Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists

Book excerpt: One of the burning issues of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy was the question of language. The single most important figure to treat this subject in the late Middle Ages was Dante Alighieri. The Dantean argument on language with its implicit acknowledgment of a classical bilingualism and its faith in the efficacy of the vernacular stimulated and defined the debate on language among the humanists of the 15th century. This book aims at a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language and at a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on linguistic phenomena. In so doing, it recaptures the theoretical assumptions — philological empiricism, political ideology, stylistic imperatives, literary aspirations — that shaped the thinking of Bruni, Biondo, Alberti, Guarino, Poggio, Filelfo, Valla, Landino and Lorenzo de' Medici. This work goes beyond the strict, technical periphery of linguistic enquiry, and becomes a study of intellectual history.