Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer (The New Middle Ages)

T H E N E W M I DDL E AG E S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses.This peerreviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio’s Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone Presence and Presentation:Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition edited by Sherry J. Mou The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant J. Mews Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W. Rosemann For Her Good Estate:The Life of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller Listening to Heloise:The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse by Robert S. Sturges Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian Japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho Engaging Words:The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Amtower Robes and Honor:The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon

Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter:The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr. Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan

Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder

Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons

Necessary Conjunctions:The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw

Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff

Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel

Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz

Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams,Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy

Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen

Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney

Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel

The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson Medievalism and Orientalism:Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska

Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt Logic,Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille:Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft On the Purification of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder Writers of the Reign of Henry II:Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

Lonesome Words:The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M.G. McGeachy

England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th-15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández

Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley

The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen

The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler Medieval Fabrications: Dress,Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?:The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn

Claustrophilia:The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition,Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor by Louise M. Haywood The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner Battlefronts Real and Imagined:War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, foreword by Giles Tremlett Chaucerian Aesthetics by Peggy A. Knapp Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama by Theodore K. Lerud Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe Morrison Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey

The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77–1445) by Albrecht Classen Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition by Geoffrey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer by Mary Catherine Davidson The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings (forthcoming) translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler Heloise and the Paraclete (forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler

Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer

Mary Catherine Davidson

MEDIEVALISM, MULTILINGUALISM, AND CHAUCER

Copyright © Mary Catherine Davidson, 2010. All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60297–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davidson, Mary Catherine. Medievalism, multilingualism, and Chaucer / Mary Catherine Davidson. p. cm.—(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–60297–7 (alk. paper) 1. English language—Middle English, 1100–1500—Foreign elements. 2. Multilingualism—Great Britain—History—To 1500. 3. English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. 4. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Language. I. Title. PE664.A3D38 2009 420⬘.42⬘0902—dc22

2009016866

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Carol Percy

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: Monolingualism and Middle English

1

Part I Traditions of Contact and Conf lict in the History of English 1. Medievalism and Monolingualism

17

2. Hengist’s Tongue: A Medieval History of English

45

Part II “And in Latyn . . . a wordes fewe”: Contact and Medieval Conformity 3. Multilingual Writing and William Langland

79

4. Chaucer’s “Diversite”

109

Afterword: Postcolonialism and Chaucer’s English

133

Notes

139

Bibliography

185

Index

207

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

his book owes its beginnings to the guidance of Professor A.G. Rigg and Professor Carol Percy. I owe a debt to a great many more mentors and friends whose kindness I enjoyed during the development of this study in Lawrence, Kansas. However, I would especially like to thank Kami Day, Michele Eodice, Paul Lim, David Bergeron, Sarah Sawyer, Caroline Jewers, Beverly Boyd, Dorice and Bob Elliott, Mary Klayder, Karla Knutson, Jennifer Floray-Balke, C.J. Gordon, Heather Bastian, and John Wiehl. During revisions, Thea Summerfield generously offered most welcome advice from abroad. In bringing this project to completion in Toronto, Igor Djordjevic, Jonathan Herold, Amanda Spencer, and Carol Percy were more helpful than they would take credit for. To Mary McGuire above all, I express my thanks for her infectious humor, immeasurable kindness, and tireless support. Research for chapter two was generously supported by a Faculty Council Grant and Junior Faculty Grant from Glendon College, York University. I would also like to thank Glendon College for kindly granting me a half-course release to complete revisions for this book.

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION: MONOLINGUALISM AND MIDDLE ENGLISH

I

t seems appropriate that a study of multilingualism in Chaucer’s England would adopt or, at the very least, adapt approaches and terminologies offered by the relevant fields of linguistics. In an often un-cited body of early research on medieval multilingualism, medievalists and language historians have already enlisted approaches from historical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis in studies that had first brought to light the complex yet commonplace nature of contact between native and acquired languages in late medieval England. This book owes its origin and development to that body of descriptivist research that has carefully taken into account the numerous instances of the apparent ease with which medieval multilingual writers variously switched both within and across sentences between English, Latin, French, and Welsh. The written witnesses to contact between two or more of these languages are wide and ref lect audiences for texts as diverse as carols, plays, lyrics, poems, chronicles, hymns, legal writing, business records, and, as many are most likely to note first, “macaronic” sermons. But less typical of those descriptive linguistic approaches that had first distinguished the nature of contact across these types of texts, this book also engages cultural perspectives in order to interrogate the monolingual bias embedded in philological or literary traditions that have accounted for these numerous instances of multilingual writing as illiterate at worst or hybrid at best. This study questions how disciplinary habits have selfinterestedly constructed Middle English as itself somehow isolated from or uniquely resistant to that multilingualism that the literate contact between so many medieval tongues survives as compelling witness. In what guises have modern monolingual investments in Chaucer’s English or, more generally, Middle English made it difficult to theorize English in submission to specifically these multilingual practices? If “the history of English has too often and for too long been written as the history of the literary language as evidenced by monolingual sources,” what modern

2

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

assumptions about the status of present day English challenge our consideration of such multilingual phenomena as defining the daily experiences of our putative Anglophone ancestors?1 It is this typically monolingual, often nationalist, and sometimes collective sense of Anglophone belonging across both time and space that this study argues has often characterized those scholarly practices that have valorized and singularized the status of late medieval English. This observation is not entirely new among medievalists. More recently, Sarah Stanbury has argued that what she describes as vernacular nostalgia continues to stir literary historians to imagine English itself as a language of political resistance in fourteenth-century England.2 Noting that despite the fact scholars have already historicized medieval dissent and expressed reservations about the social cures of vernacularity, Stanbury concludes this nostalgia underlies metaphors that belie these historicizing approaches such that at times Chaucer resembles something like a national-language “pioneer” and William Langland a kind of “linguistic Robin Hood.”3 Given shared Anglophone identity among many in the field, how irresistible is it for even the most circumspect of critics to imagine that an earlier English that they might consider theirs could even in its modest medieval beginnings prove to quash Norman oppression and, in a more protracted battle precociously launched by audacious Lollards, eventually defeat the social and spiritual abuses characterizing clerical Latinitas? For the appeal of such a triumphalist narrative in which today’s Anglophones feature as the most obvious victors, Stanbury offers what I will argue is only a partial explanation when she suggests some scholars have transposed their own nostalgia for nineteen-sixties political resistance into the sociolinguistic struggles of Middle English writers. However tentative Stanbury’s explanations are for how critics imagine earlier Englishes, her critique suggests at least that the modern construction of especially late fourteenth-century English as a voice of political dissent might emerge even among those most likely to disavow such linguistic self-fixation. In part a response to Stanbury’s recent observations, this study examines scholarly constructions of Middle English as a language of community by focusing on modern nationalist and colonialist discourses that have concealed Anglophone privilege and expansion often at the expense of multilingualism itself. To that end, the chapters of this book constitute an attempt to interrogate traditional constructions of Middle English that ref lect those modern cultural desires and monolingual privileges constituting the overlapping disciplines devoted to its study. If vernacular nostalgia characterizes simply one inf lection of modern political desires, current nationalist constructions of English as a mother tongue—and the

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

3

fact it is most frequently an only tongue for native Anglophones—invites even greater linguistic self-awareness of how scholars have disciplined Middle English.4 In moves not unrelated to the linguistically invested and culturally unref lective ways in which scholars have been able to imagine Middle English as a point of origin for English as a politically organizing voice, current Anglophone identities similarly fashion an English language legacy of fairness and free speech, which as it is idealized in recent centuries ensures national cohesion, and, with no irony intended, has unilaterally enforced democracy around the globe.5 With such assured confidence in the power of English to offer equality and promise prosperity, modern constructions of medieval English have been able to inform similarly triumphalist and nationalist narratives of the history of the language. What Anthony Esposito calls our “monolingual imaginary” suggests that a national language impulse compels scholars to minimize the prevalence of language contact in the Middle Ages in order to construct medieval vernaculars as precursors embodying the modern nation itself.6 In that monolingual imaginary, histories of English treat the status of the language as an isolated construct, neither unshaken in its self-identity nor derailed from its destiny by contact with Latin, Norse, and, most pointedly from modern perspectives, French. After imagining late medieval English as finally—but inevitably—casting off its French shackles, standard textbooks have been able to conceptualize early modern English as predictably laying the groundwork for its current status around the globe. And, often in disregard of this international status as colonial legacy or the current face of globalization, biographies of English, which anthropomorphize and, thereby, totalize the language within narratives of inevitable progress across time and space, have approached the medieval period as its infancy and gone on to describe early modern English as years of teen-like anxious self-consciousness followed by its blossoming into confident adulthood as modern English.7 This study reads against this image of the language singularly growing into maturity as the only national language of more than one country and inevitably also an acquired language seemingly everywhere else around the globe; it argues that the more likely source of English language insecurity throughout most of its history was the comparatively poor international status of English in comparison to such prestigious vernaculars as French until well after the close of the Middle Ages. Even after the eighteenth century, discourses of gender would attest to the primacy of English only as a ref lection of what distinguished it from French, that is, surprisingly perhaps, a construction of the superiority of English as a “manly” language. To these discourses in modern English, this book must also attend in order to understand not only the nationalist but also

4

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

the masculinist discourses that, by first effeminizing multilingualism, have subsequently contributed to supporting Anglophone monolingual superiority so successfully. In an indication of that privilege, the most obvious manifestation of linguistic superiority exists among those monolingualist or English-only movements in the United States that dedicate themselves to passing state-by-state legislation to protect English from threats seemingly posed by non-English languages.8 Yet, while scholarship on the status of English has questioned whether the language is sufficiently endangered to require the legal protection such organizations as US English believes necessary, the fields contributing to English language studies, however unwittingly, have nevertheless reproduced similarly monolingualist articulations of Anglophone identity. In more than just recent scholarly attention paid to the political and cultural popularity of the English-only movement, assumptions grounded in monolingual privilege have characterized and in often silent ways continue to constitute English language and literature studies. Trapped within what Walter D. Mignolo terms “monotopic hermeneutics of modernity and nationalism,” the linguistic identities on which the discipline was founded can still bind studies of English to its own foundationalist discourses.9 It is this kind of lack of self-consciousness, which Tony Crowley argues attends the study of the history of English itself, “despite the fact that it is just this [self-consciousness] that is necessary for the field to give an adequate account of its object.”10 Setting out to challenge the critical and cultural failures that “monolingualism exacerbates,” Doris Sommer has invited scholars and educators to look at multilingualism in the United States most specifically through what she calls “quotidian meta-linguistics” offered by the seemingly transitory but widely common practice of codeswitching—changing languages within and across interactions—among multilinguals.11 More recently but in the same line of questioning, cultural linguist Alistair Pennycook presses for just such a reformulation in studies of identity and language choice in the inaugural issue of Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal.12 In a linguistic application of Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, Pennycook challenges “the centrality of competence [. . .] over performance” in the field of linguistics and argues for the study of the performativity of language in order to “develop an anti-foundationalist view as an emergent property of social interaction and not a prior system tied to [. . .] nation.”13 Since the idealized competence of monolinguals typically effaces an appreciation of the multiplied gestures of performance among multilinguals, disciplines and institutions centered on a single language often consider such day-to-day phenomena as switching between languages within and across sentences ephemeral and even aberrant.

