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The Birth of the Iamb in Early Renaissance Low Countries
Mirella De Sisto, Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences
Dissertation project undertaken for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Meertens Institute, Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences, scheduled for submission in February 2020.
Supervisor: Marc van Oostendorp (Meertens Institute / Radboud University, Nijmegen).
Launched in February 2016, “The Birth of the
Iamb in Early Renaissance Low Countries” is
an ongoing research project at the Meertens
Institute of Amsterdam expected to be
completed in 2020. The project aims to
investigate contact-related language change by
way of considering changes in poetry as a
reflection of changes occurring in the language
itself. The present article constitutes an overview
of the project and its areas of investigation.
This research project focuses on the
development of iamb in Low Countries poetry.
During its Renaissance phase, around the end
of the 16
th
century, Dutch poetry moved from
an accentual verse to a foot-based one
(Gasparov
1996;
Kazartsev
2008)
by
incorporating iambic meter, a result of the
influence of French and Italian poetry. Italian
poetry, during the development of Renaissance
thought, had revitalized and adapted the
classical iambic meter, and French poetry,
inspired by the former, had elaborated its own
version of the new metrical form. The use of
iamb was far from Germanic poetic tradition;
hence, its incorporation determined a deep
change in Dutch poetry. The aim of this
research is to analyse metrical and language
change and to determine the role played by
lexical borrowings in the two processes. The
plan for this study builds on the principle that
a large amount of lexical borrowings can lead
to structural borrowings and hence structural
204
changes in the target language (Winford 2003:
53). This principle was combined with the
observation of a great number of Romance
lexical items that entered Dutch vocabulary
during the Renaissance, which are expected to
have contributed to the metrical change.
In the following paragraphs, I first
provide a description of the context in which
the change occurred, secondly I present the
starting points of the investigation and, third
and finally, I outline the goals of the project.
The Renaissance spread in the Low
Countries with a certain delay compared to its
birth in Italy and its development in France.
Due to this delay, Dutch poets were exposed to
works of French and Italian Renaissance
poetry, which were already at a mature stage.
Moreover, they could access not only the
original classical texts in Latin and Ancient
Greek, but also their translations in Modern
languages. In addition, numerous were the
translations of Italian Renaissance works into
French.
In terms of poetry, the Italian Renaissance
had been characterized by the development of
the sonnet and of the
endecasillabo. The
endecasillabo is a syllabo-tonic verse, with a
tendency towards iambic rhythm, which is
composed by ten syllables plus a feminine
ending. In this meter the stress pattern is
relatively free, made exception for the tenth
syllable and the one in fourth or sixth position,
which are always stressed (Elwert 1973;
Menichetti 1993; Gasparov 1996; Beltrami
2002). The stress on the fourth or sixth syllable
depends on the position of some kind of
caesura, or rather pause, which, according to
Nespor and Vogel (1986: 281), coincides with
the end of a phonological phrase.
In France, the poets of la Pléiade (the
literary group of which Pierre de Ronsard,
Joachim du Bellay and Jean-Antoine de Baïf
were members), being inspired by Petrarch’s
work, promoted the use of the Alexandrine, a
twelve-syllable line with an obligatory caesura
in the middle. Being a syllabic meter, the
alexandrine was composed without considering
any internal stress pattern, but, due to word
group stress occurring at the right edge of
every word group, the sixth and the twelfth
syllables always carried stress (Gasparov
1986; Lote 1991; Dinu 1993). Important
sources of Renaissance poetry were the
classical works from which the term
iamb
derives. A significant difference between
classical poetry and the French and Italian
development was its basis in a quantitative
meter: an iamb consisted of a long syllable
preceded by a short one. After several attempts
at recreating quantitative meter, it was adapted
to modern languages by substituting the
concept of “long” with “stressed” and “short”
with “unstressed” (Elwert 1973).
With this brief background in place, we can
now turn to Low Countries poetry. Before the
Renaissance, poetry was mostly composed
following an accentual meter,
in which a fixed
number of stresses were divided by a varying
number of unstressed syllables. The only
exception seems to be
het leven van Sinte
Lutgart [‘The Life of Saint Lutgardis’], a 14
th
century poem written in iambs, which
constitutes, though, an isolated case (Zonneveld
2000).
With the blossoming of the Renaissance,
many poets decided to renew and heighten
their poetry by imitating poetic forms used in
the prestigious French intellectual scene, in
particular by the poets of la Pléiade, and by
imitating the icon of the Renaissance movement,
namely the
endecasillabo of Petrarch.
Yet in order to do so, Dutch poetry needed
to undergo some changes and therefore the
beginning of the Renaissance in the Low
Countries was characterized by the passage
from an accentual verse to a foot-based one.
This was the way in which a stress-based
language could incorporate the iambic foot,
used in syllabic, syllabo-tonic
and quantitative
meter. It resulted in a line composed by a fixed
number of iambic feet. Kazartsev divides
Dutch Renaissance iambic poetry in two
phases: a first phase in which deviations from
the template are more common and the verse is
freer, and a second phase, in which the
sequence of iambic feet became more regular
due to theorization by poets (Kazartsev 2008).
However, a geographical distinction has to
be made. In fact, there is a linguistic difference
between the poets of the south of the Low
Countries and the ones of the north, a
difference that needs to be considered: the
southern poets were mostly bilingual, speaking