Two distinct cultural impulses govern the vernacularization of literary reading and taste in twelfth-century England: one, familiar from the ‘mettre en romanz’ claims of so many romances, that seems to draw outwards or downwards from Latin towards the vernacular; and another that understands translation into romanz as a movement upwards towards refinement from the demotic, the local and the unpolished. To account for both impulses is to balance the socio linguistic and literary dynamics of post-Conquest English life against the broader cultural phenomena of the twelfth-century renaissance. In this environment, romanz is both ennobled and ennobling, an instance of the ‘illustrious, cardinal, royal and courtly vernacular’ by which all the ‘municipal vernaculars … are measured … and compared’ that Dante dreamed of in the De vulgari eloquentia.

Dante's account has two fundamental virtues as a descriptive model for twelfth-century insular literary and sociolinguistic life. First is its awareness of the dynamic co-existence of multiple vernaculars. Unlike the two-term, Latin and vernacular ‘mettre en romanz’ model, post-Conquest England is diglossic, a condition in which Latin operates in a hierarchical relationship with a number of vernaculars. As Tim William Machan has argued, the ‘force of diglossia lies not simply in the coexistence of several languages … but in the dynamics between these languages and the [distinct] social’ and aesthetic ‘tasks’ they are seen as capable of performing. In Dante's terms, the ‘illustrious vernacular’ is defined, not only by its interaction with Latin and a ‘municipal vernacular’, but also by its operation within a socially, aesthetically elevated environment.