ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of early modern Spanish linguistic texts (i.e., grammars, treatises on orthography, defenses and histories of the vernacular, etc.) with particular attention to the role of the body in these works. Simultaneously the vehicle for linguistic agility and the stumbling block on the road to linguistic excellence, the body plays a fluctuating but consistently significant role in the way early modern writers thought about the vernacular tongue, grammar, and the relationship between the two. After discussing this in terms of the idea of the ‘mother tongue’ and the acquisition of language through breastfeeding, I suggest that this tension also appears in repeated portrayals of language as a woman in early modern linguistic studies.
