938 ronnie ferguson
central italy. nor did it ever consciously affirm a vernacular language
policy for herself. in other words, Venice did not punch its weight linguis-
tically in the italian Renaissance, and was unpreoccupied by this. From
shortly after 1300, the Venetian state was, in fact, probably the most recep-
tive in italy to Florentine/tuscan cultural and linguistic influence, mainly
but not exclusively in literature, and particularly in verse.25 So much
so that by the late 15th and early 16th centuries uncontaminated high-
register texts in Venetian were in rapid contraction or in greater or lesser
symbiosis with tuscan. the latter phenomenon is most strikingly manifest
in the hybrid prose of Marin Sanudo. When, therefore, Venice opted de
facto for the vernacular as its main written medium in the early Cinque-
cento, it adopted, although never legally, the fundamentally Florentine
vernacular that was becoming italy’s prestige written lingua franca and
which was increasingly disseminated by the printing industry of which
Venice was the european hub.26 this form of the vernacular was favored
by an intellectual elite attracted to its prestige and familiarity, to its rela-
tive closeness to Latin and, doubtless, to its rather intermediate linguistic
character within the myriad Romance varieties of the peninsula. Venetian
had come close to being Venice’s exclusive language of state. Had Venice
prevailed against the european powers of the League of Cambrai between
1509 and 1515,27 it is not impossible that italy might have had a codified
language based on contemporary Venetian chancery norms rather than
on old Florentine literary usage.28
the italian written vernacular was grammatically codified early in the
16th century by giovan Francesco Fortunio in his Regole grammaticali
della volgar lingua (1516) and, most influentially, by the Venetian patrician,
cardinal, and man of letters Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua
(1525). Based essentially on 14th-century tuscan and conceived originally
for use in poetry and literary prose, Bembo’s conservative norm was lexi-
cally elaborated and extended in 1612 by the accademia della Crusca in
its Vocabolario, the first of europe’s great national vernacular dictionar-
ies, and still forms the basis of the modern italian written standard. One
of its most wide-reaching effects was, virtually overnight, to relegate
25 antonio Medin, “La coltura toscana nel Veneto durante il Medioevo,” Atti del Reale
Istituto Veneto 82 (1922–23), 83–154.
26 Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular
Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge, 1994).
27 Felix gilbert, “Venice in the Crisis of the League of Cambrai,” in John Hale, ed., Ren-
aissance Venice (London, 1973), pp. 274–92.
28 giacomo Devoto, Il linguaggio d’Italia (Milan, 1984), pp. 271–72.