Appunti sulla lingua del Polifilo e la sua (s)fortuna .......... 11

Moving from the critical insights of past scholarship as well as from passages from the Hypnerotomachia (including paratextual texts), this essay reviews the defining features of the novel’s language. This is an overly refined vernacular, the only one, in the author’s intentions, apt to include the reader in the novel’s initiatic journey through enigmatic antiquarian visions. In the context of the lively fifteenth- and sixteenth-century debates on language, the Hypnerotomachia may represent the extreme outcome of a widespread push toward the ennoblement of the vernacular via a massive insertion of latinisms. This tendency is particularly strong among the supporters of the so-called ‘lingua cortigiana’ (courtly language), whose writings are comparable, though more moderate, with the language of the Hypnerotomachia (in particular, Iacopo Caviceo’s novel Il peregrino). The author’s predilection for words taken from late Latinity, in particular from Apuleius, is also grounded on the lexicographic tradition leading to Perotti’s Cornucopiae as well as on the Latin works of Beroaldo and his school. However, when the language question moves decidedly in the direction of Bembo’s theories, and once the autonomy of the vernacular is established, the language of the Polifilo evolves into a parodic one. A preciously bookish language, when turned into a spoken one, becomes intolerably pretentious, revealing affectation (as testified to by a well-known passage of the Cortegiano). The ‘polifilesco’ becomes a foolish, exceedingly refined language that identifies the character of the pedant in comedies and, through Camillo Scroffa’s Cantici, eventually turns into the so-called ‘fidenziano’ language.