4 - Vernacular literature in Western Europe

Summary

The end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth saw Europe at a crossroads, cultural as well as political and religious. The medieval traditions were failing, though not yet dead, and for many years ‘modern’ literature was still to feel influences which had informed the writings of the Middle Ages. The most striking of these were the spirit of free and often licentious realism embodied in fabliau, novella or farce, a realism which in one or other of its many forms was to enliven the work of a Machiavelli, a Folengo, a Rabelais and a Cervantes; the spirit of chivalry, courtesy and gallantry which, although chivalry itself was dying or dead, continued to find an increasingly artificial expression in lyric and romance until it was given new life by the influx of Platonic notions; and the moralising spirit with its inescapable concomitants of allegory and symbol. But other phenomena which were appearing in different parts of Europe deserve notice. Not unconnected, at any rate as a parallel mental tendency, with the decline of the scholastic philosophy into formalism was the reduction of poetry to conformity with highly complex rules. In some countries poetry was frankly regarded as a ‘second rhetoric’ and hence subject to similar rules; the ideal became the skilful and ingenious manipulation of words to fit a complicated structure of phrase, metre and rhyme which all but killed poetry. This formalism was to be seen not only in the lesser Petrarchans of Italy, the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of France and the Netherlandish Rederijkers, but also in the decaying Minnesang and the developing Meistergesang of Germany and the bardic developments of later fifteenth-century Wales.