"With his penne and langage laureate": the symbolic significance of the laurel crown

In 1341 Francesco Petrarca was crowned with laurel – a recognition of poetic genius to which he often alludes with delight. He was by no means the first post-classical poet laureate: the honour had gone to Albertino Mussato in 1315. But Petrarca consciously sought this recognition in the attempt to imitate a classical past: he was the poet who would transcend the limits of vernacular and write in the international Latin. Almost a century later, English poets attributed this symbol to their “father” Geoffrey Chaucer, canonizing the vernacular as a literary medium. If Petrarch had proposed himself as proto-humanist, the early fifteenth-century English poets affirmed their faith in a model of intellectual evolving from the medieval clerk within a newly established canon. The laureateship ceremony, whether actually performed or simply alluded to, maintains its iconographic value and signals for the modern reader the identification of the English “literary” vernacular with the English nation.