Having described the history of the decay of language, Tudor scholars confront the problem of how to undo, or at least retard, that decay.  As Protestantism strives to redeem decayed Christianity from its Catholic corruptions, as the new natural philosophy will seek to improve decaying nature, so scholars of language and of the word seek to redeem speech and texts from corruptions accreted over the centuries.  At some level, this compulsive concern to reform language has in its background aspiration to retrieve the spiritual content of language (not the actual language) before the loss of universal speech at Babel, and perhaps even before the loss or decay of Edenic language itself. 

The blurred line between English humanism and Protestantism is evident in the keen scholarly interest to establish accurate usage of ancient tongues for both secular and ecclesiastical ends.  Hebrew, though rarely learned, is of special importance for its supposed religious role as God’s language in the Old Testament.  The value of Greek is both its secular importance as the language of one of the two great classical cultures and its religious role in composition of the New Testament.  Latin, the language of the Vulgate, the Church Fathers, much of Church history and numerous great classical thinkers, has undergone the most corruption of all three languages, especially because of scholastic attitudes, and so here above all we must learn to purify valid ancient texts and expose spurious ones.   

Paradoxically, however, attention to ancient languages actually reduces their ultimate value, for it enables their replacement by the modern vernacular.  The special nature of the English Reformation, viewing Church and State as reciprocal entities, makes religious and political support for the vernacular mutually reinforcing.  Translation, first of religious documents, then of secular ones, becomes an increasingly common Reformation occupation.  Dedication to purifying ancient languages easily prompts similar patriotic purification of English: etymological analyses applied to ancient tongues now become tools for reforming and expanding English vocabulary; establishing correct spelling and pronunciation of ancient speech provides the basis for cleaning up English orthography to clarify the meanings of modern words.  Cries go up, especially after Elizabeth ascends the throne, for English writers to enhance the nation not merely by translating foreign texts but also by producing native works of imaginative literature.  Where at the start of the Reformation, most educated people held English in poor repute, by Elizabeth’s death English is widely and vigorously affirmed as a great tongue in a direct line with Hebrew, Greek and Latin–and sometimes even greater than they.

Purifying ancient languages

Following the lead of continental humanism, English writers throughout the sixteenth century lament the decline of ancient languages (most commonly Latin, often Greek) from an ancient rectitude and stress the importance of returning them to “pure” states.  Thomas Smith in 1542 offers a typical history of this decay.  Both Latin and Greek “first brought forth stout and rough orators and somewhat uncouth words…, [then] in their prime…displayed all that is tender, clever, sweet, elegant, pleasant, pure, and ornate,” and finally in “old age”–the late Middle Ages–yielded “over-ripe fruit, idle words, awkward metaphors, a stammering and half-barbarous language,” the rotting having been speeded by barbarians like the Turks and Vandals.^[1]  To their credit, certain late medieval scholars made an effort to revive Latin (most notably, the scholastics, towards whom Smith is being much less harsh than most of his contemporaries) and Greek, but their classical usage was “still barbarous, neither Latin nor Greek except in name.”^[2]  Scholastics failed because they had not found “the real sources and hiding-places”^[3] of pure ancient tongues, stored by “learned and diligent men long before,…some preserved in sweet and pleasant treatises, others in bitter and violent controversies…; some in small and slender pamphlets…others shut up in great volumes.”  These secret storehouses “have reached us entire, unhurt, untouched, pure and clean,”^[4] finally discovered through the courageous diligence of humanist scholars.  The trailblazer of this recovery, Lorenzo Valla, proved that recent use of Latin “was of adulterous and base birth, and deprived of all honour and dignity.”  Other scholars, including the English humanist Thomas Linacre, “undertook the task of cleansing the Latin tongue and restoring the true elegance of speech,” though “with much opposition everywhere.”^[5]  Implicitly, Smith himself, who is writing as a combatant in a dispute over Greek spelling and pronunciation, is another of these humanist knights of pure speech.

In Tudor thought, the idea that pure language is the foundation of learning and virtue most commonly centers on Latin.  Thomas Elyot warns in 1531 that a nobleman’s child must from infancy “have with him continually only such as may accustom him by little and little to speak pure and elegant Latin.”^[6]  For Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster, published posthumously in 1570, the mere fact of speaking a language contributes to its decay; a dead language, by unchanged, is pure and so paradoxically the most alive with truth.  Thus Latin (which, Ascham tells us, had only a one-hundred year period of purity that ended in the reign of Augustus^[7]) would certainly benefit us if it “were properly and perfectly spoken.”  In fact, however,

now, commonly in the best schools of England, for words, right choice is smally regarded, true propriety wholly neglected, confusion is brought in, barbariousness is bred up so in young wits, as afterward they be not only marred for speaking, but also corrupted in judgment, as with much ado, or never at all, they be brought to the right frame again.^[8]

The reflex to invoke barbarism–the reverse of civility and its grounding in eloquence–as linguistic devil underscores the urgency felt by Tudor writers to purify any tongue at all, and especially the most civil of tongues.^[9]  Ascham continues: Latin and the even greater Greek^[10] are “the only two learned tongues which be kept not in common talk but in private books, [and in which] we find always wisdom and eloquence, good matter and good utterance, never or seldom asunder.”^[11]  The point is the same as Thomas Smith’s about “hiding-places” of pure Latin and Greek: we can recapture the true forms of the classical tongues because they were written down during their greatness and the texts have been preserved, in principle, unchanged.

These relatively secular perspectives easily blend with more explicitly religious arguments that pure language is crucial for restoring pure Christianity, that corrupt language promotes false religion, and that the decay of language is connected with Eden or Babel or both.  We can see the bridge between secular and religious perspectives in the Catholic humanist, Juan Luis Vives, who left England in 1528 (for having supported Catherine of Aragon against Henry VIII in the divorce controversy) after having lived there six years, during which time he taught at Oxford and was involved at court.  In 1531 Vives specifically identifies Latin as an appropriate modern replacement for the universal tongue before Babel, which was also the Edenic language.  Linking an echo of classical myths about speech (language “is the treasury of culture and the instrument of human society”) with Christian concern for the loss at Babel (the human race would benefit from “a single language, which all nations should use in common”), Vives proposes that the pre-Babel language, lost as “punishment of sin,” be replaced by a tongue that is “sweet, learned and eloquent” with “variety and abundance of words and formulae,…the capacity to explain most aptly what [its users] think,” and the development of “much power of judgment.”  That language “it seems to me is to be found in the Latin tongue, above all those languages which men employ…  For that language, whose words should make clear the natures of things, would be the most perfect of all; such as it probably was that original language in which Adam attached the names to things.”  Were Latin to be lost, “there would result a great confusion of all kinds of knowledge, and a great separation and estrangement of men on account of the ignorance of other languages,”^[12] a state that sounds exactly like that immediately after the punishment at Babel.  The loss of Latin, the modern universal language for the intellectually elite, would not only destroy secular learning but, as we saw in Luther’s lament over the division of tongues for its damage to religious unity, would also cause religious decay, since “for the spreading of piety it is most useful that men should understand one another.”^[13]

Protestant insistence that English replace Latin in public worship and scripture does not attack Latin itself but putative Catholic abuse of Latin.  In 1530, William Tyndale, the most notable early English Reformation acolyte of vernacular scripture, tells us, while presenting a religious version of the more secular “history” Thomas Smith will offer twelve years later, that Catholics, in fact, are ignorant of Latin:

Remember ye not how in our own time, of all that taught grammar in England, not one understood the Latin tongue?  How came we then by the Latin tongue again?  Not by them [Catholic clerics], though we learned certain rules and principles of them, by which we were moved and had an occasion to seek further; but out of the old authors.  Even so we seek up old antiquities, out of which we learn, and not of our church.^[14]

This ignorance highlights the hypocrisy of Catholics, since a priest, spouting Latin phrases to confuse the congregation, does not even know what he is saying: “Yea, and I dare say that there be twenty thousand priests, curates, this in England, and not so few, that cannot give you the right English unto this text in the Paternoster, Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra, and answer thereto.”^[15]  The example is not random; ironically, true understanding of Latin exposes false belief, since those readers who can understand the Latin phrase (which, we are told, Catholics cannot) appreciate that Catholic ignorance of Latin has made its clerics unable to grasp even the most basic of Christian tenets, literally and symbolically, so that they plunge themselves into sin: they cannot understand God’s will, neither in earth nor in heaven, neither in what he expects of a human being nor in how he has made our own will totally subservient to his.  Some Catholics, Tyndale warns, have even gone so far as to condemn use of ancient languages altogether:

…the children of darkness, raged in every pulpit against Greek, Latin and Hebrew; and what sorrow the schoolmasters, that taught the true Latin tongue, had with them; some beating the pulpit with their fists for madness, and roaring out with open and foaming mouth, that if there were but one Terence or Virgil in the world,…they would burn them therein, though it should cost them their lives; affirming that all good learning decayed, and was utterly lost, since men gave them unto the Latin tongue.^[16]

The joke here is that the Scotists, in attacking humanism’s return to Latin sources as a “decay” of good learning, really sought only to forestall questioning of Catholic dogma and to hasten the decline of true religion by making sure that Latin was left to decay.  (The unwitting joke is that Tyndale’s pietist successors will themselves find reason to condemn the content, though not the Latin, of pagan literature.)  Tyndale’s ploy is a reply to Catholic charges that Protestants were innovators in religion: he is implying, as Protestant writers often did, that Catholics have been the real innovators while Protestants are merely trying to restore ancient verities.

