Renaissance Syntax and Subjectivity

John Leeds examines the choice made by Renaissance chroniclers between Latin and the vernacular, in light of some central concerns of current literary theory. He extends the boundaries of existing critical literature on early modern "subjectivity" to include the grammatical subject, showing how its disposition, in the radically dissimilar syntactic systems of Latin and Scots, conditions the way in which "the subject" (i.e., the human individual) is conceived in the writing of history.