The meaning of “Literature”

Michael Hattaway writes, in an introduction to Early Modern English literature (Blackwell, 2005), “A primary difference between Renaissance and modern concepts of writing involves meanings for ‘literature’ and for ‘fiction.’ As surviving library catalogues reveal, contemporaries of Donne and Shakespeare did not recognize the groupings that determine the display of books in modern bookshops and which split the curriculum in schools and universities between ‘creative’ writing and everything else. In the Renaissance, the modern category of ‘literature’ was yet to develop. The word designated not a body of fictions characterized by ‘literariness,’ but a faculty or skill, a person’s acquaintance with learning. In 1598 the expatriate Italian compiler of dictionaries John Florio glossed the word letteratura as ‘learning, knowledge in letters, lore, cunning’ . . . Only from the eighteenth century was the word applied to select and generally imaginative texts, or to polite learning.”