For Protestants, all this Catholic misuse and dismissal of Latin adds up to the vice of worldliness, reliance on human authority regardless of whether we understand or agree with it.  John Jewel in 1562, for example, condemns Catholic favor for modern (corrupt) Latin usage over ancient as a mirror of the wicked Catholic doctrine that places faith equally in Church (= human) and scriptural authority rather than scripture alone:

Pighius [a Catholic] also is not afraid to say, that we ought not to believe any text of the scripture be it never so plain, unless we have our warrant from the Church of Rome.  Much like as if…it were a mockery, now after so long continuance, to trouble the world with a new kind of speech, and to call home again the old pureness and elegancy in speaking, which Cicero or Caesar used in their days.  Such is the duty forsooth that these men do owe unto the ignorance and darkness of the times past.^[17]

Yet Catholic polemicists–especially since to some extent they, even more than Protestants, can embrace Italian humanist tradition (Italy remained Catholic, after all) with its stress on classical studies–share the beliefs that ancient tongues are essential to the highest virtue while also needing purification.  At the start of the Reformation, despite the bitterness between himself and Tyndale, Thomas More acknowledges that Latin has become corrupt–though of course he denies any comparable decay in Catholicism: 

These things [allegedly lost Christian principles] have they now restored and brought up again by antiquities and old stories, like as master Lyly late master of Paul’s school brought up in London the right order in teaching of grammar and learning of the Latin tongue.IP13,8

But now good readers we must tell him [Tyndale] again that his example of grammar and the Latin tongue, is nothing like the matter of faith that he resembleth it unto.  For the Latin tongue was no thing that ever our lord promised to preserve for ever, and therefore it might by chance & occasions of battle and war, perish and might be lost, and the countries compelled to leave it receive some other language in the stead thereof.  But as for the faith can never fail, no more than can the Catholic church, against which our savior hath him self promised that all the heretics that rebel against it, nor all the tyrants upon earth that insurge and oppugn it,…shall never obtain and prevail.^[18]

[The reader should not] interpret me in any thing which I have spoken, as though I coveted to disgrace the study of greek and hebrew…& condemned those languages, which I confess to be great helps to the attaining of the true sense in sundry places of scripture, & condemn myself for knowing so little as I do in either of them.>  A marginal note adds, “The hebrew and greek knowledge much advanced by Catholics,” but another note, a page later, warns, “A man must have a settled faith before he come to confer greek and hebrew else shall he never have any faith.”  [A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 439-440, 441]

The example of Lyly’s grammar is telling, and underscores the increasing difficulty of juggling religious and social beliefs.  It was inconceivable that proper education could occur without promoting religious goals, and it would be emotionally untenable to separate, as More does, religious from secular use of Latin.  Rather, it would be a reflex to see the appearance of Lily’s Grammar, and the principles underlying it, as contributing to the proper religious state of the nation.  Indeed, by the end of the century, when the English Reformation is far more secure than during its early decades, we find Thomas Campion on the one hand identifying the campaign to purify Latin as a quest for truth by both Protestants and Catholics alike, on the other hand carefully aligning the move to purify Latin with repudiation of Catholicism, so that Catholics in the movement for linguistic purity were actually of the Protestant party without knowing it:

Learning, after the declining of the Roman Empire and the pollution of their language through the conquest of the Barbarians, lay most pitifully deformed till the time of Erasmus, Reuchlin, Sir Thomas More, and other learned men of that age, who brought the Latin tongue again to light, redeeming it with much labor out of the hands of the illiterate Monks and Friars.^[19]

Purifying the vernacular for salvation

For Protestantism, Catholics, in addition to ignorance and abuse of Latin, misapply it in both ancient and modern contexts: they prefer Latin to languages that preceded it (by elevating the Vulgate above original scriptures) and that followed it (by preferring it to local vernaculars in scripture and church services).  As Miles Coverdale tells Catholics in 1547, repeating one of the most hackneyed and heartfelt of Protestant statements, they use Latin in church to assure that the congregation “understand not, and roll them in darkness, that ye may lead them whither ye will,” which is to reverse the civilizing process that restrains bestiality in human beings: “It is verily as good to preach…to swine as to men (if thou preach…in a tongue they understand not).”^[20]  A few pages later, the translator points out that modern Jews have their scripture in their vernacular, and that if Jews are given such a privilege, it must be even more proper to Christians.  Anyway, other nations received their own vernacular Bibles after Christ’s departure: “And after ascension many translated all the bible in diverse languages / as into spanish tongue french tongue / and almayne (sic) / italy and by many years have made it.”  [Aiii^v-Aiiii^r]

In 1562, John Jewel speaks similarly.  Catholics, he observes, claim that “Christ, the Apostles and holy fathers did not pray in that tongue which the people did understand” only as a ruse; in truth, “lest the people should understand somewhat, [Catholics] do whisper all their holy mysteries, not only with an uncertain & a low voice, but also in a strange and a barbarous tongue.”  [Apologie, 18^v, 43^v]  (Calling Latin “barbarous” reflects the tension Protestants experience in honoring Latin based on both secular and sacred traditions while repudiating its use in Catholic worship.  William Whitaker confronts the same problem in 1585 by trying to condemn the corruption of the Latin Bible while revering the its antiquity, calling it “an old rotten translation” and then clarifying “(as I may boldly call it, being compared with the original word of scripture, although otherwise I give to it that reverence, that the qnitquity thereof deserveth).”  [An Answere to a Certeine Booke…, 13])

Like Coverdale, Jewel writes that by insisting on a language incomprehensible to worshippers, Catholics pervert the divine gift of speech, here turning it into gibberish and unedifying noise: “These men pour out in the churches unknown and strange words, like unto the noise of sounding brass, without any understanding, without sense, without judgment, and this is their only endeavor, that the people should not be able to understand any thing at all.”  [Apologie, 50^v] 

Catholic opponents of vernacular worship warn that it will promote heresy.  In reply, the 1530 translation of a medieval justification of the vernacular comments that we should recall “that we find in latin language more heretics than of all other languages.”  [Compendious olde treatise, Avi^r]  In the middle ages, this statement could refer to general paganism among ancient Romans, but in the year of the translation, with the English Reformation struggling to entrench itself, it is also a clear reference to Catholic devotion to Latin. <old V.95>

To reform this perfidious practice, we must follow the scriptural advice of St. Paul, who tells us that parishioners should hear a language they understand.^[21]

The arguments in favor of the vernacular, however, also conjure up nostalgia for the lost unity and integrity of a common, spiritual human tongue.  Thus, for example, one of the primary scriptural supports for vernacular worship is the same New Testament image that offers redemption from the division of languages–speaking in tongues, now taken as not just suspension of the sin at Babel but also as a reminder that the word must be preached so that all souls can understand it: “God gave unto [the apostles] the gift of tongues that they might deal with all nations in their own languages,”^[22] And upon whitsunday god gave knowledge of his law to diverse nations without any exceptions in their mother tongue, by the understanding of one tongue.  And of this it is notable sithen the lay people in the old law had their law in their mother tongue, yet the lay english people in the new law have it as all other nations hath, sith Christ bought us as he did other and hath given to us that same grace as to other.  [“A compendious olde treatyse shewynge howe that we ought to have ye scripture in Englysshe,” in Bible, appendix (Marlborow, Hessen [Antwerp], 1530), Aiii^v] <old V.97> as John Jewel observes in 1565 while confuting Catholic support for holy services in Latin.

