The invented language: John Foxe, Edmund Spenser, and the rhetorical development of English as a genre of heritage in the sixteenth century

This paper applies the methodology of rhetorical genre theory to a study of the rhetorical changes in literary English in the sixteenth century.;Specifically, it focuses on how the use of archaic linguistic features in Edmund Spenser's poetic pastoral, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), depends on an English Protestant nationalistic literary tradition which culminated in the second edition of John Foxe's polemical English Protestant history, Actes and Monuments (1570). Foxe's text sought to authenticate its history by the inclusion of a number of historical records drawn from centuries earlier and so written in antiquated English. These records of antiquated English, in turn, took on the rhetorical values of true English Protestant heritage, values which Spenser invoked in his use of antiquated English forms.;Rhetorical genre theory---drawing heavily from the work of theorists Carolyn Miller and Kenneth Burke---suggests that a rhetorical genre (or observable type of language use) is marked by a set of formal linguistic features which have taken on recurrent or ritual rhetorical values and so are used to negotiate a recurrently typified exigence. The primary exigence facing English writers in the sixteenth century was the need to establish an English Protestant nationalistic identity. Such an identity became ritually vested in the linguistic forms of archaic English. This rhetorical investment was a gradual process, beginning with the revaluing of traditional English by such writers as Alexander Barclay and William Tyndale, and continuing with the look toward the purer forms of hereditary English by such rhetoricians as Thomas Wilson and Ralph Lever. It was given formal structure in Foxe's use of archaic records and finally made a matter of deliberate poetic artifice in Spenser's Calender .;This study finds that institutionalization of some kind must be a key step in the process by which linguistic features are invested with ritual rhetorical value. It explores closely the institutional processes involved in the production and dissemination of Foxe's Actes and Monuments and in the composition and background of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender.