Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 147, a rude and rusty language.

In this episode, we're going to look at the state of English in the early 1500s, as the

middle English period gradually gave way to early modern English. It was a time of transition

in England and throughout most of Europe. This was the period that modern historians call

the Renaissance. It was a cultural movement that produced new approaches to art, architecture,

philosophy, religion, and education. It provided the transition from the middle ages to the

modern era, but it did so by looking backward to the ancient Greeks and Romans. As English

scholars embraced the old literature and applied it to the world in which they lived, they

needed a language that could communicate all of those ideas and concepts. The problem

is that many scholars in England didn't feel that English was up to the task. They thought

that English was too rustic and too unsophisticated, with a vocabulary that was too limited. One

prominent writer of the period referred to English as rude and rusty. So rather than use

existing English words, those scholars chose instead to use the original terms of the Greeks

and Romans. Thousands of those words started to pour into English, and in the process the

English language was transformed from a rude and rusty language at the beginning of the

century to the language of William Shakespeare at the end of the century. So this time, we'll

look at the Renaissance and the transformation of English in the early 1500s. But before we

begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes and transcripts at patreon.com

slash history of English. Now this time, I want to move our story forward from the 1400s

into the 1500s. Over the past couple of episodes, we've seen that this was a period when the

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