When Protestants invoke the Pentecost to justify vernacular worship,^[23]  they are implying that redemption from the sin at Babel was not a temporary miracle but an ongoing possibility that Catholicism has subverted.  Christianity–the Word and the word–becomes a kind of inner word, to use Augustine’s terminology, that offers a universal “language” of spiritual truth.  Although the world has a multiplicity of outer words (all the languages on earth), the sacrifice of Christ has contributed a single truth that may be captured in these disparate tongues.  One inference of this argument is that Jerome’s Bible, revered by Catholic theologians, was not the final word in scripture, but only a vernacular version for Latin speakers: “it was never [Jerome’s] intent,” insists the 1530 translation of a medieval argument for vernacular scripture, “to bind the law of god under his translation of latin but by his own deed [he] giveth leave to translate it into every speech[;] for Jerome writeth in his .lxxviii. epistle to this man Atleta that he should inform his daughter in the books of the old law and the new.”^[24]

 Translation does not become just an option but a religious necessity, as we can hear in Thomas Cranmer’s joy at the success of Reform under Edward VI: IP8,8

[Now] the scripture is restored unto the proper & true understanding.  The people may daily read & hear God’s heavenly word, & pray in their own language which they understand, so that their hearts and mouths may go together, and be none of those people of whom Christ complained, saying: These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts be far from me.^[25]

Without vernacular scripture, most Christians are cut off from Christianity, since few can read or understand Latin but all must judge doctrine for themselves.  The solution is not to train everyone in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but for modern Jeromes to become versed in scriptural languages and, with God’s help, to produce vernacular translations of scripture that make its inner word available to all.  Translating that inner word demands attention to an underlying spirit in the original scriptures, a principle we may infer from the actions of Christ, the Evangelists and other Apostles, who, according to the Calvinist divine William Whitaker in 1585, never swerved from the true word, regardless of their different languages: “They cite not always the words, but they keep most truly the sense and meaning ever more.”  The specific language in which scripture appears is irrelevant so long as the sense is accurate: “The word of God I know may be uttered in other languages, than wherein first it was by writing delivered to the Church: and translations agreeing with the original text are the word of God.  For God’s word is not the language, but the doctrine.”^[26]

 Catholics, however, John Knewstub tells us in 1579, act “as if the spirit could be divorced from the written word, which it was sent to teach and confirm.”^[27]

 Punning on a central doctrinal dispute, Knewstub insists that Catholic use of Latin both hides truth and distorts doctrine by corrupting language itself: “the Papists…do transsubstantiate the word, both into a foreign tongue, and also into a strange sense.”^[28]

Secular proposals to enhance the vernacular are also put forth with a sense of producing spiritual gain.  John Hart, urging spelling reforms in 1569, seeks to restore the “ancient and sole sounds of the five vowels” by studying the history of their (Latin) pronunciation, and lo! all five are wonderfully embedded in the primal Christian truth about the Word: “In principio erat verbum.”^[29]

 The quest to determine pure, original pronunciation is explicitly part of the struggle against sin: those who deny “the vices in the corruption of the sound of letters, which we have in use” must equally favor silence in the face of “all sin and vice which is naturally in the flesh, and of longest used.”  But like sin’s effect on the soul, “an abused and vicious writing bringeth confusion and uncertainty in the reading,” and so “the vicious parts thereof [should be] cut away.”^[30]

Elevating the vernacular for civil good

Sixteenth-century England, especially during Elizabeth’s reign, also experiences considerable agitation to enhance the vernacular for patriotic, worldly gains.  Where the sacred merit of English is largely a pietist interest, both pietist and secular writers testify to the social benefits of the vernacular.

We can see this interest, for example, in the growing interest in translations of both sacred and secular texts as patriotic activities.  In 1530, against contemporary clerics who actually burn vernacular Bibles, the anonymous translator of the 1400 text promoting vernacular scripture invokes the prophecy of “saint Edward the king and confessor” that such actions will mean England’s collapse^[31]

and demands, “Where is that ancient blood that was in england in these days?”^[32]

to stir nationalistic zeal to face down the enemies of an English Bible.  To one T.N. in 1566, translation of secular texts into English is equally patriotic:  IP8,8

the translating of Latin, or other Books of other languages, into our mother tongue, doth either profit the common wealth, or the writer…  [T]he young sprung writers…[should] hereafter employ their labor to more serious and weighty matters, both to their own commodity and thy learning, and especially to the profit of our native country.^[33]

Henry Peacham in 1577, promoting the interdependent values of wisdom and eloquence,^[34]

prepares a translation of a text on eloquence “to profit this my country, and especially the studious youth of this Realm, and such as have not the understanding of the Latin tongue.”^[35]

Ultimately, not just translations but vernacular use of any kind is praiseworthy.  In urging vernacular skills in his Academy, proposed about 1563, Humphrey Gilbert envisions practical, largely worldly skills as the result, since “in what language soever learning is attained, the appliance to use is principally in the vulgar speech, as in preaching, in parliament, in Counsel, in Commission, and other offices of Common Weal.”^[36]

I omit to show what ornament will thereby grow to our tongue, and how able it will appear for strength and plenty when, by such exercises, learning shall have brought unto it the Choice of words, the building of sentences, the garnishment of figures, and other beauties of Oratory.  [Ibid.]

The measure of tenure in the Academy is vernacularization of the classics (though the curriculum itself is based on sound humanist principles of classical studies): a teacher must “once every three Years publish in print some Translation into the English tongue of some good work, as near as may be for the advancing of those things which shall be practiced in the said Academy.”  [9]  “Good” to qualify the text reminds us that aesthetics and morals are inseparable; the implication is that a translation will somehow enhance the virtue of the modern tongue.

 William Bullokar in 1580, insisting that “the wealth and strength of our country, is chiefly maintained by good letters,”^[37]

issues a proposal to reform orthography “for the easy, speedy, and perfect reading and writing of English,” an achievement which will provide “no small commodity of the English Nation, not only to come to easy, speedy, and perfect use of our own language, but also to their easy, speedy, and ready entrance into the secrets of other Languages.”^[38]

C8. The need to reform English

Reciprocal with increasing support for the vernacular are widespread admissions that modern English, like Latin and Greek, has undergone considerable decay from a putative ancient purity; and as with classical languages, programs arise to enhance English by expanding and purifying its rhetorical fitness, vocabulary, spelling and pronunciation.

Consciousness of the need to deal with vernacular deficiencies grows through the Reformation.  Translating a work on rhetoric in 1524, Leonard Cox, a humanist schoolmaster and friend to Erasmus and Melanchthon, sounds as though using English is a sign of the decay of civilization itself: the unhappy necessity of the translation is “to do some pleasure and ease to such as have by negligence or else false persuasions been put to the learning of other sciences or ever they have attained any mean knowledge of the latin tongue.”^[39]

 In 1528, Pierre Valence produces an English work that tries simultaneously to purify French and ease the learning of it; he tells us that he must draw a premature halt to his primer but hopes “some day another shall hap come that is more convenient & sufficient than I that shall restore a good part of this language in to the first cleanness.”^[40]

 In 1550, Richard Sherry observes that English “for barbarousness and lack of eloquence hath been complained of” but insists that the shortcoming is not intrinsic to his native tongue, coming rather from “slackness of our countrymen, which have always set light by searching out the elegance and proper speeches that be full many in it.”^[41]

 We need not, however, despair.  Thomas Elyot’s Latin-English dictionary of twelve years earlier is noteworthy for its expansion of English vocabulary in searching out “the copy of our language in all kind of words and phrases,”^[42]

and Sherry’s own book is applying rhetorical techniques to English in pursuit of reform.  Ralph Lever in 1573 is intent on purifying English vocabulary of “inkhorn terms” which “an englishman born…shall neither understand…by himself: nor keep…in remembrance when he is taught their signification of others, because the word can make no help.”   Reformers of English vocabulary “that devise understandable terms, compounded of true & ancient english words” can save the day, for they “do rather maintain and continue the antiquity of our mother tongue: than they, that with inkhorn terms do change and corrupt the same, making a mingle mangle of their native speech, and not observing the property thereof.”^[43]

The “movement” to reclaim and magnify English for the greater glory of the nation couches its goals in the same terms that make language the basis for all spiritual and worldly values.  Decay of rule and national power, banishment from the homeland to barren land–all go hand in hand with the decay of language.  In the same year that Sherry is advancing the rhetorical capacity of English, William Salesbury seeks to redeem a different British vernacular, his native, beloved Welsh.  Reluctantly, he admits that English, though merely a derivative of Welsh, has outstripped it in key areas: IP8,8

as for the Welsh tongue even as it is not now to be compared with the English language, so is it not so rude, so gross, nor so barbarous, as strangers being therein all ignorant and blind do adjudge it to be: nor yet (to speak indifferently without all affections) is it not all so copious, so fine, so pure, nor so fully replenished with elegance, graces, & eloquence, as they them selves suppose it.

