ABSTRACT
When in the mid-sixteenth-century Joachim Du Bellay composed La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Franoyse, he faced not only a question of ultimately transforming French into a literary language on a par with Greek and Latin, but even more so one of inventing a space that the modern language would both frame and occupy. Susan Delaney keenly points out that in the Deffence, the word is used in both its classical sense, from the Latin invenire and its modern sense, creation. Modernity does not simply occur as a series of dates on a time line; it is, along with its historicity, enacted or performed. Educated in the law like many of the humanists, in composing the Deffence Du Bellay takes on the role of advocate, or defender, of a modernity in emergence. Even in the Deffence, the political and the aesthetic are intertwined: the glory of the French language is the glory of France.
