implicitly acknowledges his closeness to God.

^[86] But neither is Nashe concerned with consistency.  When disputing with Harvey three years later (1592), he finds English inferior to Greek because it is unfit for the noble Greek hexameter and “nothing too good, but too bad to imitate the Greek and Latin“; and his praise for Spenser can be left-handed, as when he cites Chaucer and Spenser, “though far overseen,” as the English parallels of Homer and Virgil.  (In Smith, II.240)

^[87] In Elizabethan Critical Essays, II.288.

^[88] Ibid., II.287-288.  He goes on to contrast Roman names unfavorably with English ones: “Yet for the most part we avoid the blemish given by the Romans in like cases, who distinguished the persons by the imperfections of their bodies.”

^[89] Ibid., II.289.

^[90] Basilicon Doron, 142.

^[91] Basilicon Doron, 153-4.

^[92] Musophilus,” ll. 957-68, in Poems.  Stephen J. Greenblatt of the University of California at Berkeley called my attention to the imperialistic implications in this passage.