He hearkens back to a time of pure Welsh, as others show nostalgia for days of pure Latin or pure Christianity: IP8,8

Howbeit when the whole Isle was commonly called Britain,…their tongue then was as copious of fit words, and all manner of proper vocables, and as well adorned with worshipful sciences, and honorable knowledge, as any other barbarous tongues were.  And so still continued (though their Sceptre declined, and their kingdom decayed, and they also were driven into the most unfertile region, barrenest country, and most desert province of all the Isle) until the conquest of Wales.^[44]

Perhaps unconsciously, the description in the final parentheses evokes the expulsion from Eden.

Conversely, reforming the vernacular undoes the incivility represented by uncouth speech.  Sherry, expounding on the general lack in English of key rhetorical terms like scheme and trope, describes patriotic modern givers of tools for eloquence (among whom he presumably numbers himself) who sound similar to the masters of eloquence in Cicero: IP8,8

Good cause have we to give thanks unto certain godly and well learned men, which by their great study enriching our tongue both in matter and words, have endeavored to make it so copious and plentiful that therein it may compare with any other which so ever is the best.^[45]

In making his recommendations for spelling reform in 1569, John Hart underscores the sorry state of contemporary orthography^[46]

and offers an antidote that similarly makes the modern master of vernacular reform kin to the first great orator who brings humanity from rudeness to civility: Hart sees himself battling with opponents who are like early humans “contenting themselves with Hides and Felles for their clothing, and Aprons to gather their acorns in, and dwell in their dens” before the invention of arts like clothing, agriculture and building.^[47]

Ancient guidelines for vernacular reform: etymology and orthography

To attain purity in the modern vernacular we must paradoxically turn to the humanist source for all truth: ancient precedent.  Richard Sherry in 1550 insists on this perspective for infusing English with rhetorical greatness when he erects the purity of Latin as a model towards which we should strive in English: “Barbaraieris [is] when a rude word or of a strange tongue is brought into the Roman tongue.  In the English speech there be so many, that some think we speak little English or none at all…  Contrary to barbarous is pure Latin, which standeth by rule, authority, & custom.  For to speak Latin is no law, but an observation of excellent men, whose judgement standeth for reason.”^[48]

 The same principle holds for purging corruptions from English vocabulary, which requires us to produce a congruence among the interlocking triad of meaning, sound and appearance of a word.  We must determine what words “really” meant and looked like in the faded past, by using etymology to trace the evolution of meaning, by creating an orthography that makes a word look and sound like what its etymology proves it to mean.  Sometimes scholars who concern themselves with such matters seek a return to the original, “pure” meanings of words, sometimes they make a word combine all meanings in its history.

Etymological consciousness^[49]

On the broad meaning of grammar, see, e.g., William  J. Bouwsma, “The Culture of Renaissance Humanism,” American Historical Association Pamphlet #401 (Washington, D.C., 1973), 8, and Craig R. Thompson, “Schools in Tudor England,” in Wright and LaMar, eds., Life and Letters in Tudor and Stuart England (Ithaca, 1962), 302.  Polydore Vergil defines grammar itself as a function of its own etymology [An Abridgement of the notable worke of Polidore Vergile, conteygnyng the devisers and first finders out aswell of Artes, Ministeries, Feactes & civill ordinaunces, as of Rites, & Ceremonies, commonly used in the churche… (London, 1546 o.s.), xv^r-v].

is a lifetime habit of the educated Tudor mind that begins early in life, as William Kempe reminds us in 1588 in prescribing it as part of a pupil’s first Latin lessons.^[50]

 Graduates of the Tudor educational system have a reflex that expects to know a fact by understanding the history of the word that labels it.  Today we know this attitude best from Tudor imaginative literature, which teems with etymological puns that emerge as spontaneously and “naturally” as the application of the rhetorical principles writers imbibed in their schooling; the more educated and witty the audience, the more levels of meaning it will recognize in a given pun.

Attention to the history of meaning is central to Reformation doctrinal disputes.^[51]

which are typified by English wrangles over the translation of key scriptural terms.  Catholics must ridicule Protestant devotion to etymological purity, an attitude that readily grows from the Reformers’ desire to return to supposedly ancient truth unmediated by clerical authority; thus, the Catholic William Rainolds’ sarcasm in a 1583 defense of a Catholic translation of the New Testament into English: “Only resting myself upon the Protestants’ common and vulgar kind of disputing, that is, upon the first and original derivation and signification of Eccelesiastical words, I will…show how absurd and unreasonable their dealing is.”^[52]

 The Catholic view holds that a word is a function of its current usage, a notion that can take two forms.  The word may be arbitrarily defined in the present without reference to its history, as Thomas More is forced to insist when arguing against Tyndale (though this argument must have done violence to More’s humanist temperament that was established long before the Reformation strained it): IP8,8

the English tongue, by the common custom of us English people,… is the only thing by which we know the right and proper signification of any word, in so much that if a word were taken out of the tongue from whence it came, used for another thing in English than it was in the former tongue: then signifieth it in England none other thing than as we use it and understand thereby, whatsoever it signify anywhere else?^[53]

Or a word may be the sum of the meanings in the history of its use, a parallel to the idea that true faith is a mixture of scripture and its interpretations by clerical authorities.  Rainolds, echoing a sentiment on both sides of Catholic-Protestant disputes over scripture in insisting that “the abuse of ecclesiastical words [is] the ruin of religion,”^[54]

levels a common Catholic charge of paradoxical novelty against the Reformers’ efforts to return to original sources: “For look what old words you have upon newfangledness (as it might seem) altered and taken out of the Bible by the working of Satan.”^[55]

 What is newfangled is the dropping of meaning that the Catholic Church has gradually attached to sacred words over the centuries.  Relying solely on “pure,” ancient meanings of words, Rainolds argues, means losing all the Christian content that the Church has wisely and piously added to those words.  To illustrate his point, he reminds us of some key novel translations the Protestants have made in certain contexts–e.g., “lord” for “Baal,” “wind” instead of “spirit” for pneuma, “synagogue” as opposed to “church”–and offers consequent Catholic and “Protestant” versions of the same religious statement.  Italicizing the controversial words, he offers this start to the Catholic version:  IP8,8

I that am your priest and bishop, placed in this church by the holy Ghost for the feeding of your souls, do denounce unto you the name of Christ our Lord…^[56]

Assuming that consistency demands Protestants always use a given meaning they have assigned to a particular word, Rainolds then underscores the ludicrousness of his enemies’ newfangledness by replacing the underlined words with equivalents that Protestant have used one time or another in scripture: IP8,8

I that am your elder or surveyor and superintendent, placed in this synagogue by the holy wind for the feeding of your carcasses, do denounce unto you in the name of our Anointed our Baal…^[57]

For neither Beza nor Musculus in this tossing and turning ever consider what St. Luke wrote, what sense the Apostolical Church gave, and the holy Ghost in the same hath always continued, what the very letter of the greek requireth as now it standeth: but how it may possibly be wrested, if a man will follow the spirit of contention, if he will fetch the pointing of the sentence from Geneva, the meaning of one word from Dorica in one corner of the world, of an other from Jerusalem, of a third from Switzerland, the entire sum of all from the deep pit of hell.  For except the devil himself stood by them, & suggested to them such construction, I think the nature of man having some regard of honesty, of learning, of modesty, of Christ & his Evangelists, could never break forth into so much monstrous absurdity.  [427-8]

Such Protestant perversions of meaning will finally “with the words take away the things signified,…and so instead of Christians make us again Pagans.”^[58]

Protestantism, on the other hand, intent on redeeming religion from corruptions accreting over the centuries since the time of Christ, turns its heritage of etymological consciousness to the service of reform by trying to work backwards in the history of human speech and redeem language from the non-spiritual dross it has accreted over time, both by general decay from Adamic purity and specific perversions of Catholicism.   William Tyndale typifies this Protestant approach when he answers More by stressing the spiritual origin of words.  Though not referring specifically to Edenic language, Tyndale has a clear sense that God’s language in scripture possesses spiritual content that will be lost if not translated in its original spirit: “the letter signifieth not the literal sense, and the spirit the spiritual sense.  And, Rom. ii., Paul useth this term Litera for the law; and Rom. vii. where he setteth it so plain, that if the great wrath of God had not blinded them, they could never have stumbled at it.”^[59]

 “Letter” does not imply literalism, Tyndale is arguing, but writing; words themselves are a function of their spiritual content: “God is a Spirit, and all his words are spiritual.  His literal sense is spiritual, and all his words are spiritual.”^[60]

 This attitude allows Tyndale–indeed, requires him–to purge meaning of earthly additions, which is to say for practical purposes, Catholic tradition.  For example, Greek ecclesia and English congregation should be equated because a study of the history of “ecclesia” reveals its true meaning: “Now is ecclesia a Greek word, and was in use before the time of the apostles, and taken for a congregation among the heathen, where was no congregation of God or of Christ.”^[61]

 Tyndale is not promoting devotion to the superiority of ancient tongues over modern, but rather adherence to a method of infusing contemporary language with the inner word of ancient, spriritual meaning–which in turn is to make the vernacular at least as valid as any ancient language, even one in which scripture was originally written.

