Renaissance Discoveries: The Vernacular

In this video we look at the rise to prestige of vernacular Italian. Vernacular language, the volgare, is the speech that, according to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), we learn naturally, without whatsoever formal instruction. Dante had been the first great poetic practitioner of the Florentine vernacular—a descendant (like all Romance languages) of Latin and the distinguished forebear of modern Italian. As scholars in fifteenth-century Italy dusted off classical Latin and began to exalt and explore its expressive powers, some of their colleagues, inspired past Dante’s example, began discovering the elegance, power and dignity of their own mother tongue.