its results are obvious and spectacular. The sudden emergence of English as a great literary language at the end of the fourteenth century in the writings of Chaucer, Langland, and Wycliffe was accompanied by the increasing use of English in letters written by ordinary people. Italian had emerged out of obscurity into brilliance around 1300 propelled forward by Dante who was followed by Boccaccio in a society in which it was already the normal vehicle of commercial correspondence. The reformation in Bohemia, inspired by Hus in the early fifteenth century, owed its great success in part to the attractiveness of translations of the Bible, hymns, and religious treatises in Czech which could be understood by ordinary people. The development of the vernaculars was promoted by religious reformers, by merchants, and by poets, all of whom escaped with relief from the dominance of Latin. The Renaissance Latin which was evolved by Petrarch and the later Italian humanists of the fifteenth century was in effect a new language, no doubt an unfortunate scholarly diversion from the greater subtlety offered by the vernacular tongue but still a language capable of a new kind of literary charm.

As we have seen in preceding chapters, the civilization of the fifteenth century contained a variety of local cultures vying for influence in different languages and of social forms ranging from the largely rural society of the English gentry to the highly developed city capitalism of Venice and Genoa. As we have also seen, it involved a complex interpenetration of the world of the court, the still-active chivalry and the tournament, the cathedral chapter and the monastery with the life of the city, the merchant and the industrial proletariat. The English parliament which emerged in the fourteenth century, containing representatives of the nobility, the prelates, the gentry, and the burgesses, was a microcosm of the late medieval world. Nevertheless, if we look for the most brilliant achievements of that world, it is in the cities in the two areas in which they were most highly developed--northern Italy and north-west Europe--that we shall find them.

The richest society of late medieval Europe was probably to be found in the cities scattered over the land to the north-west

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