Genres

Vernacular

The Renaissance began with resurgence in classical learning, including the study and proper use of Latin. However, Latin was the language of scholars, not the common people. As more people became literate, many authors began to write in their vernacular, or native language, to reach this wider audience. At the same time, many writers attempted to demonstrate that their native languages were just as good as Latin, as Rabelais did when he published his Gargantua and Pantagruel in his native French. In addition, many writers produced works defending the decision to use vernacular, of which Joachim du Bellay's Defence and Illustration of the French Language is one of the most famous. "I do not, however, consider our vulgar tongue, as it now is, to be so vile, so abject as do these ambitious admirers of the Greek and Latin tongues," says Bellay, arguing against the prevailing belief that only the classical languages could produce literary greatness.

Irony

Irony is used in various ways. Two of these are verbal and situational. In its most basic sense, verbal irony entails saying one thing when meaning the opposite, often for a humorous effect. Situational irony occurs in the contrast between what a given set of circumstances appear to be and what in fact they are. For example, in Shakespeare's Macbeth, the title character is given false confidence from a prophecy by three witches, stating that he cannot be killed by a man born of a woman. At the end of the play, Macbeth relies on this prophecy when he fights Macduff. He is so sure of his success that he taunts him, telling Macduff about the prophecy that he cannot be killed by a man of woman born.

Satire

Satire is an attack or protest, created by portraying the object of the protest in an unfavorable manner and hoping to bring about change. In Renaissance times, writers such as Erasmus and his friend More responded to the social injustices they saw with satirical attacks, as an example from Erasmus's The Praise of Folly demonstrates. When speaking about Christians, who he says are "enslaved to blindness and ignorance," Erasmus writes that priests encourage this blindness because they have wisely foreseen "that the people (like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked), would part with less if they knew more." Erasmus is saying that if people were more educated about the Church and its injustices instead of just relying on the Church's comforting assurances, people would not be so willing to give their faith to the Church. By referring to the process of duping the people into faith as milking a cow, Erasmus sets up a negative image in the readers' minds and causes them to think about his argument.

Utopia

More's Utopia inspired many imaginary societies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is so famous that the word "utopia" came to signify both any idealized place and the literary form that depicts such a place. Renaissance utopian works sought to inspire social change by creating a new, imaginary, society that addressed problems in a different way. Two related examples from Utopia illustrate how More did this. In the first part of the book, More has his fictional character Raphael Hythloday talk to Cardinal Morton (chancellor to Henry VII) about some reforms he proposes. Hythloday brings up a current problem, the wool trade. Says Hythloday, "Your sheep . . . that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour men themselves." This is not a literal eating of men, but a symbolic one. It points to the fact that landlords who wished to get rich from the wool trade were creating widespread poverty by stealing all of the common land people formerly used for agriculture, so that the landlords' sheep could graze on it. As a result, many of the new rural poor crowded into the cities, which led to other social ills such as disease and crime. In the second part of the book, about utopia itself, Hythloday demonstrates how the utopians do not have this problem because they conserve their resources when making and using clothes: "They use linen cloth most because it requires the least labour . . . . a Utopian is content with a single cloak, and generally wears it for two years."