5 - Eloquence, Liberty, and Power: Civic Humanism and the Counter-Renaissance

Summary

Potentissima belli; pacisque machina; Oratio. Eloquence, the mightiest Engin [both of war and peace] in the world.

Gabriel Harvey, Marginalia

The ferment and germination even of the United States to-day, dating back to, and in my opinion mainly founded on, the Elizabethan age in English history, the age of Francis Bacon and Shakespere.

Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads”

At the end of the Middle Ages in Italy, Dante contemplated in De Vulgari Eloquentia a people divided among themselves by their diverse tongues – a consequence, in his mind, of man's disobedience in building the tower of Babel. Italy alone, he noted, had “at least fourteen vernaculars, all of which have variations within themselves,” and it was his quest to establish “one illustrious vernacular” in his country that had been divided by dialects, by rival city-states, and by factions within city-states such as the one in Florence that drove him into exile. Dante chose to write The Divine Comedy in the vernacular, the language of temporality, change, history – of fallen man. He chose to write On Monarchy in Latin, the sacred language that united citizens of the City of God. Not long after Dante's death, at the advent of the renaissance des lettres, Petrarch, who did much to inaugurate that movement, composed letters to his favorite classical authors and dreamed of recovering their eloquence, just as he dreamed that Italy could be restored to the glory and grandeur of ancient Rome.