AUREATE DICTION

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AUREATE DICTION, also aureate language, aureation. An ornate style fashionable among such 15c poets as John Lydgate in England and William Dunbar in Scotland, whose aim was to gild or ‘illumine’ the vernacular with classicisms, such as superne and eterne in ‘Hale, Sterne Superne! Hale, in eterne, In Godis Sicht to schyne!’ (Dunbar, Ballad of Our Lady). Later critics have generally regarded the results as florid and overdone. See DICTION, INKHORN TERM.