2 - Attractions, Affectations, Aberrations

Summary

The risk of acquiring a modern tongue, rather than using a dead language like Latin as a lingua franca, presented new hazards that worried families more than institutions. The risk was that the experience of full immersion in a modern language abroad in order to ‘perfect its knowledge’ could tempt the young mind to adopt foreign habits. In Elizabethan England, it wasn’t only Italian fashion that was being criticised as all travellers who returned home from foreign lands were ridiculed by popular satirists for their new manners. There is evidence that dowdy Englishmen were offended by their compatriots wearing extravagant clothing, displaying foreign manners and modifying their native language after years spent abroad. Polite conversation was a broad term that included different types of social occasion, as well as diverse types of performances and social skills. Indeed, when reporting on their soirées in France and Italy, many English visitors stressed the different nature of their interactions. Usually they distinguish French conversations from what Italians called conversazioni, and indeed the latter then assumed the meaning of social gatherings, in contrast with the gallant French version.