Etymological “truth” underpins secular as well as religious principles.  To explain good government, Thomas Elyot in 1531 begins by careful interpretation of the Latin root (respublica) of what it is that is governed (the commonwealth).^[62]

 Similarly, aesthetic principles may be enhanced by etymological examination, as in the way literary theorists examine the meanings of “poet” to explain what poetry should do.^[63]

 Law, the principle on which civil order relies and always dependent on subtle distinctions in words, equally benefits from etymology: in a 1588 Ramist book on law, Abraham Fraunce, repeatedly defines legal terms by appealing to etymology (or “notation”), which reveals “reason” embedded in words: “Notation or Etymology is the interpretation of the word.  For words be notes of things, and of all words either derivative or compound, you may yield some reason set from the first arguments, if the notation be well made.”^[64]

I would make it plain, how the notion of the thing is oftentimes expressed by the notation of the word, contrary to the prejudicate opinion of some silly penmen, and illogical lawyers, who think it a fruitless point of superfluous curiosity, to understand the words of man’s own profession.  [56^v]

We may understand murder, for example, by grasping the link between breath and life:IP8,8

Et le paroll, Expiration, est proprement breathing up, ou yeelding up the breath, come le seigniour Dyer dit, et est apply al home of auters choses animate: et est use pur le mort d’un home, car quant il yeelde up his breath, adonques il morust, car sans son breath il ne poet viver.  [53^r]

(This passage is typical of sixteenth-century legal texts, which made a hodge-podge of French and English.  “And the word, expiration, is properly ‘breathing up,’ or ‘yielding up the breath,’ as Master Dyer says, and is used for the death of a man, because when he yields up his breath, then he is dead, since without his breath he cannot live.”)

From the same perspective, Fraunce delineates various technical terms concerning property, noting that mistakes in understanding them arise in lawyers “who be of great wit and learning, yet not seen in many tongues, or mark not the deduction of words which time doth alter” and condemning “some uncunning lawyers that would make a new barbarous Latin word to betoken land given in fidem, or as the Italian sayeth, in fede, or fe, [and so] made it, in feudum, or fedum.”  [54^v]  To try to create a false etymology, or to alter the spelling of a word while claiming the etymology of the unaltered word, is to corrupt language–indeed, to corrupt the Latin we have seen Tudor writers so eager to keep pure–and so undermine the law, which is the basis of social order.  Without a history, a word is “barbarous,” unfit for civil society, presumably because truly civil language has a spiritual content that could only come from an ancient source which, if incapable of complete recapture, has at least left its traces through its history.

In a text on logic, Thomas Blundeville in 1599 cites the paragon of antique oratory, Demosthenes, to reveal how the ancient meaning of the very word “law” ties together divinity and worldly virtue:

Lo here the example of Demosthenes in defining what law is.  Law (saith he) is the invention and gift of God, and the decree of wise men, the correction of crimes either rashly or advisedly committed, and a common covenant or consent of the City, according to the which all men ought to live.  [The Art of Logike Plainely taught in the English tongue… (London, 1599), 49]

Whatever syllables we pronounce to communicate the idea of law, the qualities specified by Demosthenes must be inherent in our term or the word has no true meaning. The etymology of Fraunce’s very subject–logic–goes back, he tell us on the first page of his book, to Greek logos and “therefore in Greek signifieth Reason”^[65] by its identification with logos, logic implicitly becomes coincidental with the center of Christianity, not a secular study alone but a secular means to link civil virtue with divine truth, so that The Word, etymology, reason, law, social equilibrium and truth are inseparable from one another.

Reformers of spelling and pronunciation similarly look to ancient precedent, now to establish the correct sounds and uses of letters.  In his effort to revive Welsh, Salesbury gives the sound of each letter in the modern tongue by using Latin, Greek and Hebrew letters as standards, and he elevates the value of Welsh not in its own right but because it is close to those three tongues, most importantly the rhetorical power of Hebrew, glossed as “the holy language”:

I will not once speak a word in praise of it [Hebrew]…but willingly will pretermit to set forth what select words, what consonant and fine terms, and what sententious and net [i.e., clean, pure] adages, which the old, sage, & learned fathers have not only invented, but also of the Greeks and the Latins most prosperously have taken, translated, accepted, and until this day still retained: I will omit to declare any while of the manifold rhetorical phrases, I will wink at the tropes, metaphores, & translations, and such manner of speeches which the British tongue [i.e., Welsh^[66]  hath as common, yea rather as peculiar or sisterlike with the holy language.^[67]

The three major Elizabethan orthographical reformers–Thomas Smith in 1568, John Hart a year later and William Bullokar in 1580–argue that vernacular meanings are corrupted by the confusion of received spelling and pronunciation standards.  Whereas a given letter of the alphabet should stand for a single speech sound, many English letters are used for more than one sound, and contemporary spelling consequently varies widely.  Smith, Hart and Bullokar, therefore, all present schemes to expand the current alphabet by first ascertaining the original, pure sounds of English letters as they were used in classical Latin and Greek, then adding letters, or diacritical marks to existing letters, to differentiate among modern speech sounds.^[68]

Triumph of the vernacular

From support for translating the wisdom of other languages into English, commentators move to making patriotic calls for expansion of English literature itself.  Near the end of Queen Mary’s rule, Tottel presents his edition of the Songes and Sonettes to aid the nation by both ennobling the English language and promoting learning and eloquence: “It resteth now (gentle Reader) that thou think it not evil done, to publish, to the honor of the English tongue, and for profit of the studious of English eloquence, those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure, have heretofore envied thee.”^[69]

Under Elizabeth, we find a particularly strong concern with legitimizing English for imaginative literature; and the more vernacular literature that appears, the more critics comment on its supposedly sorry history.  Such laments reach a peak in the 1580s.  At the start of that decade, 1580 Gabriel Harvey goes on at length about the national disgrace resulting from the paucity of great literature in English in contrast with the flourishing of other national literatures:

What though Italy, Spain, and France, ravished with a certain glorious and ambitious desire (your gallantship would peradventure term it zeal and devotion) to set out and advance their own languages above the very Greek and Latin, if it were possible, and standing altogether upon terms of honor and exquisite forms of speech, carrying a certain brave magnificent grace and majesty with them, do so highly and honorably esteem of their country poets, reposing on great part of their sovereign glory and reputation abroad in the world in the famous writings of their noblest wits?…  What though it hath universally been the practise of the flourishingest States and most politic commonwealths, from whence we borrow our substantialest and most material precepts and examples of wise and considerate government, to make the very most of their vulgar tongues, and together with their seignories and dominions by all means possible to amplify and enlarge them, devising all ordinary and extraordinary helps, both for the polishing and refining of them at home, also for the the spreading and dispersing of them abroad?….  Dost thou not oversensibly perceive that the market goeth far otherwise in England, wherein nothing is reputed so contemptible, and so basely and vilely accounted of, as whatsoever is taken for English, whether it be handsome fashions in apparel, or seemly and honorable in behavior, or choice words and phrases in speech, or any notable thing else in effect that savoreth of our own country and is not either merely or mixedly outlandish?  Is it not clearer than the sun at noondays that our most excellent English treatises were they never so eloquently contrived even hereafter, be sib to arithmeticians or merchants counters, which now and then stand for hundreds and thousands, by and by for odd halfpence or farthings, and otherwhiles for very nihils.^[70]

In 1582 Richard Stanyhurst, translator of Virgil and disciple of Harvey (and, incidentally, eventually a Catholic exile), invokes the great classical proponent, Ascham, in support of vernacular poetry: Ascham “doth wish the University students to apply their wits in beautifying our English language with heroical verses.”^[71]

The problem is not just a shortage of vernacular literature but the very legitimacy of writing in English.  As late as 1584 we find Dudley Fenner defending secular English on grounds used all century long by Protestants to support vernacular worship.  Identifying ancient languages not as classical but as vernacular, Fenner insists that since ancients used their vernaculars, moderns should equally be able to use theirs:

what will they [who oppose the vernacular for use in serious matters] answer unto the knowledge and learning of the Egyptians, wherein Moses excelled, before the Greek or Roman tongues became general?  were not their writings, think they in their own tongue?  yea after that, were not Solomon’s treatises and discourses (whether written or unwritten) both of natural things, and of all that is done under the sun,…were they not done in most ancient and worthy tongue of the Hebrews?  Nay even their chief masters now, Plato and Aristotle, Tully and Quintilian, wrote they not in their own tongues.^[72]