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

5

Such monolingualist discourses have rendered the conversational contact between English and other languages culturally illegitimate and, within discourses of Anglophone nationalism, simply unpatriotic. Most commonly restricted to academic and literary venues, such multilingual authors as Gloria Anzaldúa have attempted to counter such normative monolingualism: Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate.14

In her challenge to subjectivity as normatively monolingual, Anzaldúa had complicated language and identity in border-crossing and such nonnational varieties of speech as Tex-Mex or Chicano Spanish, which she herself viewed as already happily heterogeneous and variously emblematic of her affiliations to region and family. By engaging these language varieties in poetry and prose throughout her Borderlands/La Frontera, literary acts of language contact she had termed “linguistic terrorism” aim at normalizing multilingualism and contest the narrow monologic of “speaking American.”15 Construed most broadly, living and writing “on the border” in Anzaldúa’s terms, then, engages communicative strategies not symptomatic of fractured identity but characteristic of the daily experience of anyone who negotiates several social settings daily by switching languages for situation, mixing tongues within a single conversation, or speaking a new language that is itself an integration of several others. Yet as common as these multilingual practices are in a nation built upon immigration, monolingualist dispositions have already erased multiple language experiences from the national memory of American history, for it seems that “forgetting language difference [. . .] is still the urgent component of [. . .] anglophone America’s understanding of itself.”16 Thus, to be able to construct a historical narrative of the monolingual nation, American English must be amnesic of its multilingualism both past and present.17 So functions in similar attitudes and practices the construction of the history of English. In the consideration of its medieval origins, the discipline of the history of the English language—already foreclosing on second language experience in the very practice of the discipline—must often be reminded that the medieval categories of French and English do not compete and that “for medieval Englishmen [. . .], French was

6

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

not someone else’s language.”18 Further yet in the absence of a formulation of one language and one identity in late medieval England, written evidence for mixing Latin, French, and English within and across sentences suggests the kind of modern practices that Anzaldúa defended were not themselves targets of social approbation or ethnic profiling. This non-stigmatized “mode of [medieval] discourse,” which arose from daily contact between languages in late medieval England, was often syntactically if not socially similar to the acts of “linguistic terrorism” that Anzaldúa had argued characterized both her daily life and her multilingual writing.19 Indeed, the medieval language contact this book considers reveals that the institutional moorings of multilingualism that often authorized switching between languages was most evidently a literate practice in both speech and writing. In cultural terms, such mixed-language discourse was unlike the mestiza identities some modern multilingual writers attempt to protect from linguistic nationalism and Anglophone monolingual superiority. This is an obvious contrast, perhaps, but it bears restating that medieval multilingualism was itself the product of nonnative language acquisition most frequently also linked to highly exclusive literate and social privilege. The study of multilingualism in this book attends to such instances of brief or prolonged language contact as obvious but traditionally overlooked features of medieval language identity. Those points in the written record where languages switch and even appear to mix—often so indiscriminately as to suggest illiteracy to modern readers—witness as much about the interrelated status of medieval languages as the multilingual proficiency and power second language acquisition guaranteed their speakers, writers, and readers. Given the common place of multilingual power in a society not organized by monolingual normativity, however, attitudes toward language choice and code-switching do not survive in the record as egregious behaviors of national nonconformity but as the practical matters of a multilingual society. Therefore, while contact between languages constitute points of focus in this study as de facto instances of identity formation and constructions—often idealized and imagined rather than directly observed—of linguistic community, it is not at all curious that we should find anxiety toward or confusion about such switching between languages typically absent.20 At the same time, however, in assessing surviving sociolinguistic evidence, observations and comments on exceptional skills and choices can reveal medieval attitudes toward what constituted unusual linguistic ability in the light of what more commonly characterized behavior in that multilingual culture. One instance especially in Jocelin Brakelond’s chronicle, Cronica Jocelini de Brakelonda (c. 1202), illustrates how medieval

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

7

attitudes toward multilingualism also shaped contemporary interpretations of the language skills of an individual on the basis of his sensitivity to changing audiences and expectations. In his account of Samson, abbot of the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds (1182–1211), Jocelin, monk at the same monastery, comments at length on the trilingualism of Samson by comparatively describing his proficiency in each language: Homo erat eloquens, Gallice et Latine, magis rationi dicendorum quam ornatui verborum innitens. Scripturam Anglice scriptam legere nouit elegantissime, et Anglice sermonicare solebat populo, set secundum linguam Norfolchie, ubi natus et nutritus erat [. . .]. [He was eloquent both in French and Latin, having regard rather to the sense of what he had to say than to ornaments of speech. He read English perfectly, and used to preach in English to the people, but in the speech of Norfolk, where he was born and bred (. . .).]21

Most likely directly observing this multilingual phenomenon, Jocelin carefully qualifies the nature of the abbot’s multilingual proficiency (eloquens) by commenting on its atypical range of applications: his oral proficiency in French and Latin is functional rather than merely ornamental. Balanced across languages, Samson’s advanced facility in French and Latin parallels his ability to read English with superlative proficiency (elegantissime). Whereas Jocelin qualifies Samson’s oral skills in French and Latin as unusual, he comments on Samson’s choice of a vernacular dialect as habitual when preaching in English as a form of public communication and popular address.22 Situated within the shifting and interdependent roles of medieval languages, multiple language users like Samson negotiated what linguists term a diglossic culture. With respect to language choice and access, this concept of diglossia would account for the medieval compartmentalization of languages to specific social roles but it does not itself predict widespread balanced bilingualism or that multilingualism of which Samson seems so exceptionally to possess and carefully employ as to merit mention.23 In contrast to what linguists term the transitional bilingualism found among modern immigrant communities who lose their first language after several generations in their adopted country, bilingualism or multilingual proficiencies within a diglossic society are motivated and conditioned by the cultural and institutional forces that define their interrelated status. For late medieval England, the concept of diglossia explains at least the overall social if not always actual restriction of Latin, French, and English to particular roles in texts, professions, classes and even speech situations.24 As metalinguistic observations on Samson’s

8

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

proficiencies suggest, his status as abbot predicts his access to Latin and French; his unique ability to speak these acquired languages f luently, however, points to the extent to which he has developed their application beyond affected ornamentation in his speech and, in the case of English, reading facility. The nature of acquired language proficiency in Latin and French implicitly suggested here as limited to writing facility among medieval second and third language learners contrasts Samson’s advanced skills in speaking both Latin and French in practical rather than ornate terms. In fact, Jocelin’s praise is empty if Latin and French were languages always spoken with Samson’s kind of ease and seemingly sober practicality. Based on Jocelin’s assessment, then, it seems clear that these second languages were not so thoroughly mastered among peers nor so wisely selected for all addressees, for, likely out of pastoral concern in this case, Samson chooses English for his sermons rather than Latin or French in order to preach to the broadest audience with whom he shares first language spoken proficiency. Whether observed linguistic behavior or an idealization of the language skills of a subject worthy of chronicling, this representation of Samson is nevertheless formulated within prevailing language norms and attitudes in diglossic culture. As Jocelin’s observations and comments on this notable instance of trilingualism suggests, the audiences for whom medieval speakers and writers chose languages can tell us much about the likely purpose of simply selecting one language within a single speech situation. However, not only used exclusively to convey information or complete simple social transactions, language choice could also carry symbolic weight based on the comparative language skills of the speaker and his audience. Therefore, even at the expense of mutual intelligibility, not every language choice aims at accommodating their audiences by converging with their language skills in the fashion Abbot Samson exemplifies among his congregation at Bury St. Edmunds. In many cases as later chapters in this book will demonstrate, a change of language did not necessarily offer proof of a change of audience just as Samson had accommodated Anglophone monolinguals by selecting English; rather, language choice or even the mixing of languages could also constitute evidence of the social distance a medieval speaker could place between himself and his addressees. Despite our lack of access to recorded speech from the period, numerous fictional representations of multilingual interactions provide compelling evidence of the identity and attitudes language choices and switches articulated in late medieval communication. Although this study will turn to consider many such instances in the final chapters of this book, for the moment Chaucer’s Pardoner can provide an example for my purpose here of introducing

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

9

how medieval speakers could have imposed linguistic distance between themselves and their addressees. In a metalinguistic commentary similar to Jocelin’s observations on Abbot Samson’s linguistic awareness of his audience, the Pardoner ref lects on and clearly boasts about how his language-mixing strategies shape the responses of his listeners. More specifically, switching to a language that diverges from his very likely monolingual audience establishes why Chaucer’s Pardoner consciously moves from English to Latin and back to English again in a move that he terms “saffroning”: And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe, To saffron with my predicacioun, And for to stire hem to devocioun. (VI 344–6)25

As constrained as language choice would have been for the majority of speakers in the diglossia of late medieval England, it is due to these limits that Chaucer’s Pardoner can provide us however indirectly here with a glimpse into an awareness of how code-switching would have characterized the power of bilingual speakers. By either converging with an audience to mark solidarity or diverging from their language skills to ref lect one’s authority over them, such choices within that medieval multilingual culture would express identity without also articulating social subversion or political resistance.26 In the Pardoner’s case, at least, switching between Latin and English can engage audiences at the same time his “wordes fewe” dissociate them from that bilingual privilege that would have never invited his listeners to challenge it. By contrast seemingly avoiding the “saffroning” of the Pardoner’s sort constitutes unqualified praise for Abbot Samson for he speaks three languages with sensitivity to both subject and audience, employing languages based not on affectation (ornatui verborum) but practicality (rationi dicendorum). My outline here of attitudes toward language choices implicit in the linguistic representation of Abbot Samson and Chaucer’s Pardoner introduces the kind of descriptive account of language choice and codeswitching that this study adapts from sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. While extensive scholarly literature exists on modern codeswitching, the analysis of contact phenomena in the Middle English period has been traditionally restricted to studies of typically French borrowing, that is, those instances in which French words subsequently became part of the English lexicon in what was very likely initially a code-switch. We will see in the first chapter that it is just this distinction between switching and borrowing in which traditions centered on

10

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Chaucer’s French lexis have been unwittingly invested. In aid of our distinguishing code-switching from borrowing if not in explicitly addressing that long debate on Chaucer’s loan words, a handful of medievalists have already accounted for the syntactic features of such instances of languages in contact; however, fewer yet have considered the numerous social or discourse functions of switching languages within or across sentences that the written record so widely witnesses. Following the path less traveled in pursuit of interrogating the monolingual dimensions of vernacular nostalgia further, this study focuses on determining what role code-switching had not in the genesis of borrowing but in the negotiation specifically of language attitudes and identities in late medieval England. Such an objective can only be achieved by establishing what assumptions about the status of English distinguish its medieval contact from modern contact with non-English languages. This study transverses periods of English arguably already constructed by those political and cultural events borrowing had subsequently characterized such as the inf lux of French loans after the Norman Conquest and Latin borrowings during the Renaissance in England; however, the synchronic approach in this book most closely examines evidence for medieval and modern Anglophone attitudes toward non-English languages especially to which the retention of borrowed words in each period only stands witness after the fact. In pairing attitude with contemporary representations of multilingual phenomena, my approach to language contact does not aim to explore anew the mechanisms of borrowing, although chapter one will treat modern discourses that attempt to account for the history of loan words in nationalist and colonialist terms. Instead, my study of code-switching as a means of articulating medieval identity constitutes a focus on performance rather than on a syntactic approach more characteristic of theorizing competence or investigating language acquisition. In chapters two, three, and four especially, my study of aims and attitudes associated with switching languages reveals decidedly more about those mundane features of multilingualism that made medieval Anglophone experience distinct from modern English language identity than studies of Latinity or medieval vernacular competence alone might offer. This focus on code-switching and medieval attitudes toward such contact phenomena does not merely sidestep traditional approaches that often exclusively fix their gaze on vernacular evidence or the subsequent effect of contact verified only diachronically through most obviously such phenomena as borrowing. Even more synchronic in its focus on two obviously distinct periods of English, this approach contributes to ongoing interrogations of those modern constructions of watersheds in the late medieval period that have often served to pinpoint the birth of a modern

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

11

feature of English such as linguistic nationalism or monolingual confidence. A case in point for questioning these traditions has been the scholarly narrative offered for the rise of the standardization of English at the close of the Middle Ages. Until very recently, the beginnings of vernacular standardization in that period centered on observations of the increase of English language choice over Latin or French within official government communication attributed to the reign of King Henry V (1413–1422). In his now classic discussion, John Fisher had argued that that “sudden burst of production . . . [was] a deliberate policy intended to engage the support of Parliament and the English citizenry for a questionable usurpation of the throne.”27 Further enactments of this policy under Henry V brought English into domains previously restricted to Latin and French: in 1414, English petitions could be recorded in the statutes in English rather than Latin; in 1416, Henry V addresses the first proclamations in English since Henry III in 1258; in 1422, he sends his first missive not in French but English in which he subsequently communicates in nearly all his domestic correspondence. 28 In effect, in his linguistic conjoining of Chaucer as poet to Henry V as language policymaker, Fisher had contended that the king provided official umbrage for English as a formal written language under which vernacular literature found its apparently deserved shade. For some literary and language historians, however, Fisher’s exclusive focus on monolingual English texts produces that outcome that these language policies had proposed but not yet achieved. Nicholas Watson has asserted that Fisher simply retold the “official version” of Lancastrian language planning, and, as Laura Wright has contended, Fisher overlooked the far greater quantity of multilingual record keeping in London that suggests writing in a single language did not characterize other far more well-attested practices.29 Moreover, if political and linguistic selfconsciousness impelled Henry V’s preference for English, that status of English, which the king apparently recruited to support cross-Channel royal interests, was neither the fetishized national language of a people nor an effigy for the nation itself. It was literally “the King’s English,” as Krishan Kumar has argued, and “the language in and by which an individual showed his attachment to the monarch as a personal ruler.”30 Even had Henry V strategically sent missives in English as an expression of vernacular solidarity, it is remarkable, W.M. Ormrod has argued, that “the king himself seems never to have developed a strategy for the broader, nationwide dissemination of documents couched in his own mother tongue.”31 In the simplest terms, these seemingly sweeping royal gestures did little to promote the linguistic self-sufficiency of English entirely apart from

