| Etymology lies at the root of English Renaissance poetics, as Sidney's influential discussion of the origins of the name 'poet' in his Defense makes clear. My dissertation traces the recurrence and explains the uses of such etymological moments in the texts of the period, exploring the under-examined political, religious and literary implications of the increased interest in the history of the English language arising in Early Modern England as a result of humanist reading practices, the growth of lexicography and, particularly, early attempts to study Anglo-Saxon. I consider the ways in which the origins of English are employed in political controversies, and the manifestation of these contentious uses of linguistic history in the poems of Spenser, Jonson and Milton. Throughout this study, I show how etymology offers each of these poets not only a means of expressing thought, but also -- more importantly -- a way of thinking.;The strangeness of our own mother tongue, as revealed through the etymological investigation of native words, has powerful metaphorical potential for Edmund Spenser. In The Shepheardes Calender he uses what I term a rhetoric of linguistic estrangement in order to satirize the behaviour of the Elizabethan clergy, and to show the falsity of claims to novelty made by those reformers who fail to recognize the inextricability of innovation and tradition. Spenser further develops this allegorical capacity of the past lives of English words in his Faerie Queene, where he cultivates a sense of alienation from the root meanings of our language as a means by which to show how his characters -- and readers -- are similarly unaware of their own true natures, and therefore excluded from true faith. Ben Jonson's interest in etymology lies primarily in its temporal element, and there is evident in hid poetry the hope that the time it takes to excavate a term's origins will mirror the enduring quality of this form of semantic allusion as a linguistic device. The delay that is fundamental to etymology also makes it suitable for covert forms of communication, an insight that I show Jonson derives from contemporary Catholic polemic. John Milton displays some skepticism towards etymology in his early writing, until he comes to understand the political resonances of returning words to their earliest senses and the possibility of accessing a native idea of liberty through the recourse to the roots of the vernacular. By the time he writes Paradise Lost , however, political circumstances make this notion untenable, and etymology serves rather to reveal the distance between Milton's own world and his republican ideals. For each of these poets, I argue, the work of etymologizing is at once an act of discovery, as they uncover the history of a word, and of invention, as they re-make that word for present use. As such, the etymological form reflects the project of the Renaissance itself. |
