ABSTRACT
A notable effect of Renaissance humanism, with its enthusiastic emphasis on the acquisition of classical languages, was that, for almost a century, the energies of European poets were diverted away from the use of their native tongues. Dante's Commedia – which most twentieth-century poets considered the greatest poem of the modern era – had been written (between 1305 and 1321) in Florentine Italian; and Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia, though written in Latin, had argued the case for the use of the vernacular in poetry. Chaucer (inspired not least by Dante's example) had produced at the end of the fourteenth century a massive, various and ambitious body of writing that drew upon the narrative traditions of France, Italy and the English regions while also employing a metropolitan form of English that formed the basis of the national language. France – North and South – had cultivated not only the great subtleties of Occitan literature but also a wealth of prose-poetry in the Romance tradition, as had the German writings of Gottfried of Strasbourg and Wolfgang von Eschenbach. Yet it was only at the end of the fourteenth century with Boiardo and Ariosto – writing between 1480 and 1530 – that the Italian vernacular began to revive and to display a renewed confidence. As for Spain, France and England, renewal begins only in the second and third decades of the sixteenth century, gathering momentum in a wave of experimentation that eventually produces Garcilaso de la Vega in Spain, the Pléiade in France and Shakespeare in England.
