Cantare, canting? The Italian brand between learning and deception in Early Modern England

Research in the linguistic landscape of Early Modern England has recently come to highlight its strikingly multilingual nature (Gallagher 2019). As Wyatt shows, the teaching of Italian was perceived as partaking of a “Circean element”, a capacity for melting away one’s apparently fixed identity and taking on a new one (Wyatt 2005, 170). Such a quality came into direct contact with purists’ concerns for the deceitful and dangerous character of contemporary linguistic and cultural practices, from lexical borrowing to the fictional nature of the theatre. Wyatt’s work situates Italian language teaching on a literary continuum which stretches from Renaissance learned intertextuality to the perceived dangers of the English theatre, but one unexplored site for dangerous linguistic encounters which sits at the inferior edge of the continuum and which has recently attracted renewed attention precisely as a multilingual object (Eynard 2022) is the Early Modern canting glossary. Petty criminals’ canting language emerged in the latter half of 16 th century England as a commercial commodity, exposed in pamphlets and glossaries which purported to explain it to the reading public so as to protect the safety of English citizens (Blank 1996; Gotti 1999; Noyes 1941). Such pamphlets construct a linguistically hybrid sociolect out of a variety of lexical sources, most prominently Latin, but also French and other romance languages; as Eynard has recently shown, canting could be constructed as a carnivalesque reversal of notions of contemporary learning – crucially, engaging in an ambiguous relationship with purist perceptions of foreign language learning, at once reinforcing and subverting them (Eynard 2022). This paper aims to analyse the ways in which the Italian Early Modern brand negotiated conflicting associations between ideas of Renaissance learning and the troubling implications of a gallimaufry of languages, especially as reflected in the romance roots of canting. The research will focus on the intertextual and metalinguistic commentary included in canting glossaries, considering its relationship with Italian language teaching and learning in the framework of studies on Early Modern English attitudes to language (Blank 1996; Tudeau-Clayton 2020).