The Columbus-language nexus: The influence of the New World discovery on the questione della lingua, the perception of the ancients, and the rhetoric about grammar

This dissertation examines the questione della lingua in the context of Christopher Columbus' voyage of discovery by looking at four epics written in the late Renaissance and Baroque. I propose that this age of expansion and exploration inspired a counter, centripetal movement in Italy which expressed itself as a need to define borders and confirm a cultural identity by way of a concrete grammatical standard for the vulgate.;In Chapter One, I suggest that Inferno XXVI is at the root of the Columbus-language nexus that the poets of the Cinquecento and Seicento adopt. I also consider some Renaissance perceptions of Columbus' historic journey and his brief appearances in the epics of Ariosto and Tasso.;Chapter Two discusses the implications of a systematized Italian grammar and the evolution of the questione della lingua from the Cinquecento to Seicento. The voyages of discovery ignite a polemic about the authority of the ancients and the notions of “otherness” and boundaries—in geography as well as in grammar, rhetoric, and criticism. These anxieties are present in the unfinished epics of Alessandro Tassoni and Guid'Ubaldo Benamati entitled L'Oceano and Tre libri del Mondo nuovo respectively.;Chapter Three provides a close study of the completed epic of Tomaso Stigliani entitled Mondo nuovo, his grammar manual L'Arte del verso italiano, and his epistolary battle with poet Giambattista Marino. I argue that Stigliani's poem establishes Columbus' voyage as a reenactment of the sinful enterprise of Nimrod, and, through language, recasts the conquest of the New World as Italian.;Finally, Chapter Four considers the sexuality of language through the account of the syphilitic plague in the Mondo nuovo of Stigliani and L'Ammiraglio delle Indie by Alvise Querini.;In my Conclusion, I contend that these representations of Columbus betray a question of ethics. The attempt to define and categorize language through strict rules of grammar is an effort to erect lost boundaries and identify that which is Italian in view of a new Ecumene. Grammar becomes an act of cultural correction and an attempt to impose ethics in the wake of an ethically questionable enterprise.