What was (and is) the Point of Macaronics? Historical and Typological Considerations

A historically significant form of linguistic hybridization was the so-called ‘macaronic’ poetry from the Italian Renaissance. Its best-known practitioner was a sixteenth-century Benedictine monk, Teofilo Folengo. Starting from that historical context, this article seeks to better describe what was (and remains) typical of macaronic writing, namely the intentional creation of a linguistic hybrid with comic effect. In macaronic multilingualism, languages are blended, fused together, not juxtaposed, as happens in other manifestations of multilingualism in literature. A more difficult question relates to the need (or not) for Latin to be part of the equation. In the absence of bilingual blending, the mere presence of Latin is certainly not enough, but what about clearly hybrid texts that only involve modern languages and do not contain any Latin?