The Growth of a Vernacular High Culture

With their consolidation of territory, wealth, and power in the last half of the twelfth century, kings, barons, princes, and their wives and daughters supported new kinds of literature and music. For the first time on the continent, though long true in England, poems and songs were written in the vernacular, the spoken language, rather than in Latin. Meant to be read or sung aloud, sometimes with accompanying musical instruments, they celebrated nobles’ lives and provided a common experience for aristocrats at court. Patrons and patronesses in the cities of Italy and in the more isolated courts of northern Europe spent the profits from their estates and commerce on the arts. Their support helped develop and enrich the spoken language while it heightened their prestige as aristocrats.