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How to Do Things with Hard Words: the Uses of Classical Borrowings

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How to Do Things with Hard Words: the Uses of Classical Borrowings How to Do Things with Hard Words: The Uses of Classical Borrowings in the English Renaissance By Brian C. Ballentine B.A. St. John’s College, 2001 A.M. Brown University, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2010 © Copyright 2010 by Brian C. Ballentine ii This dissertation by Brian C. Ballentine is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date _________ _____________________________________ Kenneth Haynes, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________ _____________________________________ Karen Newman, Reader Date__________ _____________________________________ Coppélia Kahn, Reader Date__________ _____________________________________ Virginia Krause, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________ _____________________________________ Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE EDUCATION Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Brown University, May 2010 M.A., Comparative Literature, Brown University, May 2007 B.A., St. John’s College, Santa Fe, May 2001 ACADEMIC AWARDS AND HONORS ACLS / Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2008 Cogut Center for the Humanities Graduate Fellowship (declined), 2008 Grant-in-Aid, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007 Dr. Frances Price Harnish ’25 Dissertation Fellowship, Brown University, 2007 University Fellowship, Brown University, 2003 Award for Academic Excellence, St. John’s College, 2001 PRESENTATIONS “Multilingualism and the Uncertainty of Early Professional English,” MLA, San Francisco, December 2008 “Linguistic Disinterment in Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Claremont College, November 2008 Chair, “Literature and Other Arts,” Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Claremont College, November 2008 “Harmless Drudges: Forays and Failures in Lexicography,” Guest Lecture in “History of the English Language,” Brown University, November 2007 “Introducing Montaigne: Florio’s Essayes and the Task of the Renaissance Translator,” Comparative Literature Colloquium, Brown University, April 2006 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Teaching Assistant Departments of Comparative Literature and English, Brown University: “Banned Books in World Literature,” with Meera Viswananthan, Spring 2007 “History of the English Language,” with Geoffrey Russom, Fall 2006 “Civilization and its Discontents: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Racine, and others,” with Arnold Weinstein, Spring 2006 “Introduction to Scandinavian Literature,” with Arnold Weinstein, Fall 2005 “The Fiction of Relationship: Laclos, Brontë, Melville, Woolf, and others,” with Arnold Weinstein, Spring 2005 “Introduction to the Theory of Literature,” with Edward Ahearn, Fall 2004 iv Writing Fellow Writing Center, Brown University, 2006–2008 English Instructor Lycée La Haie Griselle, Gérardmer, France, 2001–2002 PEDAGOGICAL TRAINING Certificate in the Teaching of Higher Education Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning Brown University, 2007 ACADEMIC SERVICE Graduate Student Representative Working Group on Graduate Education Brown University, 2007–present Comparative Literature Liaison Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning Brown University, 2007–present Graduate Student Representative Graduate Housing Working Group Brown University, 2007–present Graduate Student Representative to the Faculty Department of Comparative Literature Brown University, 2004–2005 PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Assistant Archivist The Geoffrey Hill Archive Brown University, 2008–present Digital Text Encoder and Researcher Women Writers Project, http://www.wwp.brown.edu/ Brown University, 2007–2008 LANGUAGES French Ancient Greek Proficient Latin ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many have contributed to the shaping and reshaping of this project. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Folger Library for their close readings and careful critiques of the opening chapters. Coppélia Kahn and Virginia Krause have read and improved each chapter, and it was through courses taught by each of them that this project began. Karen Newman’s direction first led me to consider the subjects of Renaissance translation and lexicography, and her readings of the project have always made it stronger. My greatest debt is to Kenneth Haynes, who over the course of directing my writing and research taught me what it means to be intellectually responsible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 I. Coined and Counterfeit Language in the Renaissance 27 II. Naming and Knowing in Love’s Labour’s Lost 53 III. Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, and “the intercourse of antiqitie and proficiencie” 94 IV. “God attributes to place / No sanctity”: Milton’s Foreign Geographies 141 Conclusion 193 Works Cited 201 vii INTRODUCTION This dissertation is about Latinate language in Renaissance English literature. By “borrowed” I use the traditional metaphor that refers to words from foreign and classical languages into English texts. I am especially interested in those “borrowings”—mainly from Latin, but also from Greek and other ancient languages—that constitute the largest number of the class of words known as “hard words” in the Renaissance, that is, terms that were perceived to deliberately reject ordinary expressions or belong to professional jargons or specialized learning. Throughout this project, I use the term “borrowing” to refer to any word that is perceived to be of foreign origin, and the phrase “hard words” to indicate words, typically borrowings, that were perceived to be especially unusual, opaque, or specialized. Many words were borrowed that today no longer sound unusual, just as many words classified as “hard words” would no longer be deemed so. This project, however, is only concerned with borrowings insofar as they were construed as opaque or hard or conspicuously belonging to another language—words that advertised their foreign provenance. My focus, then, is on the act of construing language as hard or as foreign in order to show how “hard words” in particular foreground questions about the nature of language, the possibility of communication, and relationships between languages and communities. This is not a history of the development of the English vernacular, although any study of borrowings demands at least some attention to the 1 2 history of language. Rather, it is an examination of the ways in which borrowed Latinate language shaped the texts and culture of the English Renaissance. Often when I describe this project to others, they ask, “What is an example of a hard word?” I am never able to give a satisfying answer to this question, despite my efforts to memorize anecdotes about Latinate curiosities of the period. One could recount numerous Latinate transliterations from early dictionaries—decachordon, obnulibate, exprobration—but this is an incomplete answer, because it assumes linguistic uniformity across the category of hard words. Words that were considered “hard”—and which were often represented on the earliest dictionaries or “hard word lists”—range across the styles of speech. Most often, hard words were what we might expect: long words of Greek and Latin origin, labeled as “dark,” “obscure,” or “inkhorn terms” by their opponents. But the family of hard words would also include unfamiliar words borrowed from non- classical languages, the jargons of specialized trades, barbarisms, the unique terms of regional dialects, and Saxon revivals. Hardness is not an intrinsic linguistic property, but is determined extrinsically by individuals and communities. Linguistic perception varies with audiences and speakers. Discussions of hard words and borrowings do not revolve around specific words. Rather, they circulate around a type of language perceived to have questionable legitimacy and are therefore considered to be a threat to the language, its users, and social order. In the Renaissance and in this dissertation, interest lies not only in ostentatiously Latinate or foreign words themselves, but in what such language reveals about its users and their relationships to other speakers and to language. Hard words perform social functions by relaying information about their users that constitutes an essential part of what they 3 communicate. Such language performs illocutionary acts: in this project and in their historical context, interpretations of hard and borrowed words focus not so much on what is being said, but on how it is being said, to whom, why, and the relation between speaker and hearer. Hard words entered the language from a variety of sources. This project focuses mainly on discussions and uses of words borrowed from the classical world. Latinate borrowings provoke particular anxieties by creating tensions with an imagined “native” English. On one hand, Latinate borrowings offered the mutable, isolated English vernacular participation in the stability of an enduring, authoritative language. On the other hand, they posed a threat to the vernacular in the exclusion and overthrow of its pure, Saxon roots. Of course, borrowings from other languages could also be used to foreground questions about English and the social performativity of language. French and Italian literature had already negotiated the problems of foreignism in their languages, and, to a greater degree than England, had established national literatures. Many of the
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