And Fifteenth-Century Italy

Quidditas Volume 6 Article 9 1985 Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy Paul Oskar Kristeller Columbia University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, History Commons, Philosophy Commons, and the Renaissance Studies Commons Recommended Citation Kristeller, Paul Oskar (1985) "Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy," Quidditas: Vol. 6 , Article 9. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/rmmra/vol6/iss1/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Quidditas by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Latin and Vernacular in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Italy* by Paul Oskar Kristeller Columbia University The subject of this essay concerns Dante only indirectly and in part. Never theless I hope to be able, among other things, to ex plain Dante's historical position and hi influence on the Italian Renai sance. I cannot avoid partially repeating what I wrote in ome of my previous studies, es pecially in my early article on the Italian prose language. 1 Some of my prior obse rvations, which seemed new to me a t the time, have since been widely accepted; but some new ources and literature have been added in the meantime, 2 and on some points I have changed my opinion or paid attention to new points of view. The subject i too broad and complex for one essay. But while many studies may pertain to my topic, no comprehensive reference works or bibliographies could erve as a firm ba i or staning point. 1 I must, therefore, select and emphasize a few fact , not all of which are genera ll y known, and refer occasionall y to manuscript or rare editions. It is not ea y to formulate and divide our subject in a clear way. We must deal no1 onl y with the difference between Latin and vernacular, but al o be tween medieval and humani t Latin, between Tu can and the other Italian dia lect , between poetry and pro e, and between the various literary genre of poetry and e pecially o f pro e. A survey of the entire literary production of llaly in the fo urteenth and fifteenth centuries is impo sible; even many pecial i t have a very imperfect idea of its true extent. I shall merely emphasize a few particular aspects: the mutual influence of llalian and Latin literature upon each other; the imultaneous use of both languages by the same authors and fo r the ame literary genres; and the influence of Dante, a well as of Pet rarch and Boccaccio, on the literature and culture of the late fourteenth and of the fifteenth century, including Lalin humani m. I hould lik e to start from a ba ic fact which nowadays is not widely recog nized: the literary culture of the various countries of Western and Central Europe from the Middle Ages to about 1800 was bilingual and found it 106 Latin and Vernacular expres ion simultaneously in Latin and in the respective vernacular languages. The number of books and pamphlets wrinen and published in Latin down 10 1600 or even 10 1700 wa greater than that of the vernacular writings of the same period, and the number of works written in Latin after the end of cla i cal antiquity was many times larger than the total volume of ancient Latin literature to 600 A.O. -including early Christian and specialized literature that has come down 10 us. From the high Middle Ages, the vernacular liter ature has steadily increased in volume and quality, and Latin has gradually declined in importance. From the period of Romanticism, thi development has often been treated as if political or ideological contra ts were involved and as if Latin were an artificial language that was doomed from the beginning. Such treatment ignores the fact that every literary language is artificial when compared to the spoken language and that the methods and conclusions of modern linguistics based on the spoken language cannot be immediately trans ferred to literary languages. As long as it is possible to write and publish in Latin a well in the vernacular (I myself have occasionally published in Latin), the choice of the language depends on the linguistic abilities of the author, on the public of listeners and reader which he or he wishe to address, and on the literary genre and models which he or he is trying to follow . Vernacular literature begins alm ost invariably with poetry and narrative prose and becomes only much later an instrument of learned prose. Latin literature and especially Latin learned prose-wa written in the Middle Ages by and for clerics, and later for an international public of profes or , student and learned profe ionals. Latin was the language of in !ruction of most universitie and advanced chools down 10 the eighteenth century. Vernacular literature, on the other hand, was written for listeners and readers who had literary and intellec tual interest , but no academic learning: for princes and noblemen, merchants and artisans, ladies and nun . Thus we can easily under tand why many authors, including Dante and Milton, wrote in both languages. The history of the vernacular in Italy differ in everal re peel from that in the other European countrie . The literary u e of the vernacular begins much later than in England and Germany, France and Spain. Almost nothing ur vives from the twelfth century, and fairly litt le remain from the thirteenth. II is only from the fourteenth century on that the vernacular literature of Italy quickly came to equal and even surpass that of the other countrie in volume and importance and soon 10 exercise a strong influence upon them. At the same time, Latin literature flourished in Italy and wa equal to vernacular liter ature in volume and influence, though perhaps not in literary quality. The late beginning of vernacular literature in Italy ha probably more than one reason. The language spoken in Italy wa much closer to medieval Latin than anywhere else, and a Latin text recited in local pronunciation could al o be understood by the ordinary people. If in Italy in the fourteenth and in part during the thirteenth centuries a distinction is made between li1teraliter (per Paul 0. Kristel/er 107 leuera) and vulgariter (per volgare)' and if the documents speak of a latino volgare, chi reflect the icuation of an earlier pe riod in which both languages we re perceived merely as two forms of one and the same language, and in which the vernacular was used for oral discourse, whereas Latin wa a a mat ter of course preferred for written use. When Latin wa often called la gram matica, ' this means that Latin was admired for the uniform and firm struc1 ure of its vocabulary and grammar, a view that was still held by Dame in his De vulgari eloquentia. Another factor was the early development of French and Provenc;al literature which was often imitated in Italy, and from the thirteenth and early founeenth centuries we have example of Italian author who wrote in Provenc;al or in French or in a hybrid language that was half French and half Italian. 6 Moreover, there were in Italy as elsewhere many different dia lects, and it took several centuries until the language of Tuscany was recog nized as a common literary language for all of Italy. In the thirteenth a nd early fourteenth centuries, the Tuscan dialect still had other dialects as its rivals. The Sicilian dialect which had been the language of the earlie t poets (a language often Tu canized by later copyists) was occasionally u ed by Northern Italians as a prose language;' and the Bolognese dialect, which wa the second poetic language, appeared a early as the thirteenth century in form letters and form speeches and in rhetorical treatises, and in the early fourteenth century in the commentary of Jacopo della Lana on Dame.• The later predominance of the Tuscan dialect was based not only on its phonetic beauty and on its closeness to Latin, both in vocabulary and gram mar, but above all on it rich and important literary production which extended from the late thirteenth to the late fifteenth centuries and which included, beside Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, a vast body of writings in both verse and prose. This is no doubt a matter of 1alcnt (Florence was and still i a city blessed by 1he Muses); but we must al o consider the fac1 that Florence, in con trast to Bologna, had until the middle of the founeenth century no univer i1y with an old Latin tradition, only a large upper and middle cla which had trong intellec1ual interest and was eager to read, or to hear reci1ed , poetry and prose literature written in i1 own vernacular. The ma terpiece of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio were soon diffu ed out- ide of Tu cany; this wa favored by Dante' and Petrarch's exile and by Boc caccio' travel . Beginning with the fourteenth century, many other Tu can works in verse and prose were also read and imitated outside of Tu cany. T he Tu can poetic language was adopted in many cases as early as the Trecento; also in the vernacular prose writings by non-Tuscan authors, the local dialect of the author wa often adapted to Tuscan usage. Starting with Sannazaro and Bembo, all major non-Tu can writer wrote in Tuscan.' Tuscan language and literature of the fourteenth century ("il buon secolo della lingua") was taken as a model, and the Tuscan of the fifteenth century which had undergone ome changes was rejected.

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