Constantly, writers feel they must “prove” the worth of the vernacular by rummaging through what they sense as a meager heritage of English literature to glean evidence that the vernacular really does have literary merit.  William Kempe in 1588 notes that royalty has a tradition of enhancing English literature: King Alfred “translated diverse books into the vulgar tongue, and wrote many new of his own.”^[73]  In trying to find English works that will give vernacular literature the same stature as classical, Stanyhurst in 1582 calls Chaucer “our Virgil” who manages “to ferret out the secrets of Nature, with words so fitly couched…as in truth he hath in right purchased to him self the name of a surpassing poet, the fame of an odd oratoure [sic], and the admiration of a profound philosopher.”^[74]   William Webbe in 1586 cites Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate and the supposed author Piers Plowman as early examples of great English poetry,^[75]  then Skelton, then a gap before Surrey, Tusser, Haywood and several (now) lesser lights with names like L. Vaus, Norton of Bristow, “S. Y.” and “M. D.”^[76]  He adds a recent translator of the Aeniad, Phaer, along with Golding, Goodge, Whetstone, Sidney, Spenser and Harvey.^[77] For Spenser in particular Webbe has great hope:

if it would please him or his friends to let those excellent Poems, whereof I know he hath plenty, come abroad, as his Dreams, his Legends, his Court of Cupid, his English Poet, with other, he should not only stay the rude pens of my self and others, but also satisfy the thirsty desires of many which desire nothing more than to see more of his rare inventions.^[78]

Yet within another decade or so–by the end of the century–all this defensiveness has changed.  Late Elizabethan writers seem to have been as conscious of the sudden explosion of their literature as modern critics are.  Thomas Nashe in 1589 praises “divine Master Spencer, the miracle of wit,” as the equal of any poet in “Spain, France, Italy, and all the world.”^[79]  By 1593 even Harvey, whom we saw so critical of English literary heritage in 1580, has become extremely optimistic about the state of English literature, though his list does not differ much from Webbe’s of seven years earlier:

Is not the Prose of Sir Philip Sidney in his sweet Arcadia the embroidery of finest Art and daintiest Wit?  Or is not the Verse of M. Spencer in his brave Faery Queene the Virginal of the divinest Muses and gentlest Graces?  Both delicate Writers, always gallant, often brave, continually delectable, sometimes admirable….  Sir John Cheeks style was the honey-bee of Plato, and M. Ascham’s Period the Siren of Isocrates.^[80]

In 1598, Francis Meres can include among great English writers such recent figures as Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman, along with lesser lights,^[81]  in addition to the traditional triumvirate of Chaucer (whom he elevates above the Virgilian rank assigned by Stanyhurst, paralleling Chaucer with Homer and Petrarch and calling him “the God of English poets”), Gower, and Lydgate.^[82]

In the 1590s, in fact, English becomes more than just a successful substitute for ancient language; it also becomes an appropriate vessel for the spiritual power available to language, for recapturing ancient meaning when word and thing supposedly were united or at least close. This sense was emerging throughout the Reformation  We see a hint of it in William Tyndale’s assertion of the aptness of English for scripture by its affinities with the two great tongues of the original scriptures:

the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin.  And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin.  The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favoredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew.  A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.^[83]

Implicitly, English becomes the closest modern language to God’s, and closer even than the great classical languages after Hebrew.  English becomes a kind of modern universal tongue, or at least the closest modern approximation to it.  Ralph Lever in 1573 suggests that English has a special facility of expression that surpasses other tongues:

As for devising of new terms, and compounding of words, our tongue hath a special grace, wherein it excelleth many other, & is comparable with the best.  The cause is for that the most part of English words are short, and stand on one syllable apiece.  So that two or three of them are often times fitly joined in one.^[84]

“Grace” may play on a relation between English and divinity, referring temporally to especially refined and well-born people and celestially to God’s gift to humankind.^[85] We have already seen Nashe in 1589 referring to Spenser as “divine” and “a miracle of wit,” terms which remind us of the spiritual power of great literature; by setting Spenser’s poetry against that of “Spain, France, Italy and all the world,” Nashe hints that God has chosen English as the modern receptacle of his truth.^[86]

William Rainolds’ Catholic view in 1583–that a word is the totality of its meanings through history–now gets taken over for general secular honoring of English as a suitable modern universal tongue, as we find in Richard Carew in 1596.  For one thing, Carew writes, English fuses a variety of meanings into single words:

Yea so significant are our words, that amongst them sundry single ones serve to express diverse things; as by Bill are meant a weapon, a scroll, and a bird’s beak: by Grave, sober, a tomb, and to carve; and by light, mark, match, file, sore, & pray, the semblable.^[87]

English names similarly carry within themselves a history of meaning that tells us about the family’s nature and history:

in a manner all the proper names of our people do import somewhat which, from a peculiar note at first of some one of the Progenitors, in process of time invested itself [in] a possession of the posterity, even as we see the like often befall to those whose fathers bare some uncouth Christian names.^[88]

Time accretes new meanings to old words; ancient languages could not have as much meaning as modern ones (and other modern ones do not show accumulated meaning as well as English does).  In a parallel way, English contains all speech sounds: 

For easy learning of other Languages by ours, let these serve as proofs; there are many Italian words which the Frenchmen cannot pronounce, as accio, for which he says ashio; many of the French which the Italian can hardly come away withal, as bailler, chagrin, postillon; many in ours which neither of them can utter, as Hedge, Water.  So that a stranger though never so long conversant amongst us carryeth evermore a watch word upon his tongue to descry him by, but turn an Englishman at any time of his age into what country soever, allowing him due respite, and you shall see him perfect so well that the Imitation of his utterance will in nothing differ from the pattern of that native Language: the want of which towardness cost the Ephramites their skins.^[89]

If we can set aside the silliness of this claim, we can see that Carew’s point is no idle or theoretical one, but focuses on the most practical of consequences that echo the problems seen by commentators on Babel: national security (for foreigners will be betrayed by their inability to speak all English sounds) and personal survival (the English, who can make all speech sounds, will not be undone by their tongues, as the Ephraimites were for being unable to pronounce “shibboleth”).

No less an authority than the soon-to-be-head of the English language and nation, King James VI of Scotland, assures us of the spiritual and worldly greatness of English as he pens advice to his infant son in 1599: “I would…advise you to write in your own language: for there is no thing left to be said in Greek & Latin already, & enough of poor scholars would match you in these languages.  It best becometh a King to purify & make famous his own language, wherein he may go before all his subjects.”^[90]  That Latin and Greek have nothing more to say indicates a radical departure from inherited sixteenth-century attitudes towards the classics.  Once, it was a Renaissance homily that the ancient languages contain all knowledge–indeed, they were the foundation of the many schemes for education of children in general and of the prince in particular; now, as a new century and ruling house are about to arrive, whatever knowledge we do grant classical tongues, this regal prescriber of a prince’s education reports that they have reached their limits of usefulness to us.  For James, the universalizing power of the vernacular, finally, is its prospect for attaining that great and elusive human goal, captured briefly long ago to herald the immanence of Christ’s coming to redeem humankind from all sin, including linguistic pride–civil peace, which “may easily be done in this Isle of Britain, being all but one Isle, and already joined in unity of Religion, and language.”^[91]  In the same year that James writes those lines, Samuel Daniel offers a vision of English as the world’s language in the near future when British influence will spread throughout the globe:

              And who in time knows whither we may vent

              The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores

              This gain of our best glory shall be sent,

              T’enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?

              What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident

              May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?

Or who can tell for what great work in hand

              The greatness of our style is now ordain’d?

              What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command,

              What thoughts let out, what humors keep restrain’d

              What mischief it may powerfully withstand,

              And what fair ends may thereby be attain’d.^[92]

Daniel’s diction–“powers,” “spirits,” restraint of excess humors and “mischief”– suggests a spiritual power in English, which is exactly what a replacement for Edenic language should possess.  While occupied colonials might take vigorous exception, to the English patriot these words border on divine prophecy, given the history of English colonialism in the coming centuries.  In any event, they portray a view as Tudor history comes to a close of not just power in language generally but of a special power in the nation’s very own language and literature.

---

^[1] Thomas Smith, On the Correct and Improved Pronunication of the Greek Language, ed. Bror Danielsson (Stockholm, 1978), 47.

^[2] Ibid., 49-53.

^[3] Ibid., 51.

^[4] Ibid., 47-49.

^[5] Ibid., 55-57.  Reversing the decay of language, however, is a complex business, for, as John Colet informs us in his Latin grammar of 1527, “To speak and to write the clean Latin” we must first know “all the varieties and diversities and changes in Latin speech (which be innumerable).”  [Aeditio, (1527; Scolar Press reprint), Dviv.]

