ABSTRACT
It has only been fairly recently that the significance of the term 'baroque' has begun to assume proportions much wider than those attributed to it traditionally to define seventeenth-century art and literature in all their stylistic manifestations. The cultural habits of Hospitaller society had left an indelible mark on the culture of early modern Malta, its customs, its traditional religious beliefs and values, its archaic economy, and not least on the locally widespread splendour of its native tongue, however incomprehensible this might have very well been to the outsider. Behind the inception of Malta's Hospitaller baroque experience lay three significant developments. There is no doubt of course that what constituted this impressive Hospitaller phenomenon was an unconscious act of borrowing. In the Hospitaller context, this act of cultural borrowing was as much one of receiving, thereby allowing itself unconsciously to be imperceptibly transformed, as it was of diffusing it into others, conquering them in turn.
