This chapter situates the sixteenth-century drive to define ’Englishness’ through literature within a broader European context, charting the widespread efforts to reify ’national character’ through the production of standardised grammars for vernaculars and assertions of their peculiar grace. After surveying early modern thought on the relationship between language, nation and empire, the chapter discusses the particular strategy adopted by English writers (centrally Puttenham and Sidney) to establish the very peripheral barbarousness of the English tongue as a proof of its distinction, before pointing at the close towards the emerging role of empire in underpinning notions of Englishness.