12

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Latin or French. Even in late fourteenth-century England with diglossia arguably on the wane, first language proficiency in English promised social aff luence only in additive rather than subtractive bilingualism. That is, unlike the monolingualist status of modern English that often demands first language loss as the cost of belonging to Anglophone community, second language acquisition empowered medieval Anglophones. In that period attributed to the rise of English, Anglophone monolingualism itself would continue to predicate social weakness as it had throughout the late medieval period. This was a linguistic state of affairs even late Middle English writers—themselves typically multilingual—would have been at an obvious disadvantage to correct. At that time when English was still primarily a spoken language and in status an unruly tongue, Anglophones inevitably addressed the fact that to write formally and seemingly exclusively in English meant begging pardon for such linguistic license.32 By tracing neither an evolution nor destiny but rather by simply historicizing the status of English in relation to the languages with which it came in contact, we will see that premodern features of English even cautiously described as “proto-nationalist” cannot predict the inevitable marriage of one language and one nation in today’s linguistic nationalisms. Indeed, at that time when “French was not regarded as being the sole preserve of the inhabitants of continental France,” and being English was not necessarily characterized by exclusively speaking English, Latin—the native language of no one—was the language by which community, specifically Christian, could be most widely imagined.33 And in expressions of solidarity among French-speaking English rulers after the Conquest, Englishness was expressed strategically and discretely rather than officially through English language usage to distinguish the first French speakers from their Norman cousins across the Channel or to distance Continental interests as royal discretion rather than political policy demanded.34 And even by the end of the Middle English period when legislation legitimized the conduct of official and commercial affairs in English, this linguistic license to practice in the vernacular was nevertheless often promulgated with no irony at all in the most saliently symbolic language of literate and legal authority, Latin.35 In that multilingual culture, the informality for which French speakers or Latin writers discretely or unofficially enlisted English then distinguishes it now from some modern English language nations where the language alone can render speakers citizens who “become categorically indistinguishable from what they speak” such that that national belonging proscribes multilingualism itself.36 The separation of this study into two sections aims to decouple modern monolingual disciplinarity from its construction of Middle English

MON OL I NG UA L I S M A N D M I DDL E E NG L I S H

13

itself. Thus, before considering multilingualism in Chaucer’s England in the second section, the first investigates how Anglophone investments in monolingualism distinguish medieval and modern portraits of the history of the language. This first section, “Traditions of Contact and Conf lict in the History of Medieval English,” opens by exploring how modern animosities often inform constructions of late medieval English, which are told in ways that ref lexively categorize French as a language of comparative inferiority. Describing nineteenth-century discourses centered on national manhood and linguistic behavior, chapter one, “Medievalism and Monolingualism,” reveals how modern Francophobia in England informed biographies of English language resistance to French in the centuries after the Norman Conquest. Historical romance offers evidence of how such linguistic assumptions had first gathered inf luence. Along with the role Walter Scott had in inventing the tradition of the kilt among other cultural medievalisms, his popularized construction of twelfth-century French-English antipathy in his first novel set in the Middle Ages, Ivanhoe (1819), participated in nationalist discourses, which continue to characterize articulations of Anglophone monolingualism and masculinity.37 The second chapter, “Hengist’s Tongue: A Medieval History of English,” turns to twelfth-century historical writing to consider Scott’s nineteenth-century medievalism of Anglophone virility against medieval historical traditions of English language origins. This reading of modern constructions of medieval origins against medieval traditions themselves aims at contrastively emphasizing the gendered formulation of English in the centuries after the Norman Conquest not as potently monolingual but consciously subordinate in its assimilation of French lexemes as well as textual and rhetorical appropriations of Latin. The second chapter argues that a medieval tradition of English language inadequacy persists with literate ambivalence throughout the late medieval period toward what Gower in the opening of his Confessio Amantis described as the vernacular legacy of Engisti lingua. The second section of this book, “ ‘And in Latyn . . . a wordes fewe’: Contact and Conformity in Late Medieval England,” turns to the writing of Langland and Chaucer in order to examine how their vernacular writing suborned English language monolingualism to multilingual strategies so conventional within their communities that such phenomena as code-switching appears in their literary construction of English speaking characters themselves. In especially these final chapters devoted to the place of Langland and Chaucer in the often mutually informing canons of literary and linguistic history, my primary aim is not to prove just how nationalist the communities were, which these medieval writers could imagine; instead, I propose to consider how the absence of widely

14

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

shared positive English language ideologies, institutionalized practices, as well as masculinist monolingual discourses characterizing modern linguistic nationalism conditioned how medieval men wrote and spoke in ways that ref lected literate community as well as maintained linguistic boundaries typically impermeable to monolinguals.38 Against the centrality of Chaucer over Langland to traditions ascribing a founding father for modern English, we will read how multilingual attitudes characterized the social vantage points from which both authors similarly distanced their projects from Anglophone monolingualism itself. In representations of the authority limited language choice denies their most notable female speakers, Lady Mede and the Wife of Bath, the fictions of dialogue the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman present also serve overall as stylizations of masculinity as multilingual literacy itself. Quite intentionally, then, this study distances itself from a stylistic analysis of the borrowed lexis of Chaucer and Langland—many such invaluable studies already exist—in order to focus instead on those medieval language attitudes toward contact that attended the license to write formally in English, which only multilingualism could entitle. Across these two sections and within the scope of the book overall, we will find that modern monolingualist discourses gendering the English language as masculine most obviously challenge any ongoing disciplinary narrative that would imagine medieval Anglophone identity in terms of a modern English that defines itself by resistance to multilingualism. A variation on vernacular nostalgia, these modern constructions of Middle English have done more than lurk within the disciplines of medieval literary and language studies. Indeed, however much these interrelated disciplines might have more recently considered the linguistic legacies of colonialism worldwide, the practice of English language studies, founded in ref lection of its own image of Anglophone selfconfidence, might still occlude the complicity of popular discourses and scholarly assumptions that attend our study of English in the multilingual culture of Chaucer’s period. But to the cultural promise rather than disciplinary challenge medieval language contact first offered to English language scholarship and, even more inf luentially, to modern popular literature centered on the linguistic effects of the Norman Conquest, the opening chapter now turns.

PART I TRADITIONS OF CONTACT AND CONFLICT IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1 MEDIEVALISM AND MONOLINGUALISM

I

f Chaucer’s multilingualism has never been in doubt, opposing views of his French-derived vocabulary have nevertheless long characterized the reception and construction of his literary language. Until the early part of the past century, the presence of French in Chaucer’s English divided scholars and lexicographers into those who argued Chaucer added new words to his English writing from his own acquired French and others who contended he had more passively selected from among French loan words already in common use among medieval Anglophones. While views of Chaucer as the first borrower of French might have come to a pronounced end in the past century with Joseph Mersand’s second edition of Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary (1939), arguably the Oxford English Dictionary, however wittingly in its preference for literary attestations, has preserved this portrait of Chaucer as the father of French loan words in the modern English lexicon.1 In a comparison of first attestations to Chaucer in the OED with identical entries in the Middle English Dictionary, Christopher Cannon has demonstrated that many of the loans the OED ascribes to Chaucer had already been in use in his day.2 In effect, etymologically French lexis had been as much a part of late Middle English as Chaucer’s English. As evidence of the disciplinary discomfort language contact has provoked, that longstanding scholarly focus that had centered on French words in Chaucer’s English invites our scrutiny of the function the figure of Chaucer has served in the modern conceptualization of specifically French during the Middle English period. It might seem obvious to speculate that what has been the traditionalist pinning of late medieval lexical borrowing from French onto the unquestionable genius of a single literary figure has very effectively dispensed with a central cultural matter: the challenge of language contact—at least in the face of recent monolingual identities—to imagining an unsullied origin for modern English. Yet,

18

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

were Chaucer the first to introduce French words into English language writing, even that literary tradition would also have to concede that especially his spoken French was likely better than if he had simply used preexisting loans already forced onto his native tongue. However, while these ostensibly competing portraits of Chaucer in traditions focused on his lexicon do not take their own musings this far, what benefit for constructing a history of English has there been in distinguishing between either of these seemingly only minimally conf licting images of the father of English as a French-speaker? If the medieval language contact conditions in which modern English has been said to originate are themselves incontestable, what scholarly and even popular preoccupations did those early origins of more particularly spoken modern English most pressingly elicit and at what time? The popularity of and, perhaps, even fixation on studying especially the history of the lexicon disclose how weighted and conf licted discourses in the modern English period have been in their aim to account for etymologically French words felt at once both foreign and native to the English language. For nineteenth-century American Anglo-Saxonist John Seely Hart, an apology seems appropriate for the lexical changes aff licted on English by its speakers, which, in effect, spoiled the simple or pure beginnings of the language: [t]he wall of partition between native words and foreign words having been completely broken down by the Norman conquest [sic], scholars have completed what warriors, traders, and artists began. Hence the strange anomaly, that with us, learned men have been the chief corruptors of the language.3

Although his commiserative tone at least partially discounts French as a formative feature disrupting the course of the history of English, Hart places the culpability for damaging English itself on the entire community of Anglophones throughout history in what constitutes a patently gendered move. In effect, shared guilt negatively unites an English language brethren of medieval warriors, artists, and now scholars, men like Hart, who might exculpate themselves by suggesting they would more likely write than speak the vocabulary they now add to modern English. Unlike Hart’s openly conf licted account of the lexicon of English as a “strange anomaly” that began bravely enough, one supposes, among “warriors” after the Norman Conquest, another aspect of this discourse on late medieval borrowing from French—one that has proven to be more powerful—characterizes a reverse strategy, that of turning an apology for native-word poverty into a celebration of loanword richness.

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

19

Seemingly similar to constructions of the lexical copiousness of English first associated with Latin borrowing during the Renaissance, monolingualist discourses formulated only later reduced the source languages of borrowing to their utility for English itself. Unlike that early modern period of resistance to “ink horn terms,” which saw the first major spike of Latin loan words in the history of English, these later discourses adumbrating borrowing from many languages other than Latin also engaged in articulations of linguistic confidence and cultural superiority consistent with the colonialist expansion of Anglophone nations by the modern English period. In the United States, William Swinton’s Rambles Among Words (1859), commonly attributed to Walt Whitman, could essentialize the linguistic generosity of English speakers who play host to loan words such that “[American English] absorbs whatever is of use to it, absorbs and assimilates it to its own f luid and f lexible substance [in a] rich copious hospitable f low.”4 Conjoining monolingual assimilation and second language eradication, this rich imagery thinly veils the fact that such a “copious f low” very likely washes over and subsequently drowns the tongues from which it initially borrows. When these discourses of generosity center on modern English borrowing exclusively and account for the spread of English globally, they also treat that inf luence as itself a virtue. The dominance of the language speaks to its rightful place of authority, reconceptualized as the power to host the words of languages often subordinated by English. Linking this notion of the hospitality of English to colonialism itself, Alistair Pennycook has argued that there are serious questions [. . .] to be asked about the image of democratic English put into play by the construction of English as a borrowing language. Indeed, the constant replaying of this image of English as an open and borrowing language, ref lecting an open and borrowing people, is a cultural construct of colonialism that is in direct conf lict with the colonial evidence.5

The metaphor of an imagined Anglophone community both past and present—“a borrowing people”—characterizes discourses of colonial expansion, linguistic nationalism, and clearly also an attempt to account for origin as the destiny of that nation through a history of its language. Extolling Anglophone borrowing as a virtue has not been restricted to popular discourses; standard textbooks on the history of the English language have reproduced this portrait of English, which frame its global reach in terms that seem as much rapacious as generous. Most notably in a textbook as widely used as C.M. Millward’s A Biography of the English Language, Middle English lexical gains have recuperated Old

20

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

English lexical losses through the ongoing hospitality of early modern and modern English speakers: [A]lthough English lost all but a handful of its inf lections during M[iddle] E[nglish] and has undergone little inf lectional change since, M[iddle] E[nglish] marks only the onset of the burgeoning of the English vocabulary to its current unparalleled size among the languages of the world. Ever since M[iddle] E[nglish], the language has been more than hospitable to loanwords from other languages, and all subsequent periods have seen comparable inf luxes of loans and increases in vocabulary.6

In this image, for which English itself becomes a single entity despite the lexical mix that makes its character worth celebrating, the language also appears the victor as it encroaches on foreign tongues. Seemingly placing concerns over the vernacular bilingualism of any English speaker to rest, including even Chaucer perhaps as a Middle English writer, the Anglophone habit of borrowing can characterize an even wider language tradition than literary history. Recuperating Anglophone borrowing at the same time it minimizes the bilingualism or multilingualism that can occasion borrowing itself, this discourse equally characterizes Baugh and Cable’s response in A History of the English Language to the perennial problem of French loan words when they explain that “[t]he large number of French words borrowed during the Middle Ages has made it easy for us to go on borrowing.” 7 Although moving away from the metaphor of English as an individual entity that can be “hospitable” or “assimilate” even as it “f lows” where it singularly seems to chose, Baugh and Cable’s account of “us” similarly sees the history of the borrowing of English as a totality, one in which a community of Anglophones past and present initiate and then dutifully carry on a tradition of borrowing as if in allegiance to only ever one language. The presence of foreign words in the lexicon, then, was not a weakness of English but offered a portrait of English in which its colonialist superiority was hospitality and the monolingualism of its speaker’s patriotism. It is the main argument of this chapter that these images of English as both guest abroad and host to new words at home have been in many ways foundational for the discipline of English language studies, because these modern portraits have always also successfully paired Anglophone identity with gender. By examining the inf luence of these discourses of gender on the formulation of the history of contact between English and French, this chapter singles out for consideration that point at which the contentiousness of bilingualism or multilingualism overlapped with popular expressions of language as national identity. It will become obvious that what distinguishes this recent nationalism from earlier periods in the history of English are expressions of linguistic patriotism characterized by