^[6] The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 18.  Cf. Vives, TRANSMISSION, 110.

^[7] The Scholemaster, ed. R. J. Schoeck (Don Mills, Ontario, 1966), 123.

^[8] Ibid., 22.

^[9] Cf. Edward Hake, who counsels in 1575 that “love unto the Latin tongue should grow” in pupils but warns that it is nonetheless better to learn no Latin at all than to learn it filled with the “foul barbarous words” so common in his day.  [A Commemoration of the Most Prosperous and Peaceable Raigne…of Elizabeth (London, 1575), G4^r, G5^r]

^[10] Learning [is] chiefly contained in the Greek and in no other tongue.”  [Ibid., 49 margin]  Cf. Vives, 144: “The Greek language remained untouched and pure longer than ours [i.e., Latin] because it was less exposed to the attacks of the barbarians than the language of the West.”  Vives identifies the peak of Greek as coinciding with the flourishing of Athens, from Pisastratus to the death of Demosthenes, and so recommends Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle as models of proper use of Greek.

^[11] Ibid., 100.  Cf. Vives, TRANSMISSION, 94: “If anyone has joined Greek to the Latin language, from the two he will receive many seeds of the material of knowledge remaining to us.” 

^[12] Vives, De tradendis disciplinis, 91-2.

^[13] Vives, De tradendis disciplinis, 91-2.

^[14] An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue…, ed. Rev. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1850), 55.

^[15] Ibid., 75.

^[16] Ibid.  It is especially noteworthy here that Tyndale, and early Protestant pietist, finds no problem in approving pagan writers like Terence and Virgil.

^[17] An Apologie or Aunswer in Defence of the Church of England (London, 1562; Scholar Press reprint), 47^r-v.

^[18] The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, in The Complete Works of Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, James P. Lusardi and Richard J. Schoeck (New Haven, 1973), VIII.807.  Writing in 1583, William Rainolds, answering Protestant criticisms of the Vulgate, sets its authority above the “original” scriptures as the highest scriptural authority while insisting on his reverence for the Hebrew and Greek scriptures:IP8,8MDSD

^[19] In Elizabethan Critical Essays, II.329.  It is interesting that Campion dates the reform of Latin from Northern European humanists immediately close to the Reformation rather than from the slightly earlier and Italian Valla.

^[20] The Christen rule or state of all the worlde from the hyghest to the lowest… (1547), 40^v, 41^r.  Since the Old Testament was in the languages of its writers, Tyndale asks, why can we not have scripture in our own vernacular?  [Doctrinal Treatises, 144-5]  Similarly, if the Apostles preached sermons in the vernacular, “Why then might they not be written in the mother tongue?”  [148]  The 1530 translation of a medieval justification of vernacular scripture similarly explains that the ancients generally had scripture in their vernacular: “For when the law was given to Moses in the mount of Sinai, god gave it to his people in their mother tongue of Hebrew that all the people should understand it and commanded Moses to read it to them until they understood it…  And Esdras also read it in their mother tongue.”  [Compendious olde treatise, Aii^v-Aiii^r]  How can modern Christians, then, be denied this favor? IP8,8Then sithen the dark prophesies were translated among the heathen people that they might have knowledge of god and of the incarnation of Christ / much more it ought to be translated to english people that have received the faith and bounden them self to keep it upon pain of damnation / sithen Christ commanded his Apostles to preach his gospel unto all the world and excepted no people nor language.  [Ibid., Avii^r.]

^[21] He that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men,” Paul says, for example, and “if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.” [I Cor. xiv.2 and 14]  (N.B. that “unknown” is an interpolation of the King James Bible.)  Coverdale (“And yet Paul ii. Corinthi. xiiii. forbiddeth to speak in the Church or congregation save in the tongue that all understand.  For the lay man thereby is not edified or taught[,]…but woteth not whether thou bless or curse.”  [The Christen rule or state of all the worlde from the hyghest to the lowest…, 40^v-41^r]) and Tyndale (“Paul commandeth that no man once speak in the church, that is, in the congregation, but in a tongue that all men understand, except there be an interpreter by.”  [Doctrinal Treatises, 29]) are typical in the way they cite Paul in support of vernacular worship.  @comment<old V.96>

^[22] The Works of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, The First Portion, ed. Rev. John Ayre (The University Press: Cambridge, 1845), 268.  Cf. the 1530 translation of a medieval justification of vernacular scripture:  IP8,8

^[23] We should note that the dispute over the intrinsic value of vernacular scripture is peculiar to England, where English Bibles had been heavily controlled since 1408 in response to Lollardry.  France and England both produced vernacular Bibles during the second half of the fifteenth century.  Cf. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York, 1964), 9.  For a history of English scriptural translation in the sixteenth century, see the same volume, 28-138, 189-193, and … CRAIG THOMPSON; JOHN KING? ANYONE ELSE?

^[24] Ibid., Avii^v. 

^[25] A Defence of the True and Catholike doctrine of the sacrament of the body and bloud of our saviour Christ… (1550), *iii^r.

^[26] An Answere to a Certeine Booke…, 117.

^[27] Ibid., 34^v.  In this passage, Knewstub lumps libertines and Anabaptists with Catholics.

^[28] A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the Fryday before Easter, 1579 (London, 1579), 8^v-9^r.

^[29] Ibid., 31^r.  Further to associate his project with piety, Hart later offers a French version of the Lord’s Prayer using his proposed orthography.  [Ibid., fols. 65-66]

^[30] Ibid., 11^v-12^r.  In 1590, Antonio de Corro justifies retention of unpronounced letters in French with a similar sense that sounds have spiritual content: he writes of “the power which each letter hath, and how it ought to be pronounced” and describes Spanish pronunciation by comparing each letter with a counterpart in Hebrew or Greek or both, so that modern pronunciation relies on ancient precedent.  [The Spanish Grammer… (London, 1590; Scholar Press reprint), 1-13]  According to Hart, the origin itself of the word “orthography” reinforces the spiritual importance of accurate spelling.  [“Epistle,” unnumbered, first page]

^[31] Compendious olde treatise, Av^v.

^[32] Ibid.

^[33] In T.N., Aiiii^r.

^[34] Aii^v.

^[35] Aiii^v.  William Salesbury’s elevation of Welsh is “to edify” English people “as well in civil institutions, as in godly doctrine.”  [Brief and plain introduction, Aiii^v]

^[36] Queene Elizabethes Achademy, ed. F. J. Furnivall (London, 1869), 2.  If the pupil will benefit from mastering English, English will also be enhanced by using it in education: IP8,8

^[37] William Bullokar, Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, 40.

^[38] William Bullokar, Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, title page.  Cf. Hart, who seeks to teach “the natural [i.e., ignorant] English knowing no letter, to be able to learn to discern and easily to read.”  [An Orthographie (London, 1569: Scolar Press reprint), 4^r]

^[39] Aiii^r-v.

^[40] Q3^v.  Valence draws attention to the “lowness” of the mother tongue: “our intention was to make up this work with some short vocabulary of nouns or words which be most common & vulgar, & belong to the daily speech.”  [Ibid.]  “Common & vulgar” in one sense are merely descriptive redundancies identifying the vernacular as the speech of everyday life.  But in the elitist society of the times, they also contrast unfavorably with the uncommon, superior speech of pure language.

^[41] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aii^v-Aiii^r.

^[42] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aiii^r.

^[43] vii^r.<6n.31>

^[44] Brief and plain introduction, Ei^v-Eii^r.

^[45] Treatis of Schemes and Tropes, Aii^v-Aiii^r.

^[46] “[In] the modern & present manner of writing (aswell of certain other languages as of our English) there is much confusion and disorder, as it may be accounted rather a kind of ciphering, or such a dark kind of writing, as the best and readiest wit that ever hath been, could, or that is or shall be, can or may, by the only gift of reason, attain to the ready and perfect reading thereof, without a long and tedious labor.”  [2^r]

^[47] Hart, An Orthographie (London, 1569: Scolar Press reprint), 46^v-47^r (misnumbered 42 and 43).  Eleven years later, William Bullokar speaks of the “savage, rude, and barbarous” nature of the illiteracy his own orthographical scheme will amend.  [Booke at Large (1580), in The Works of William Bullokar, ed. J. R. Turner, Leeds, 1970, Ci^v]  With the carping of his opponents in mind, Bullokar identifies himself with that elect whom God has chosen to aggrandize the English nation: “that creature, by whom God ministreth his goodness towards us, deserveth to be wished well unto.”  Recalling either the Reformation or Elizabeth’s accession or both (“Neither ought we to forget the manifold blessings of God showed to this our Nation in this last age”), he includes among the consequent blessings his own spelling reform, a “change…not of the least importance, though it seem a trifle in some men’s judgments.”  [Ibid., “Bullokar to His Country,” 5th page]

^[48] Treatise of the Figures, v^v-vi^r.

