'The Premature Renaissance: the Emergence of the Mother Tongue in 14th-century Florence and London'

The culture of the Middle Ages has never been afforded the same respect as  the gothic masterpieces of Dante and Giotto, and the achievements of the  sixteenth century renaissance. However three vernacular works of genius inspired by The Divine Comedy: Petrarch's Canzoni, Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, showed how the mother tongue could reveal the lives and aspirations of those outside the narrow, Latin educated worlds of church and university. These bold narrative journeys embodied a new type of literature that eschewed moral allegory and religious dogma and challenged the stranglehold that Latin had over intellectual life; the church's teaching on sin,  redemption and the afterlife; explored the mysteries of the human personality;  the forces of nature; and gave a new prominence to the voices and perspectives of women. The radical nature of these vernacular epics was such that there was an inevitable retreat and a reassertion of the Latin patriarchy that ensured that this was a renaissance that did not last beyond the lifetimes of these three writers.