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

21

self-conscious monolingualism and resistance not to borrowing from second languages but to their acquisition by Anglophones. Most effectively termed monolingualist, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses first successfully affixed national belonging to speech behaviors, which were literally labelled “manly” precisely because they were monolingual. Broader in inf luence and scope than the scholarly energies spent on the genesis of Chaucer’s French lexis, popular modern constructions of medieval English invoked portraits of its ability to bear up against the onslaught of postconquest French. Clearly, for a masculine and national language that could always only be monolingual, fashioning its origins in a period that began with foreign language conquest was logically rife with contradiction. With the field of Middle English not yet established, however, it was in popular national discourse and historical fiction where the formulation of a monolingualist history for late medieval English had first seemed to take hold. Most inf luential in popularizing this portrait, Walter Scott (1771– 1832) fashioned a self-consciously monolingual character for postconquest English in his first novel set in the Middle Ages, Ivanhoe (1819). Historians have already disclaimed Scott’s seemingly simplistic depiction of ethnic hostilities between French-speaking Normans and Englishspeaking Saxons. However, histories of the English language often reproduce that English and French language antipathy that Scott explored with likely greater multilingual circumspection than the monolingualist tradition of that crosslinguistic hostility that Ivanhoe has subsequently fed and multiple adaptations of the novel have preserved. More simply ref lecting rather than fuelling monolingualist pride, Scott’s apparent effacement of his own proficiencies in French and German for his creation of the twelfth-century linguistic world of Ivanhoe has nevertheless proven to popularize medieval Anglophones—and Englishmen immemorially—as resistant to the French language. With reluctance to display foreign language learning the definition of national manhood by Scott’s day, the linguistic legacy of what an Englishman inherited came under especially close scrutiny within the historical sensitivities specific to eighteenth- and nineteenth- century constructions of the Middle Ages in England. In A Dream of Order, one of the earliest discussions of these nostalgic investments as medievalism, Alice Chandler describes how conceptions of the late medieval period in literature ref lected nineteenth-century desires to return to the order that feudal society was idealized as offering against challenges to the landed class during the Industrial Revolution.8 Devoting her first chapter to Walter Scott and describing his historical novels beginning with Ivanhoe as the culmination of centuries of literary interest in the Middle Ages, Chandler views Scott’s medievalism as unique from similar

22

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

“gothicizing” among the Romantics of his period. She argues for an analysis of nineteenth-century responses to the Middle Ages that would view its medievalism as a movement itself with use as a social and political ideal and its symbolic value as a metaphor of belief. It must also take into account all kinds of peripheral manifestations of interest in the Middle Ages: its dependency on historical writings, its inf luence in arts and decoration, its manifestations in popular fiction and poetry, and its inevitable attraction for parodists.9

These diverse expressions of medievalism made its nineteenth-century reception more broad than the literary output of the Romantic Movement, as Anne K. Mellor provocatively suggests: For many years scholars and critics have been speaking in one way or another of what we might call the romantic “spirit of the age.” But the spirit we have been describing animated at best but a small portion of the people living in England at the time.10

Within popular conceptions of the medieval period more widespread than the literary interests of Romanticism, however, popular medievalism likely motivated even more exclusive interests in the acquisition of medieval texts. Fostered first among aristocratic antiquarians, an interest in early English texts served their traditionalist sense of history. With landed interests challenged by an economy increasingly based in moveable wealth, an interest in imagining the continuity of Anglo-Saxon Englishness through late medieval feudalism justified rather than scrutinized aristocratic privilege. To the ends that ongoing projects of Anglo-Saxonism served in both England and the United States, another link between medievalism and nationalism, by the nineteenth century, shaped English language identity.11 Even more broadly, through nationalist discourses organized around the linguistic performance of masculinity, what compelled the construction of English as uniquely “manly” was likely even more popular and widespread than contemporary literary movements and antiquarian practices. By the nineteenth century, this new focus on language as evidence of both gendered and national identity also likely occurred because language itself became especially appraised as “concrete proof of identity.”12 Clare A. Simmons explains this designation of the language one spoke as irrefutable identity also fashioned a heritage for the English that placed them, not merely in respect of language but also in politics and character, within the Teutonic tradition. And

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

23

that linguistic evidence is not necessarily the same as cultural evidence, and that neither can possibly prove the ultimate Victorian conclusion from Beowulf—that the English by blood-descent retain the Teutonic virtues of their ancestors—remained comfortably overlooked.13

If the unlikelihood of ethnic and linguistic links to the Scandinavian speakers in Beowulf was conveniently discounted, these Anglophone desires for linguistic purity similarly demanded rejecting foreign languages.14 English was simply better because the language itself embodied national manhood and enjoyed a linguistic past as essential to Englishness as its present. According to these constructions of English, the nineteenth-century Anglophone should clearly avoid speaking French, for only English speech—most manifestly monolingualism—was ironclad proof of masculinity. It is this nexus of language and nineteenth-century medievalism to which we at least partially owe those monolingualist Anglophone identities that constitute Middle English as a discipline. Without explicitly making these kinds of connections between monolingualism and English language identity, David Matthews has already demonstrated in The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 how we inherit our current critical and cultural conception of late medieval English often from pointedly self-interested constructions of earlier Englishes.15 Historians, antiquarians, and, most importantly for our popular notions of English language history, the historical novelist Scott, imagined late medieval English in ways that ref lected the nineteenth-century construction of English language manhood. Writing the linguistic past through contemporary investments, these historical portraits of English happily rendered any with the means to make himself an antiquarian as rightful an heir to and natural lord of medieval English as his landed properties already appropriately predicted. Constructing their origins in a medieval past to naturalize their noble status, aristocratic antiquarians formed the first societies devoted to collecting more frequently than closely studying what were initially termed “semi-Saxon” texts. Unlike the study of Chaucer or Anglo-Saxon, it was not yet established in Scott’s day just who would study late medieval non-Chaucerian texts and how they would appraise “semi-Saxon,” an expression later replaced by a term equally suggestive of linguistic and political continuity, “Middle English,” in 1870. Scott joined the first and most elite of these societies, the Roxburghe Club founded in London in 1812, as the only Scotsman and one of its few literary members just several years after the completion of Ivanhoe. In ways as yet unstudied in his medievalism, this chapter argues language attitudes in Ivanhoe display how Scott incorporated early

24

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

nineteenth-century discourses scripting masculinity and Anglomonolingualism as overlapping categories during what Krishan Kumar defines as “the moment of Englishness.”16 Scott’s first novel set in the Middle Ages served to construct “semi-Saxon” in ways more unique than his antiquarian contemporaries partially because he likely aimed to use his construction of postconquest English to articulate his own participation in landed Englishness. In wearing what John M. Ganim describes as the “hierarchical paternalism” medievalism supported, Scott attempted to efface his own recent modest family history—his father, a minor barrister, and his grandfather, a sheep farmer—and recall the landed lineage he claimed distantly on both his paternal and maternal side.17 Furthermore, in creating legitimacy through language history, Scott fashioned a national character for twelfth-century English in Ivanhoe, which emphasized a common linguistic heritage cutting across the region and class distinguishing Scott from the circles in which he found himself. Monopolizing on shared linguistic identity, Scott fictionalized an illustrious past of feudal rights on which he too could make claims with his financial success supporting his public displays as laird of the manor at Abbotsford. Enlisting performances of masculinity intersecting the category “English,” then, the medieval English Scott stages in Ivanhoe supports his conservatism, minimizes his modest recent family history, and maximizes monolingualism as the shared marker of English national manhood. By situating his English in the century after the Norman Conquest and centuries before Chaucer, Scott had free rein to move between two preexisting traditions of investments in Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer.18 However, while nativist traditions continued to construct preconquest English in support of the Englishness of some laws and institutions, the makeup of postconquest England as especially multilingual due to the presence of French would naturally dampen any celebration of an illustrious history for the tongue as an institution itself. Of course, the history of English in terms of its contact with varieties of French after the Norman Conquest clearly offered as much counter evidence for the Germanic purity of English as that masculine status, which questionably took so long to shake off its Norman inf luences. In aid of def lecting from the abject state of what would be later called early Middle English, one obvious strategy was to downplay the French tongue of the Normans by focusing on their origins as ultimately Germanic.19 But emerging pressure on language as “iron-worded” proof of identity offered Scott another strategy. Working within contemporary discourses on linguistic manliness, Scott could formulate English language history in Ivanhoe as what might effectively be called manifest monolingual

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

25

destiny. Recursively nationalist and essentially manly, English, even in its twelfth-century servitude to French, could characterize the essential virility of the linguistic forefathers of nineteenth-century English speakers: At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other.20

Despite the oppression imagined here for Anglo-Saxons themselves after the Conquest, the English of “rustics and hinds” was all the more manly by virtue of its speakers’ lack of thorough knowledge of another language; this monolingual simplicity appropriately rendered Anglo-Saxons resistant to that foreign language that hypocritically institutionalized justice in Norman England. In effect, this emphasis on linguistic heritage worked equally well to reduce Norman institutions as contributions to rather than constitutive features of an immemorial English language nation.21 By surviving its servitude to French and linguistically preserving Englishness, the Anglo-Saxon legacy resiliently lived on in a manly language, which as evidence of that manhood resists foreign language oppression. Supported further by various strains of contemporary antiGallicism, English could view its earlier self as immemorially resistant to and not simply the compliant company of linguistic others.22 Overlooking the nineteenth-century cultural and linguistic context, which informs Scott’s novels, literary critics disinterested in the medievalism of his day have been apologetic and sometimes simply embarrassed about Ivanhoe. Such critical discomfort seems unwarranted, however, if the specific cultural and political functions of nineteenth-century medievalism were “a philosophy rather than a fad [which] satisfied the nation’s needs.”23 Furthermore, literary assessments that focus on Scott as historian neglect to note that the medieval research of Scott’s day should be characterized as “the property of gentlemen antiquaries rather than scholars and were emotional rather than technical in intent.”24 In The Achievement of Walter Scott, for instance, literary historian A.O.J. Cockshut provides a traditional assessment of Scott’s medieval historical fiction by concluding that Scott fails as a novelist because he fails as a medievalist: Though a learned man in his own way, he did not know enough to recreate the earlier centuries. Moreover, he was writing for a public ready

26

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

to be entertained and bewitched by an unreal middle age, a public that had emancipated itself from the stock Augustan prejudices about medieval barbarism, and now ready to adopt different misconceptions, and to be deceived in new ways. All this means that this chapter is in some ways a melancholy one for an admirer of Scott to write.25

But in his preface to Ivanhoe, Scott himself accounts for what Cockshut seems to bemoan as his historical inaccuracies: It is true, that I neither can, nor do pretend, to the observation of complete accuracy, even in matters of outward costume, much less in the more important points of language and manners. But the same motive which prevents my writing the dialogue of the piece in Anglo-Saxon or in Norman-French, and which prohibits my sending forth to the public this essay printed with the types of Caxton or Wynken de Worde, prevents my attempting to confine myself within the limits of the period in which my story is laid. It is necessary, for exciting interest of any kind, that the subject assumed should be, as it were, translated into the manners as well as the language of the age we live in. (9)

Clearly, Scott’s literary aims, which he programmatically proposes here, distinguish between historical literalism and his own linguistic fictions. In similar sensitivity to the reception of Ivanhoe especially by “the more grave antiquary [who] will perhaps class [it] with the idle novels and romances of the day” (5), Scott satirically cites the historical authority for his novel as the Anglo-Norman “Wardour Manuscript.” By attributing its ownership in Scotland to one Sir Arthur Wardour who cannot “read one syllable of its contents” (12), Scott can describe his authorship of Ivanhoe as worthy an endeavor as those aristocratic collectors who were often heedless of the contents of the books they so rapaciously acquired. Similarly anticipating and satirizing critiques of his intentionally inaccurate period language, Scott attests that the conveniently unique copy of the Wardour Manuscript possesses “an individuality as important as the Bannatyne MS., the Auchinleck MS., and any other monument of the patience of a Gothic scrivener”(12).26 In a prefatory posture similar to the unique librum vetustissimum of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Scott even seems to parody his own fiction as historical writing.27 Nevertheless asserting Saxon predominance by writing against the same Celtic origins Historia Regum Britannae set out to recover in the twelfth century, Scott argues he disinterestedly avoids wholesale reconstruction of that same century in Ivanhoe for the sake of clarity for his readers. And, by incorporating rather than rejecting how the endeavors of the gentleman antiquarian can underwrite his privilege, Scott develops

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

27

literary and linguistic techniques for engaging the medieval past as an original contribution to their aristocratic enterprise: His language must not be exclusively obsolete and unintelligible; but he should admit, if possible, no word or turn of phraseology betraying an origin directly modern. It is one thing to make use of language and sentiments which are common to ourselves and our forefathers, and it is another to invest them with the sentiments and dialect exclusively proper to their descendants. This, my dear friend, I have found the most difficult part of my task. (11–12)