^[49] Etymology at this time can mean much more than in the twentieth century; it may include a wide range of language study that covers anything to do with meaning and requires tools of scholarship for fields superficially outside language.  In a 1593 translation of a Hebrew primer by Peter Martinius, for example, etymology encompasses all of grammar other than arrangement of words: “Grammar hath two parts, Etymology and Syntax.  Etymology is that part of Grammar which giveth rules concerning words.”  [The Key of the Holy Tongue, trans. John Udall (London, 1593; Scholar Press reprint), 5]  “Rules” implies that studying the history of a word teaches us how to “fix” its usage and meaning by stripping it of any corrupt meaning, as if the “true” meaning is mysteriously buried within the sound or spelling or history of the word.  For Martinius, numerous details of language enter etymology: he examines accent, vowels and consonants, whether the words are “primitive” or “derivative,” and what part of speech the word is.  If, in addition to all this, he also intends the usual meaning of grammar at this time–literary studies in general–when he makes etymology part of grammar, then “etymology,” learning “rules” about words, assumes that truth embedded in language emerges only from wide knowledge, in context, of all the great compositions in history from the Iliad to the present, and even demands studies like history and Renaissance equivalents of archaeology and anthropology to supplement more traditionally literary ones.

^[50] The Education of Children in Learning (1588), in Four Tudor Books on Education, ed. Robert D. Pepper (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 226.

^[51] We may recall Montaigne’s lament that “most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical” and his dismay over how a mere relative pronoun (this in “this is my body,” the basis for the debate over transsubstantiation) can produce the most dire consequences: “How many quarrels, and how important, have been produced in the world by doubt of the meaning of that syllable, Hoc!”  [Apology for Raymond Sebond in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, 1958), 392]  @comment<quote is 53.6% through the essay>.  These lines first appeared in French in 1580.

^[52] A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 264.  Rainolds is defending Jerome’s Latin Bible, officially declared by the Council of Trent in 1545 as the higher authority when it disagrees with received scriptural texts in the original languages.  The rationale behind this position is readily supported by basic philological principles now well established by humanist scholarship: the inherited Greek and Hebrew scriptures are relatively recent, corrupted copies of the pure scriptures (copied, incidentally, by Jewish scribes, who, like all Jews, cannot be trusted), whose real meaning God inspired Jerome to perceive.  For Rainolds, therefore, any kind of historical examination, etymological or otherwise, is beside the point.

^[53] The confutacyon of Tyndales answere, 167.

^[54] A Refutation of Sundry Reprehensions, Cavils and False Sleightes… (Paris, 1583), 270, margin.

^[55] Ibid., 277.

^[56] Ibid., 268.

^[57] Ibid., 269.  By ignoring tradition, Protestants have made a thoroughgoing, disorganized linguistic melange of scripture:IP8,8

^[58] Ibid., 277.  Cf. Rainolds’ sarcastic jibe at Protestant justification by faith: “these good Gospellers have a faith, and a justifying faith, whereby they apprehend eternal life, without father, son, and holy Ghost, without Christ and his passion, or any of these other matters, which are rather subtle points of the papists’ historical faith, than of the lively, justifying faith, wherewith these Evangelical brethren in all security are warranted of the certain favor of God in this life, and assured glory in the next.” [280]

^[59] Doctrinal Treatises, 309.

^[60] Ibid.

^[61] An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue…, 15.

^[62] The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 1.

^[63] See, for example, Thomas Elyot (The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London, 1962), 46-47) and Philip Sidney (In Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London, 1904) 2 vols., I.154) on the meaning of “poet,” George Puttenham on “theater” (Ibid., II.38) and “tragedy” (II.36), Thomas Lodge (Ibid., I.80-81) and Polydore Vergil (An Abridgement of the notable worke of Polidore Vergile…, xviii^r-v) on “tragedy” and “comedy,” and Polydore on “satire” (xix^v).  @comment<VI.6n.8,7,6>

^[64] The Lawyers Logic, (London, 1588; Scolar Press reprint), 51^r.  He adds an unclear statement–“To whom the interpretation of the name agreeth, to that also the name it self and contarily”–which seems to mean that a word and its definition have a reciprocal relationship, so that a word is never arbitrarily chosen.  He then makes it clear that knowledge of “notations” is crucial to legal rectitude:IP8,8

^[65] ý_ß_ý_ß_Ibidý_Ü_., 1ý_â_rý_Ü_.

^[66] A marginal note reminds us: “British misnamed walsh.”  [Brief and plain introduction, Eiii^v]

^[67] Brief and plain introduction, Eiii^v.  Edmund Coote in 1596 affirms the value of learning English and writes a textbook on the language, but also falls back on Latin as a model for English, as when he surveys Latin vowels and pronounces that “these three vowels, e, i, u, are very corruptly and ignorantly taught, by many unskillful teachers, which is the cause of so great ignorance in true writing in those that want the Latin tongue.”  [35]

^[68] Accurate capture of ancient spelling and pronunciation can lead to the opposite conclusion–that we should not change contemporary spelling.  With the same goal of enhancing meaning, Claude Desainliens in 1576 includes among arguments for exact spelling that “the orthography showeth the derivation of the diction” and that we will retain understanding of “the ancient monuments written so many years past, which could not be understood hereafter if the writing were altered.”  [The French Littleton, ed. R. C. Alston (London, 1576; Menston, 1970), *ii^v-*iii^r]  Antonio De Corro in 1590 counsels retention of unpronounced letters in French words “to the end that every one might the plainlier see from what tongue the vowels descended: and that the writing of the words might show the right etymology of them.”  [The Spanish Grammer, 14]  It is interesting that the division of opinion on spelling in these examples is between commentators on English and those on other modern vernaculars; I don’t know if this is consistently true in other Renaissance discussions of orthography.

^[69] Songes and Sonettes, Ai^v.

^[70] In Smith, I.123-4.  William Webbe in 1586 shares Harvey’s disbelief at the dearth of great English literature, and pleads for patriots to come to the fore [in Smith, I.223 and 228-9].  He cites Spenser in support of this view: “I doubt not…to adjoin the authority of our late famous English Poet who wrote the Sheepheards Calender, where [he laments] the decay of Poetry at these days.”  [I.232]

^[71] In Smith, I.137.

^[72] The Artes of Logike and Rethorike, in Four Tudor Books on Education, ed. Robert D. Pepper (Gainesville, Fla., 1966), 145.

^[73] In Pepper, 209.

^[74] In Smith, I.135.

^[75] In Smith, I.241-2.

^[76] In Smith, I.242.

^[77] In Smith, I.242-6.

^[78] In Smith, I. 246.  His last reference to Spenser suggests that all that keeps English literature from greatness is that not all of Spenser’s works have yet been published.  In this essay, Webbe also discusses what he does not like in English literature, but this does not nullify his intent both to improve vernacular literature and seek out favorable examples of English authors.

^[79] In Smith, I. 318.

^[80] In Smith, II. 282.  Harvey refers to “the English Ariosto,” presumably Spencer, but laments that we have no “English Tasso” or du Bartas.  [283]  Nonetheless, his vision is far rosier than in 1580, and he seems really to have little doubt that England will produce its Tasso and du Bartas–and in the very near future. His tone is that English will now actually progress faster than other vernaculars and soon permanently surpass them.

^[81] In Smith, II.315-23.

^[82] Ibid., 314.

^[83] Doctrinal Treatises, 148-9.

^[84] v^r-v

^[85] The language connection is no accident: well-born people should be spiritually superior; calling someone “your grace” implicitly acknowledges his closeness to God.

^[86] But neither is Nashe concerned with consistency.  When disputing with Harvey three years later (1592), he finds English inferior to Greek because it is unfit for the noble Greek hexameter and “nothing too good, but too bad to imitate the Greek and Latin“; and his praise for Spenser can be left-handed, as when he cites Chaucer and Spenser, “though far overseen,” as the English parallels of Homer and Virgil.  (In Smith, II.240)

^[87] In Elizabethan Critical Essays, II.288.

^[88] Ibid., II.287-288.  He goes on to contrast Roman names unfavorably with English ones: “Yet for the most part we avoid the blemish given by the Romans in like cases, who distinguished the persons by the imperfections of their bodies.”

^[89] Ibid., II.289.

^[90] Basilicon Doron, 142.

^[91] Basilicon Doron, 153-4.

^[92] Musophilus,” ll. 957-68, in Poems.  Stephen J. Greenblatt of the University of California at Berkeley called my attention to the imperialistic implications in this passage.