The Contribution of Erasmus to the Development of Romance Languages in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

The influence of Latin, since the Middle Ages, in shaping Romance languages as vehicles for the expression of discourse traditions characteristic of conceptual scripturality (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1990 [2011]) has been analysed from different perspectives by Romance Linguistics scholars. Elaboration processes (Ausbau in German, cf. Kloss 1978) are responsible for the development of the mechanisms needed in vernacular languages to access the domain of communicative distance, which remained for many centuries exclusively reserved for Latin. During the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, the use of Latin became increasingly restricted and was already limited in the 16th century mainly to liturgical manifestations, science, learned literature and international diplomacy. As Latin was excluded from oral communicative interactions, Erasmus’ Christian humanism advocated the recovery of Latin as an effective instrument of communication among Europe’s cultivated youth. The author’s most famous work during his lifetime, the Colloquia familiaria, was conceived as a manual of conversational formulas and motifs to encourage the use of Latin among the European cultured elite of the early 16th century. Although the Erasmian endeavour did not succeed, the influence of the Dutch scholar on vernacular literatures propitiated the triumph of strategies suitable for the textualisation of orality based on the Erasmian Latin model, which led to a manifestation of the ideal of ‘natural style’ (cf. Del Rey 2015b) that is common to numerous European Renaissance authors. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of Erasmus’ influence on the shaping of literary dialogue in the Romance languages of the Early Modern Period (cf. Burke 1989). Important metalinguistic reflections of some of the most relevant authors of the time, such as Baldassare Castiglione and Juan de Valdés (cf. Gauger 1996, Bustos 2011), are also considered with the aim of understanding the influence of Erasmus on their writing and, consequently, the importance of the Dutch author in the evolution of style in vernacular languages in Early Modern Period Europe.