By virtue of its temporal distance from his present, however, historical fiction set in the medieval period grants Scott even greater creative license to move across cultures and languages and between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries in order to invest authority in the language of “our forefathers” (5). In this respect of both designating and enjoying the privileges of this linguistic legacy, however, Scott is not wholly free from constructing twelfth-century English with “the sentiments [. . .] exclusively proper to their descendants.” Without explicitly referring to how monolingualism made men English in his day, Scott reproduces those attitudes by depicting Saxon distrust of French as well as ref lecting his own public cautiousness about multilingualism throughout Ivanhoe. In addition to the resolute monolingualism in which Scott was engaged, speech itself was under contemporary cultural scrutiny such that taciturnity was praised as public masculine virtue over both artful conversation and polished eloquence.28 Given these linguistic restrictions on multilingualism as well as cultural restrictions on men from being loquacious, Latin and Greek emerged as the most desirable languages of instruction for young men precisely because they were least likely to be spoken, under the cultural assumption that second-language speech and conversation itself typified the affectations of ladies, fops, and Frenchmen.29 That French would begin to invade the English lexicon shortly after the period Scott depicts should have proved problematic; however, we shall see that nationalist discourses gendering English and French as opposites neatly dispensed of the matter by representing English both past and present as masculine speech both measured and monolingual. In alignment with discourses distinguishing the tongue of the English gentleman from his counterpart on the Continent and in the homosocial affection of respectfully considering his linguistic forefathers proper men, Scott depicts his Saxons as embodiments of the linguistic virtues of nineteenth-century Englishmen, while at the same time and in the same gesture of Anglophone superiority, he ref lexively abjectifies the

28

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Normans through the questionable masculinity of modern French and implicitly language acquisition itself. In enlisting contemporary discourses to construct the linguistic topography of postconquest England, Scott’s linguistic medievalism seems considerably more attuned to language history than the “period language” for which Samuel Johnson famously derided Spenser.30 In an appraisal of Scott’s sensitivity to issues of language change, Graham Tulloch has shown that Scott’s fiction of medieval English skirts quite consciously between appearing to be medieval and simply being intelligible. Tulloch demonstrates that Scott succeeds at the objectives set out in his dedicatory epistle to Ivanhoe. In Tulloch’s analysis, Scott’s archaizing, which Scott subsequently termed “conveyings,” invests less in adopting terms used around the twelfth-century setting of Ivanhoe than in adapting early modern vocabulary in ways that staged a medieval quality by simply seeming either old or specialized.31 And in further defence against literary distaste for period language, Tulloch notes that only Scott, though borrowing heavily like the Romantics from Elizabethan writers, uniquely employed both specialized vocabulary and archaic grammatical forms within dialogue.32 Arguing, then, that dialogue in Ivanhoe is risibly anachronistic misses the mark on Scott’s interest not in replicating written medieval English, but in retrospectively constructing its linguistic character within and against contemporary discourses of what constituted the responsibilities and privileges of speaking the language inherited from “our forefathers.” Matthews has shown how Scott had already linked Saxon linguistic inheritance to his Lowland identity in his edition of Sir Tristrem from the Auchinleck manuscript, which he completed in 1802. For Matthews, Sir Tristrem marks a period within which “Scott began to shape, amplify, and put to work a sense of self motivated by the genealogical connections with the Border regions and the Middle Ages.”33 Part of his strategy for Sir Tristrem included promoting the medieval author of the text as Thomas the Rhymer and working within a conceptualization of the medieval minstrel already popularized in the Reliques of Thomas Percy, one of several eighteenth-century antiquarian writers who “invented bards and then recovered their literary output.”34 The attention to language as history is especially acute here, however. Effectively exposing Ossian as a linguistic and literary hoax in an essay for the Edinburgh Review in 1805, Scott would show himself sensitive to the benefits of creating linguistic origins through literary fictions.35 To this end, part of Scott’s linguistic argument for the provenance of Sir Tristrem built on his qualification of his Lowland Scots English as more Teutonic than that English south of Scotland, which Scott deems weakly incapable of resisting French language inf luence in the late medieval period. If Scott legitimizes Scots English in Sir

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

29

Tristrem by “deploying a Middle English poem as an authentication and legitimization of Scottish national origins,” he also suggests the Lowland tradition preserving Sir Tristrem saved the English language from French inf luence itself.36 However, almost fifteen years later and with considerably greater attention from the landed gentlemen with whom his literary success brought him in contact, the twelfth- century English he fashions in Ivanhoe creates a patrimony of Anglophone monolingualism any English-speaking man in England or Scotland could proudly inherit. In the most culturally salient way, Scott’s first historical narrative set south of Scotland imagines cultures in conf lict within their perceived present-day linguistic analogues of French and English. The radical departure in temporal setting from his earlier novels set no more remotely than a century from his present serves Scott’s own pressing sense of addressing contemporary discourses of Englishness for which language served as an ethnically inclusive although gender exclusive feature. His shift in the setting of this novel from his usual locale of Scotland to England presents an integrated narrative of shared history across these regions and historically distinct nations now linguistically united under empire. In fact, Scott’s linguistic construction of Englishness could allow him to embed English national pride in medieval Scotland: The name of Robin Hood, if duly conjured with, should raise a spirit as soon as that of Rob Roy; and the patriots of England deserve no less their renown in our modern circles, than the Bruces and Wallaces of Caledonia (6).

Underlining a shared pride in male heroes England and Scotland traditionally immortalize, Scott argues that his interest in celebrating medieval England is analogous to the Scotsman’s delight in recollecting Rob Roy or the Bruce. The shared language of English also masculinizes the writing of Scott, who regionally possesses more immediate access to an idealized past: To match an English and a Scottish author in the rival task of embodying and reviving the traditions of their respective countries, would be [. . .] in the highest degree unequal and unjust. The Scottish magician, you said, was like Lucan’s witch, at liberty to walk over the recent field of battle, and to select for the subject even the most powerful Erictho was compelled to select, as alone capable of being reanimated even by her potent magic— —gelidas leto scrutata medullas, Pulmonis rigidi stantes since vulnere fibres Invenit, et vocem defuncto in corpore quærit. 37

30

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

The English author, on the other hand, without supposing him less of a conjuror than the Northern Warlock, can, you observed, only have the liberty of selecting his subject amidst the dust of antiquity, where nothing was to be found but dry, sapless, mouldering and disjointed bones [. . .]. (8)

Here, Scott’s northern conjuring—his act of recalling the past through his self-declared craft of historical fiction—has the advantage of being temporally closer to its medieval origins yet also geographically distant from the southern industrialization, which Scott’s most privileged contemporaries bemoaned as disrupting their links to the idealized feudal order of medieval society. But, overall, gender finally organizes these discourses of time and location with italicized stress in the 1819 edition on her undercut by the final assertion that the “Northern warlock” is no less powerful than Lucan’s witch in reviving voices already long lost. Nor like this “Northern warlock” are Rob Roy and the Bruce any less national heroes than their southern counterparts. Even if England and lowland Scotland shared English to the degree that the tongue elided their regional difference as Scott imagines here, the gendering of English itself promised a more patent marker of shared national identity in ways that could position Anglophones against Francophones. According to Michèle Cohen, a focus on speech and linguistic behavior in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries defined English masculinity by ref lexively devaluing French as affected and feminine. Thus, if an English lady could acquire French without prejudice to her character, it was because French and the act of speaking it were gendered female.38 This linguistic polarization of masculine and feminine, which the English and French languages contrastively symbolized for Scott’s readers, also served his construction of English-speaking Saxons and French-speaking Normans in Ivanhoe. In essence, in this portrait, the language of English itself would inevitably by its masculine nature subdue feminine French such that the historical record could also ref lect prevailing notions of Anglophone superiority. But how could that monolingualist origin for English account for the abundance of French vocabulary that had displaced so much of the native Saxon lexicon by the end of late medieval period? How could such an account write away the glaring presence of effeminate French in manly English? To say that Scott fashions a progressivist portrait of the inevitable domination of Norman-French—and supposedly other varieties of French in England—by Saxon-English begins to answer these questions; but it also seems that much of Ivanhoe works out linguistic history from an especially monolingualist perspective as well. Although Tulloch argues Scott’s customary interest in language provided the most likely

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

31

inspiration for Ivanhoe, that interest itself was equally invested in understanding English in the light of contemporary national manhood. Given popular negative attitudes toward French, it is not surprising that literary history preserves the most anti-Gallic explanation for Scott’s conception of Ivanhoe, that is, the often nationalist preoccupations of etymologizing itself. In the received account of Scott’s ideas for his first medieval novel, J.G. Lockhart, Scott’s biographer and son-in-law, describes an after dinner conversation between Scott and his friend William Clerk. The content of that conversation, focused on the etymologies distinguishing the native word for an animal on the hoof and that nonnative word for the same animal on the plate, historians of the English language have seemed forever doomed to repeat.39 This ready distinction of field versus fare and English versus French, Scott famously employed to establish French language presence as foreign and oppressive in the opening pages of Ivanhoe. And most effective is the construction of this oppression when represented as the most obvious kind of folk etymology in dialogue between Saxon serfs Gurth and Wamba: “Why, how call you these grunting brutes running about on their four legs?” demanded Wamba. “Swine, fool, swine,” said the herd, “every fool knows that.” “And swine is good Saxon,” said the jester; “but how call you the sow when she is f layed, and draw, and quartered, and hung up by the heels like a traitor?” “Pork,” answered the swine-herd. “I am very glad every fool knows that too,” said Wamba, “and pork I think, is good Norman French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what do’st thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?” “It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool’s pate.” “Nay, I can tell you more,” said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondmen such as though, but becomes Beef a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worschipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calve, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment. (21)40

Though a slightly worn distinction now to illustrate the lexical history of Middle English, this famous fictionalization of twelfth-century

32

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Anglo-Saxon attitudes toward Norman-French loan words continues to appear in English language history textbooks, although often with the correction that Scott’s distinction is about one hundred years too early to be entirely accurate.41 English language historians and literary scholars, who attend solely to Scott’s anachronisms rather than the masculinist and nationalist objectives of his medievalism, have also found his dramatizations highly wanting in historical accuracy as well. David Brown, for example, argues this famous dialogue best exemplifies Scott’s inaccuracies as an inability “to visualise the supposed Norman/Saxon conf lict in concrete social terms familiar to him, simply because the later forms of social opposition did not exist between the two races.”42 More generously, David H. Richter concludes “readers of Ivanhoe were not in a position to question Scott’s social assumption that ‘Norman’ and ‘Saxon’ in the 1190s represented two castes like whites and blacks in the antebellum south.”43 However, what Scott renders inaccurately about Saxons and Normans does accurately ref lect what he enlists from the linguistic attitudes of his day. Informed by nineteenth-century discourses about linguistic difference as national, Scott wittingly crafts the multilingual terrain of twelfthcentury England as inevitably hostile to Gurth and Wamba, these lowliest examples of the medieval Anglophone monolingual. In introducing language as itself a theme in the opening pages of Ivanhoe, Scott sketches a broad synchronic portrait of the linguistic topography of twelfth-century England. Nativizing this terrain as Englishness, he also maps out diachronically the triumph of English in eventually absorbing the invaders whose linguistic alterity embodied their foreignness: Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present day English language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe. (17)

As “happily” as the languages that divided kingdoms in the past are synthesized to create an English for England, its birth explains how that “far more manly and expressive” character of Englishness (21) can inevitably subsume the Norman language and character, continue to enforce an embargo on any recent Gallicisms, and unilaterally import classical and Mediterranean languages. In effect, this diachronic overview sets historical limits on a reading of Ivanhoe in which Norman victory is temporary, their

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

33

eventual linguistic subordination certain, and subsequent contact with the French language restricted by the essentially manly core of English. The matter of the medieval conf luence of French and English, which likely inspired Scott’s initial conception of Ivanhoe, reminds us that the depiction of language contact in the novel constitutes an attempt to solve English language purity by engaging specifically in prevailing discourses centered on manhood and monolingualism. Perhaps, an inaccuracy from a purely linguistic point of view, both the literary and political function of that Norman-English mixture Scott terms a “lingua franca” in the novel (27) are not at cross purposes with what his linguistic characterization invites—the guarantee that English makes Englishmen of its speakers.44 However linguistically inaccurate, the disappearance of the lingua franca Scott describes attests to the potency of English precisely because that monolingual resistance to the Normans subdued French and Normanness by speaking plain and manly English.45 Should a man ensure himself a place of inf luence both politically and culturally by the nineteenth century, in Scott’s public interests the nationalist discourses of monolingual masculinity would have to win out against even his own multilingualism. Little mention of the French Scott spoke at Abbotsford and his turn from earlier projects in German translation to historical novels further suggest it was linguistic nationalism married to Scott’s medievalism that informs his strategically anachronistic representation of English as monolingualist in Ivanhoe.46 Less than failing as a language historian, Scott’s construction of medieval dialogue for his principle characters strategically pair his literary goals and contemporary cultural investments. In his conveying of twelfth-century linguistic difference, then, Scott enjoins nineteenth-century oppositional constructions of English and French in ways that cast Saxon and French as twelfth-century analogues respectively seen as unaffected and pretentious. By building this contrast as ref lective and even constitutive of present day languages and their respective nations, Scott can designate Saxon as the primary progenitor of modern English despite its contact with Norman French.47 This linguistic essentialism places the Saxons in natural opposition to non-English speakers. By constructing the masculine character of English as essentializing its speakers throughout its history, Scott can gender Saxon itself in Ivanhoe, most notably in the tongue of Wilfred of Ivanhoe’s father, Cedric. In demonstration of the masculinity Scott’s English readers share with their linguistic forefather Cedric, the opening chapters of the novel appraise the simplicity of his Saxon tongue against the linguistically diverse crowd he hosts of, Jews, Normans, well-travelled Templars, and their Arabspeaking slaves. At pains to praise both the man and his only tongue, the narrator makes it clear that Cedric’s forced fealty to his Norman

34

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

guests did not compromise his English masculinity. Scott’s transposition of contemporary terms “manly” and “plain” especially mark Cedric’s twelfth-century Saxon as normatively masculine.48 As Philip Carter explains for the semantic field of such terms, the masculine performance of politeness—that is public behavior for males—had shifted by the end of the eighteenth century from expectations of refinement to unpolished simplicity. When sincerity forced “polished” English into the private or domestic spheres of women, then could “blunt sincerity” constitute “a defining characteristic of English manliness.”49 For readers in Scott’s day, the Englishness of Cedric would be most obvious in the manly and plain language his narrator describes. In that linguistic un-refinement, Scott’s Cedric certainly seems an exemplar for his nineteenth-century readers not only in his blunt sincerity but his manly monolingualism. To the French speakers of Ivanhoe, this monolingual masculinity is both confusing and even suspicious. The multilingual Abbot Aymer, for example, marvels at Cedric’s linguistic resolve: “I marvel, worthy Cedric,” said the Abbot, as their discourse proceeded, “that, great as your predilection is for your own manly language, you do not receive the Norman French into your favour, so far as the mystery of wood-craft and hunting is concerned. Surely no tongue is so rich in the various phrases which the field sports demand, or furnishes means to the experienced woodsman so well to express his jovial art.” (48–9)

Of course, Cedric offers the stereotypically blunt reply of an Englishman to Abbot Aymer. Distancing his multilingual interlocutor as foreigner, Cedric responds in a performance of manly lexical simplicity against the overrefinement of hunting and its rarified French terminologies attributed to the Arthurian knight, Sir Tristrem:50 “[. . .] I care not for those over-sea refinements, without which I can well enough take my pleasure in the woods. I can wind my horn, though I call not the blast neither a recheate or a morte—I can cheer my dogs on the prey, and I can f lay and quarter the animal when it is brought down, without using the new-fangled jargon of curee, arbor, nombles, and all the babble of the fabulous Sir Tristrem.” (49)

Further rejecting Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s insistence that French is “not only the language of the chase, but that of love and of war” (49), Cedric immediately recounts Saxon resistance to the Normans thirty years earlier, speaking on the subject of war not in French but English: As Cedric the Saxon then was, his plain English tale needed no garnish from the French troubadours, when it was told in the ear of beauty. (49)

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

35

The narrator supports the simplicity Cedric asserts by similarly characterizing Cedric’s “feelings [as] all of a right onward and simple kind, and were seldom occupied by more than one object at once” (50). Read within the nineteenth-century discourses of masculine behavior, this seemingly pejorative primitive portrait of Cedric as simple emerges instead as linguistic virtue. Like the lack of affectation expected in Scott’s day, Cedric’s simplicity is performed both in manners—resistant to overseas inf luence—and here in speech by demonstrating his rejection of foreign vocabulary even as he must utter it. Following the linguistic logic Scott offers for the representation of English in his novel, such transpositions most simply render the medieval past intelligible for his readers. Within the discourses of Anglophone manhood in Scott’s day, however, his conveyings implicitly make the linguistic past a legacy worth inheriting. How better to designate oneself as rightful heir to English than to see oneself as much like one’s linguistic forefathers in an expression of homosocial affection? Doubled in the gesture of making the past accessible to the readers of Ivanhoe, Scott can also imagine the nation in terms of an immemorial character and language, features that continue to essentialize the speakers of English as always successfully surviving contact with linguistic others. If English marks the community of Saxons as well as the readers of Ivanhoe, Scott presents French in the novel often as pretentious and disingenuous as it was likely viewed by its earliest Anglophone audience. Never “manly” enough nor simply “plain,” linguistic insincerity characterizes the speech the narrator of Ivanhoe uniquely attributes to the Normans. In that light, the ease with which the Norman French acquired languages on Crusade becomes a sleight to social honesty. In Cedric’s presence, the Norman French of one Templar contrasts his characteristically Saxon sincerity after he generously opens his hall to Jew, Saracen, and Christian alike. In as much a linguistic insult to the host, Cedric, as his interlocutor, Isaac, Brian de Bois-Guilbert switches to most likely Arabic to distance all Saxon speakers: The Templar smiled sourly as he replied [to Isaac], “Beshrew thee for a false-hearted liar!” and passing onward, as if disdaining farther conference, he communed with his Moslem slaves in a language unknown to the bystanders. (53)

In underlining his dismissal of Isaac, the French-speaking Norman— represented above as a speaker of English as well as Arabic—switches from English to a language that those in the hall in their monolingual simplicity cannot seem to identify. While the language of the slaves most likely necessitates Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s language choice, his switch

36

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

from the only language of Cedric’s hall symbolically underlines an abrupt and unilateral ending to any exchange. An affront to both graciousness and clarity, the switch to a “language unknown” to Cedric and his men invigorates Anglophone prejudices and monolingual expectations of polite language choice among the readers of Ivanhoe. In representing what linguists term a dissociative code-switch designed to distance interlocutors, Scott constructs the linguistic likelihood of an unmanly behavior as predictably not English and very possibly multilingual. Frenchness as second language insincerity characterizes Norman language choice even more pejoratively in another instance in the novel. At the Tournament of Ashby, the victory of the Disinherited Knight, whom the Saxons and Normans only later learn is Ivanhoe, stirs the Saxons to exclaim, “Long Live the Lady Rowena, the chosen and lawful Queen of Love and of Beauty” (90).51 Prince John attempts to display her subjugation to him by publicly addressing her in French, “affecting,” the narrator tells us, “not to understand the Saxon language” (91). While Prince John’s selection of tongues is clear for political reasons, his French language choice alone, which the narrator takes pains to point out, carries with it nineteenth-century codes of effeminization marking the French-speaker as both affected and cunning. Despite the shared English language knowledge between John and Cedric, Prince John’s display of linguistic subtlety contrasts the “manly sincerity” Cedric exemplified amidst the multilingual guests. Cedric’s assertion to Wamba, “I know no language [. . .] but my own, and a few words of their mincing Norman” (213) encapsulates this patently masculinist attitude toward French. If Cedric’s monolingual simplicity marks his national and linguistic native-ness, Ivanhoe’s contact with foreign languages in his absence from England challenges Scott’s equally persuasive depiction of his character’s Englishness. If Ivanhoe was just as likely as the Templars to acquire foreign languages on Crusade, his time abroad would demand considerable explanation to fit within nineteenth-century discourses of monolingual manhood. Very likely for that reason, Scott attentively notes that Ivanhoe may be multilingual but his ability to use French or another language is never exclusionary or effete. Indeed, Scott depicts Ivanhoe—still in disguise as a pilgrim and speaking of himself in the third person—as asserting that his French usage on the Continent was only a linguistic weapon and chief ly a means for self-protection: “Ivanhoe,” he said, “was so well acquainted with the language and manners of the French, that there was no fear of his incurring any hazard during that part of his travels.” (56)

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

37

This qualification lies most literally in the fact that travel abroad often requires even modest bilingualism. However, the discourses of language and manhood in which the novel intimately engages offers a compelling cultural explanation for the justification of Ivanhoe’s French as well. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the English gentleman often acquired oral facility in French while on the Grand Tour. Yet, the paradoxical nature of learning to speak French in the face of an increasingly monolingualist national identity eventually spelled the demise of the young Englishman’s bilingual experiences on the Continent. As Cohen explains, negative attitudes toward second languages increased to the point of problematizing any demonstration of that knowledge: As a good French accent was considered particularly difficult to acquire, travel to France would ensure a correct pronunciation would be learned. No gentleman could be said to be accomplished if he did not know French [. . . but] French was said to be not only refined and polished, but too refined and too polished.52

If proficiently speaking French eroded the essential English core of the Anglophone monolingual, that nonnative language also cast cultural and sexual suspicion on manhood itself such that the bilingual Englishman did well to keep his linguistic affectations to himself. In the context of these cultural attitudes toward foreign languages, Ivanhoe epitomizes Scott’s Saxon as much as the English gentleman of the early nineteenth century who wisely “displayed neither his foreign clothes nor his foreign tongue.”53 Such monolingualist discourses that targeted French as exclusively a foreign language might have compelled Scott to downplay both a long history of favorable relations between Scotland and France as well his own firsthand contact with the French language in his marriage to Charlotte Charpentier, one of many French émigrés to England in the 1790s.54 Likely consistent with his aspirations as English gentleman and national author, Scott underreports his own French facility, which only indirect evidence suggests he spoke at Abbotsford, perhaps only intimately with his wife.55 As much a means of providing privacy to Scott’s Romance language talents as advertising the Englishness of this presumably anonymous and demonstrably monolingual author, the linguistic medievalism that Scott constructed for Ivanhoe constitutes a site for our understanding of the nineteenth-century discourses that promoted the public and masculinized displays of animosity toward languages deemed foreign. Indeed, Scott was as equally invested in new colonialisms to which he saw neither his linguistic medievalism nor his English nationalism in conf lict

38

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

precisely because of that totalizing effect of conceivably one shared language within England when, as Linda Colley argues, empire-building abroad rendered Scotland and England equal partners.56 This sense of linguistic peerage against colonized others silently shapes the framing of Scott’s medievalism and realization of his national role as far from regional. With his regional difference effaced by linguistic nationalism, Scott seems to express most uncertainty not unsurprisingly in his period with class as he writes in his Memoirs in 1808, eleven years before the publication of Ivanhoe: I do not mean to say that my success in literature has not led me to mix familiarly in society much above my birth and original pretensions since I have been readily received in the first circles in Britain. But there is a certain intuitive knowledge of the world to which most well-educated Scotchmen are early trained that prevents them from being much dazzled by this species of elevation. A man who to good-nature adds the general rudiments of good-breeding, provided he rest contented with a simple and unaffected manner of behaving and expressing himself, will never be ridiculous in the best society and so far as his talents and information permit may be an agreeable part of the company.57

Thus, both proud and apologetic for origins he describes as “neither distinguished nor sordid [. . .] it was esteemed gentle as I was connected though remotely with ancient families both by my father’s and mother’s side,” Scott had already conceptualized his Englishness as value-added to his Scottish pedigree, which he cites as “a national prerogative as inalienable as his pride and his poverty.”58 If Scott exploited his regional affiliations and ancient lineage as features of his gentle life as laird of Abbotsford, his putatively anonymous identity as the “Author of Waverly” also allowed him to separate the literary earnings funding his aspirations as gentleman from the landed status that the income had purchased.59 With English the exclusive marker of national manhood by the nineteenth century, citizenship could cross classes, but that sense of imagined monolingual community did not also extend across genders. French language acquisition among English ladies for the specifically female art of conversation aligned neatly with fears of its feminizing perils. Equally in line with anti-France sentiment, the association of French with specifically female speech underscored its undesirability for men who were expected to speak plainly and economically.60 Consistent with expectations of monolingual masculine speech, Latin and Greek were ideal as dead languages to be read and written but unlikely spoken, thus helping the male student avoid the art of conversation specific to the ends of French language acquisition among English ladies.61

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

39

Within the years when the Grand Tour waned because of its association with refinement in French speech, domestic tourism grew in popularity since it offered freedom from acquisition or even contact. Increasingly the desired destination, Scotland offered a pilgrimage to a medieval past restricting few likely both due to its proximity and potential for ease of monolingual communication most especially in the Lowlands. Thus, just when such aristocratic practices as the Grand Tour and French language acquisition were coded as effeminate and increasingly avoided, so did the intersection of “English” and “gentleman” realign without their previously exclusive association to multilingual facility, landed status, and Continental experience. In likely sensitivity to these shifts from which he was a social benefactor, Scott adapts this realignment in the affiliations of the noble Englishman and the functions of English in another linguistic construction of Ivanhoe’s masculinity. In what appears at first read to be a consideration of classless monolingual solidarity, Scott depicts Ivanhoe strategically employing Saxon to divulge—and linguistically earmark for the reader— his true identity to Saxons. Still in disguise as the Pilgrim on his return from the Holy Land, the narrator informs us, Ivanhoe first reveals his Saxon identity to the swineherd Gurth, arguably the least among those present including Isaac—typically the victim of Norman anti-Semitism— and Cedric’s jester, Wamba, by their shared first language: “Nevertheless,” said the Pilgrim, in a commanding tone, “you will not, I think, refuse me that favour.” So saying, he stooped over the bed of the recumbent swine-herd and whispered something in his ear in Saxon. Gurth started up as if electrified. (60)62

Ivanhoe’s temporary alignment with the lowest swineherd—an intimacy marked by the proximity necessary to deliver a whisper—symbolically gestures to an affiliation based on shared language. Certainly, the ways in which this episode considers class, similar to the opening dialogue between Gurth and Wamba, were not only lessons in English language history for Scott’s first readers but likely also reflections of Scott’s own class-crossing experiences that would be framed against the “distinctions and impositions [. . .] vivid enough to the increasingly ‘class conscious’ Victorians.”63 More pertinently in imagining an English language past, such linguistic gestures—as well as the fact Cedric subsequently frees this thrall—serve to explain away slavery among “our forefathers” in the face of the fact such monolingualist solidarity was unlikely between Saxon lord and Saxon serf. With language the marker of national belonging in modern Englishness, however, such fictions of shared linguistic identity across

40

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

class can at least temporarily challenge varieties of difference across religions. In an encounter encapsulating negotiations of religion and language, Ivanhoe regains consciousness to find himself in the capable care of the daughter of Isaac, Rebecca, while the Normans hold them both captive at Torquilstone. An injured Ivanhoe begins to speak in what the narrator describes as the “Arabian tongue” to accommodate “the turban’d and caftan’d damsel who stood before him (235).” Rebecca, however, asserts her Englishness in Saxon-language choice: But here he was interrupted by his fair physician, a smile which she could scare suppress dimpling for an instant a face, her general expression was that of contemplative melancholy. “I am of England, Sir Knight, and speak the English tongue, although my dress and my lineage belong to another climate.” (235)

Already disrupting the opening to their very first exchange, the narrator interjects that the anti-Semitism of Ivanhoe’s day might have prevented their eventual marriage (and, of course, in the narrative it does). But, the narrator also adds that language, religiousness, and shared misery under Norman rule ultimately mark their alliance, however temporary. Indeed, similar feelings of commiseration with the Saxons Rebecca had already pressed upon Isaac when preparing to care for Ivanhoe: “[W]e may not indeed mix with them in banquet and in jollity; but in wounds and in misery, the Gentile becomes the Jew’s brother.” (231)

Despite her multilingualism and religious alterity, in the novel’s linguistic logic Rebecca can seemingly negotiate such affiliations as Saxon and Christian simply by virtue of embracing a language that bestows upon its speakers a democratic sense of plain fairness. Not at all curiously in the contemporary discourses Ivanhoe ref lects, English also functions as the first language of resistance to moral turpitude. Indeed, in her resistance to the predatory Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Rebecca opens her rejection of his sexual violence with English and only resorts to French when her situations demand persuasion and f lattery rather than sincerity. A heated multilingual exchange with Brian de Bois-Guilbert depicts Rebecca, unlike Ivanhoe at any point in the novel, speaking French: “It is well spoken,” replied the outlaw in French, finding it difficult probably to sustain in Saxon a conversation which Rebecca had opened in that language.

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

41

[. . .] “Thou art no outlaw,” said Rebecca, in the same language which he addressed her; “no outlaw had refused such offers. No outlaw in this land uses the dialect in which thou has spoken. Thou art no outlaw, but a Norman—a Norman, perhaps noble in birth—O be so in thy actions, and cast off this fearful masque of outrage and violence.” (197)

Gauging the switch from English to French as itself the futility of Rebecca’s linguistic resistance, the narrator’s characterization of the Templar Knight as French-speaking settles any question over his sexual depravity. Furthermore, the very fact the exchange takes place in French between a male and a female patently participates in discourses concerning French and conversation with ladies, a practice seen in the nineteenth century as dangerously effeminizing. Thus, while Rebecca’s French speech proficiency reproduces its appropriate acquisition among nineteenth-century women in England, her interlocutor’s French conversation with a woman compounds the absence of “manly” Saxon in the sexual indecency of the Norman’s unrestrained desires. This exchange between multilingual speakers continues in French as the narrator reminds readers that Rebecca replies “in the same language in which he addressed her” (197). To underline Rebecca’s vain attempts to enjoin the Norman to live up to the chaste and noble behavior she points out befits a Templar Knight, the narrator repeatedly reminds readers he is “an outlaw” as well as a “ruffian” (196–7) in his handling of Rebecca. As their heated and far from taciturn exchange in French turns to Brian de Bois-Guilbert’s assertion of his sexual domination over Rebecca, Scott further codes this Norman’s ignobility as French: “It were so indeed,” replied the Templar, laughing; “wed with a Jewess? Despardieux!—Not if she were the queen of Sheba. And know, besides, sweet daughter of Zion, that were the most Christian king to offer me his most Christian daughter with Languedoc for a dowry, I could not wed her. It is against my vow to love any maiden, otherwise par amours, as I will love thee. I am a Templar. Behold the cross of my holy order.” (197)

Here Scott stages Frenchness as disingenuity and vulgarity in switches from English to French words.64 While switches to despardieux (depardieux MED) in Middle English likely constituted euphemistic swearing by switching from English to French, in the Norman’s French it must be seen as an outright vulgarity in the context of Scott’s conveyings. Not unique in respect of such second language tusheries among Scott’s nonEnglish speakers in his other novels, its pairing with par amours displays his typical interest in language change as he reverses the process of the lexicalization of the loanword paramour to imagine an earlier form, par

42

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

amours.65 Unlike Rebecca’s entirely Englished French, which is not peppered by switches, Scott’s fiction of Norman French for Brian de Bois-Guilbert depicts as its censures his language and behavior from a nineteenth-century view of appropriate manhood as Englishness. In a ref lection of nineteenth-century cross-Channel antipathies, this representational strategy separates plain Saxon speakers from blasphemous Normans as much as it distinguishes nineteenth-century English speakers from French republicanism. Dramatizing languages in conf lict to those narrative and cultural ends for Ivanhoe that can declare the proper man the victor, Scott depicts strategies significantly more complex than the phenomenon of borrowing—that practice that famously irks Gurth and Wamba since it marks their subjugation—and language choice, which the linguistic construction of Ivanhoe and Prince John contrastively embodies. Like the ways in which language choice can mark solidarity or distance, the depiction of other phenomena such as switching between languages within interactions suggests that Scott aimed to explore multilingualism as quotidian practices in twelfth-century England. Not surprisingly, among the disenfranchised of twelfth-century England, English constitutes the linguistic code of justice and manly simplicity. At the same time that the narrator asserts that all Christians in twelfth-century England were equally anti-Semitic, as history would bear out with the expulsion of Jewish communities in 1290, he constructs Saxon as the lingua franca among Jews and Christians. Granted neither religious nor linguistic identity by their Norman persecutors, both Isaac and Rebecca find instead with the Saxons, despite their religious difference, a kind of solidarity, which is symbolically marked by language choice. As a transposition of present religious sentiment into the past, English national religiosity aligning Jew and Christian in Ivanhoe at first glance appears to position Anglophones against the atheistic principles of the French republic. Yet, as Michael Ragussis points out, the fact Ivanhoe and Rebecca cannot marry—an unhappy ending several later versions of the love triangle between Ivanhoe, Rebecca, and Rowena emend— nevertheless reconstitutes nation for Scott as the resistance of integration with linguistic others.66 If Ivanhoe demands to be read as “a treatise on nationality [. . .] intermingled with the novel’s themes of race,” this chapter has suggested the earliest readers of Scott’s first literary venture into medievalism also conceptualized nation as especially linguistic boundaries.67 By attending to contemporary discourses on the exclusive knowledge of a language as “iron-worded” proof of identity, Ivanhoe just as compellingly constitutes a treatise on linguistic nationalism. For our purposes of understanding how nineteenth-century discourses of borrowing and language

M E D I E VA L I S M A N D M O N O L I N G U A L I S M

43

acquisition inf luence historical portraits of English, the novel also teaches us about the cultural forces and gender biases that have driven the formulation of monolingualist Anglophone identity. In imagining the history for that identity as continuous from medieval to modern English, the contemporary dimensions of Englishness Ivanhoe ref lects construct the potency of medieval English speech, which had self-evidently proved to dissolve Norman control. In terms of what constituted the linguistic performance of manhood in his day, the timeless Englishness Scott attributes to his principal Saxon characters, Ivanhoe and his father Cedric, exemplifies the virile power of resolute monolingualism. For the English language “us” of Scott’s earliest and even also subsequent Anglophone readers, then, manly resistance to or self-suppression of multilingualism had founded and would continue to preserve an immemorial nation of immutable linguistic borders against the threat of foreign language others by speaking simply English. Despite the fact Scott popularized crosslinguistic antipathy as an Anglophone trait, his portrait could hardly predict the power such monolingual discourses would prove to have. Linguistic medievalism like Scott’s persists as proof, then, that whenever support for nationalist ideologies promote English, its speakers strategically memorialize its paternal purity in terms of premodern monolingualism often also proudly framed in origins of warrior-like resistance. Just as in Britain in Scott’s day, the time within which nation and language became inextricable from monolingual masculinism in the United States was when citizenship was conceivably only available to white males of considerable means.68 Thus, that English has only recently been explored as requiring official national status in the United States attests to the normativity of Anglonationalist monolingualism, which the gendering of English as masculine had sufficiently assured. So inscribed was that gender for English that Walt Whitman could imagine American English “brawny enough” for a national language in 1855. In those terms of monolingual boundaries, manly English itself made national destiny manifest.69 In the light of Scott’s own literary ambitions and linguistic selffashioning, the medievalism of Ivanhoe seems less profound for occurring in the years leading up to the founding of Middle English studies than in creating a popularized portrait of an anti-French English identity “to which all later depictions of Saxons and Normans, either directly or indirectly, owe a debt.” 70 Nevertheless, produced during the early energies around “semi-Saxon,” the popularity of this view of early contact between French and English as hostile has characterized constructions of a Middle English more tenacious against that foreign language invasion than it had initially proved to be, which modern discourses of English as a borrowing

44

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

and hospitable language have so successfully recuperated. More obviously, how Anglophones have imagined Middle English has often spoken to their own modern conceptions of language as politically demarcating national boundaries, with these boundaries in turn demanding linguistic allegiance among those within, often idealized as monolingual citizenship. Thus, even as Ivanhoe ref lected Scott’s assessment of his own position in early nineteenth-century discourses of nation, his historical romance— variously dismissed as inaccurate and fanciful—has proven to ref lect and even popularize a nationalist myth of the manly core of the English language as potentially borrowing from, but always resistant to, linguistic others.71 On account of the fictionalizing strategies of Scott’s clearly inf luential linguistic medievalism, it is hardly the historical inaccuracy of his twelfth-century portraits of the English language that I will argue should preoccupy language historians. But one modern language attitude seemingly inherited and more likely still preserved from discourses in Scott’s day will continue to concern us for the remainder of this book: the monolingual biases that drive our cultural and often critical habits of imagining medieval language contact as necessarily rife with conf lict. So habitual has that monolingualist view been that it was only very recently that scholars have conceded that our knowledge of medieval multilingualism has itself been a disciplinary enigma.72 If studies of Middle English have been even indirectly engaged by modern fictions of its manly resistance, then, it may be due in large part to the fact writers like Scott were simply ref lecting the discourses of monolingualism, nationalism, and colonialism that can still inform Anglophone culture. In popularizing an image of English as the language of the nation past and present, Scott’s construction of his period language also constitutes a reminder of the ways in which gender has marked the value of Anglophone monolingualism in its resistance to multilingualism. In imagining the character of English as a history of its resistance, Scott’s linguistic medievalism—a tangle of anachronisms for many language historians and literary critics—could place English above history in the ways it essentialized its speakers as collectively wary of intimate language contact. This idealization of English speech could more profitably in its popular aims be untroubled by Chaucer’s French lexis and, in many ways, minimize the power of medieval multilingualism by culturally citing the unquestionably manly core of English speakers past and present. Even more simply, that nineteenth-century paradigm that had reversed linguistic conquest could also ultimately suggest that Chaucer’s lexicon can stand witness to his attrition of French as the first of many victories of English over other languages.

CHAPTER TWO HENGIST’S TONGUE: A MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH

I

n the absence of national language legislation in many Anglophone nations until very recently, it has been popular discourses linking nation and gender at first in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that have informed and ref lected the monolingualist features of modern English. Most certainly fixed by the early nineteenth century, that belief in English language superiority offers an explanation for why modern histories of medieval origin as destined triumph of the language have been more in the making than any protectionist national language policies. In part at the expense of other languages, confidence in English has invited a celebration of its past; clearly, this self-congratulation had not also necessitated political guarantees of its future. In idealizing or rationalizing why Anglophones were more likely to borrow from other languages rather than acquire f luency in them, popular constructions of contact in the history of English could in many ways simply trump traditions often vexed by Chaucer’s French. But if linguistic nationalism could effectively recuperate the late-medieval history of English exposure to French by reading that intimate contact through the modern virtue of borrowing words from other languages, with what attitudes toward contact did late-medieval writers interpret the beginnings of their far less self-confident English? If late-medieval Anglophones had imagined an origin and history for their modest first language, it speaks to the voicelessness of medieval monolingualism that we can most easily find an English language witness to such a history in John Gower, that multilingual author most famous to modern readers for having written arguably the same poem in French, Latin, and English. Evidence for his own interventions near the end of his life suggests Gower had aimed at ensuring his literary posterity

46

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

by collectively commemorating Mirour de l’Omme, Vox Clamantis and Confessio Amantis as his multilingual oeuvre.1 With Confessio Amantis the most studied of his trilingual corpus since, however, Gower’s English seems to have exceeded even his own expectations for the singular success of any one of his major poems. But without the prejudice of the hindsight of English literary history, it has been possible to argue that each of these poems had constituted a very specific linguistic response on Gower’s part to changing political climates during the Hundred Years’ War, literary responses that Gower could only look back on afterward as a multilingual career.2 By the time Gower wrote the Confessio Amantis, then, it would appear that his having left the least prestigious language for last did not finally signal the overdue encroachment of English on domains previously reserved for Latin or largely preferred for French. Perhaps even more simply than that, his selection of English for the Confessio Amantis could have also constituted an expression of his own poetic confidence both in spite of and on account of that linguistic choice. In avoiding so immodest a posture, the prologue of the Confessio Amantis establishes that Gower’s selection of English for his third major poem was itself a gesture to English language affinity that negotiated and even seems to have emboldened his poetic undertaking: I wolde go the middel weie And wryte a bok betwen the tweie, Somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore, That of the lasse or of the more Som man mai lyke of that I wryte: And for that fewe men endite In oure englissh, I thenke make A bok for Engelondes sake [. . .] (17–24)3

Imagining an audience that the majority monolingual status of English did not also necessarily predict, Gower’s choice of a “middle weie”— gesturing to neither conventions in classical rhetoric nor varieties of English diction itself—seems to invoke vernacular solidarity by referring to that first language as shared (“oure”). Transparently the feature of the modesty topos, this hope for the readership of a “fewe men” also veils the sincerity of its desire for a wide audience; in effect, the multilingual poet can at least symbolically capitalize on shared first language identity among both his peers and those “fewe men,” that is, an imagined audience of perhaps both Anglophone monolinguals and literate bilinguals. However, the practicality of this shared animus of vernacularity seems at first clarified but, as this chapter will later argue, problematized by his

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

47

dedication of the Confessio Amantis to “Engelond” by selecting English itself. Thus, even as trilingual Gower seemed to call on linguistic patriotism to grant license to this project, we shall see that this nationalism could only invoke a history of English that seemed as much to compromise as well as complement his literary objectives. As the opening observations of this chapter suggest, literary sleight of hand and the nature of medieval multilingualism compound the problems for our modern reading of the linguistic procedures the poem invokes. According to recent arguments, switches between Latin and English throughout the poem, witnessed by Latin verse headings as well as Latin marginalia in Confessio Amantis manuscripts, confound a monolingualist solution for its interpretation as either curbed by the monolithic authority of Latin or subverted by English in the vernacular literary field over French.4 For the comparatively low status of English, of which its contact with Latin would have always constituted a reminder, Gower seems to have made at least these initial provisions in his opening English language lines. As we might well guess for multilingual Gower, if English drew its status relative to his Latin and likely also French, he most broadly anticipates the literary limits of “oure englissh” by addressing that relational status in the opening Latin verse in the lines before the English of the Prologue. Indeed, his Latin opening and its subsequent shift to English demonstrate the juxtaposition of these languages is not at cross-purposes. Far from compromising the “middle weie,” these second language lines—part classical invocatio, part homegrown riddle, yet all Latin meter—elaborately own up to and even heighten the linguistic tensions and classical traditions overshadowing his choice to write verse of epic length in English: Torpor, ebes sensus, scola parua labor minimusque Causant quo minimus ipse minora canam: Qua tamen Engisti lingua canit Insula Bruti Anglica Carmente metra iuuante loquar. Ossibus ergo carens que conterit ossa loquelis Absit, et interpres stet procul oro malus. [Dull wit, slight schooling, torpor, labor less, Make slight the themes I, least of poets, sing. Let me, in Hengist’s tongue, in Brut’s isle sung, With Carmen’s help, tell forth my English verse. Far hence the boneless one whose speech grinds bones, Far hence be he who reads my verses ill.]5

Before the poem shifts to the English, for which Gower makes a display of begging pardon preemptively here, the invocatio calls attention to the

48

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

divergent status of English and Latin in late-medieval diglossia: English must have the help of Carmen, classical muse of song and Latin letters; the English verse primarily comprising the body of the Confessio invites its framing in Latin verse as well as marginalia; and, finally, the poet of little learning—little Latin, one must assume—hopes no one literate, that is with ideally Latin as an acquired language, think poorly of his English verse, a posture through which he ostensibly solicits forgiving readers. However, at the same time this Latin invocation oversees interpretation in any language, its literary play invites the opposing status of Latin and the vernacular to converge but not cancel each other out: the classical convention of naming a poetic forefather nods here not to Virgil or Ovid but to the English language itself, described in the invocatio not in that traditional naming of a poet but in a seemingly opaque reference to the putative progenitor of Gower’s late-medieval English, Hengist, metonymically known here exclusively through his orality. To write in what is most commonly speech—the phrase Engsti lingua seems to say so incisively—the poet must nevertheless demonstrate his literate training as Latin. In his Latin verse here, Gower pronounces his skills in conventions that suggest this project has little to do with either calculating the risks of writing in English or fear of any mixed reception for what would have been his third long poem among yet other shorter works supporting his literary reputation. Yet the fact that these gestures were made at all indicates something was indeed at stake in what might appear to modern readers as the most culturally obtuse of his references and riddles in these Latin lines. Does the invocation of a progenitor of English modestly request license for his vernacular project? Or does the naming of Hengist boldly legitimize his own poetic prowess? Of course, coming down on either of these proposals for our understanding of Gower’s conception of his English through or against its prevailing status first demands establishing what medieval language attitudes generally did frame that figure of the earliest English. In the allusion to Virgil and epic itself in the opening Latin lines in the prologue, the fact that the poet establishes he will sing of Insula Bruti naturally directs us to Brut traditions for a possible answer. Indeed, a very likely source for his reference to specifically the language of Hengist could have been the vastly popular Anglo-Norman Brut—translated into English only after Gower’s day—whose narrative like other Brut chronicles included the arrival of Hengist and his Saxons among the Britons at the invitation of their king, Vortigern, in the late fifth century. Unlike chronicles that treated first contact between Saxons and Britons, however, the narrator of this thirteenth-century prose Brut conspicuously identifies that Saxon tongue as English. Appropriately enough

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

49

in an episode of crosslinguistic communication, the naming of English occurs during the narration of British King Vortigern’s introduction to the Saxon drinking ritual of “wassail”: E quant vint au seir qe le roi entra sa chamber e deueroit cucher, Ronewenne, la fille Engist, vint oue vne coupe dor en sa main e sa mist deuant le roi a genulz e dit, “Sire Roi, wessail.” E le roi ne sauoit qei il fust a dire, ne quei il deueroit respoundre, pur ceo qil ne nul de ses Brutons ne sauoient vnquore entender ne parler engleis, mes parlerent mesmes tele langage come les Brutons parlent vnquore. [And when evening came so that the king entered his chamber and was about to go to bed, Engist’s daughter Ronewenne came with a golden cup in her hand and went down on her knees before the king and said, “Lord King, wassail.” And the king did not know what it meant, or how he was supposed to answer, for neither he nor any of his Britons knew yet how to understand or speak English, but they spoke the same language that the Britons still speak.]6

As if the popularity of “wassail” in the narrator’s day were indication enough of the survival of “engleis,” his initial clarifications seem fixed not on what Rowena says but what the Britons still speak.. If this Brut confirms “engleis” was as much Rowena’s as her father’s language, it cannot tell us more about what might have particularized Hengist’s own speech for his tongue to have had such historical and cultural resonance for Gower. But with confirmation at least that medieval audiences understood the language of the Saxons as the earliest English, we can tentatively consider again what that invocation aims to establish for the Confessio Amantis as a vernacular project. Most plainly, it seems Gower’s Latin naming of the father of English underlines the literary traditions and cultural practices that distinguish those languages in medieval diglossia. To put it another way, the clever incongruities of these lines, which embolden the project overall in a ref lection of the poet’s obvious bilingual and, therefore, literate talents, must rely on the symbolic divergence of Latin and English even though their shared textual space belies this divergence at least in practical terms. Although the strategy of referring to the English language as Engisti lingua might authoritatively state in Latin what is at stake in writing in English, referring to the first speaker of English in Latin forms only part of the intertextual reference here: imagining that the father of English closely resembles the classical Latin figures to whom medieval poets often bowed constitutes the heart of both Gower’s vernacular selfdeprecation and multilingual self-confidence.7 But these initial observations seem far from entirely satisfactory, especially if we press on to investigate whether the absence of an English

50

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

literary history as illustrious as that of Latin forces Gower’s vernacular hand to invoke at least a kind of medieval history of the English language. If Gower appears to contrast the status of English and Latin through a gesture of such dense referential meaning, the phrase Engisti lingua clearly demands further investigation of the sources that commonly account for the language, and, even more specifically, for the very speech of the putative father of English in late-medieval writing. To determine the textual, linguistic, and cultural reference points on which Gower might have drawn here, it will be necessary to focus exclusively in the coming pages on the figure of Hengist. In considering literary authority as never far from multilingual power, Gower’s Latin naming of English seems more than just a knowing literary wink; rather, as this chapter will argue, Gower was invoking a centuries old historical narrative that had already engaged intimately in the contemplation of the conf licting status of languages in late-medieval England. We will see that Gower, likely less reliant on the Anglo-Norman Brut version of Hengist’s arrival than on other Brut narratives, cites a tradition far more complex in multilingual negotiation than simply naming Saxon the earliest “engleis.” Yet in addition to exploring how the story of Hengist might have constituted a medieval history of the beginnings of the English language on Brutus’ isle, this chapter will go on to consider those historical traditions and language conventions that must also set limits on our reading of Gower’s naming of English as Engisti lingua.8 That endeavor involves more than solely proving that medieval writers believed Hengist spoke the earliest version of “engleis”; it demands particularizing those features of Hengist’s speech that historical narratives had so carefully preserved as themselves as much a product of contact and conf lict as Gower’s Latin invocation of the father of his English. Based on Gower’s own obvious multilingual preoccupations, the question of which sources inform his reference to Hengist’s tongue rests—perhaps surprisingly—upon examining a tradition that enjoyed, at least initially, a more specialized Latinate and bilingual audience than Gower appears to enjoin for the Confessio Amantis: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britannie (c. 1138). Although a source itself for the Anglo-Norman Brut, Geoffrey’s focus on Hengist in his Historia had engaged in a far more vivid linguistic representation of the putative father of medieval English. Stretching across the Norman Conquest, a multilingual tradition of depicting Hengist’s first contact with the Britons had stemmed from especially one of Geoffrey’s sources, the Psuedo-Nennius (Historia Brittonum c. 840) rather than his others, Gildas (De Excidio Britanniae et Conquestu c. 540), Bede (Historia Ecclesiastica 731), and the British authority Geoffrey described, perhaps

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

51

ironically, as librum vetustissimum.9 To whatever degree Geoffrey’s predominantly British history put “much of Anglo-Saxon history in the shade,” his centering of the early Saxon language presence in England on Hengist effectively preserved even earlier themes of linguistic conf lict to which equal attention was paid in subsequent Latin, French, and English versions of Geoffrey’s history throughout the Middle English period.10 Not necessarily a distant ref lection and, therefore, covert critique of the more recent Norman invasion, Geoffrey’s reliance on Gildas and PsuedoNennius for a Latin history of the Britons nevertheless lent textual permanence and temporal resonance to the Britain of Arthur for Geoffrey’s day.11 Like his sources, Geoffrey was clearly untroubled by the absence of the Celtic languages of the history’s principle characters. However, even while writing in Latin, Geoffrey chose to dramatize the linguistic gulf between Saxons and Britons themselves in a multilingual episode, the Battle at Amesbury, which he had clearly expanded from the ninthcentury Psuedo-Nennian history.12 In his retelling of the events building up to that encounter, which would see the Saxons massacre the Britons at the “Night of the Long Knives,” Geoffrey’s fictionalization of Saxon speech subsequently characterized a multilingual tradition that staged the origins as well as status of late-medieval English in his narrative terms of Hengist’s tongue.13 With a view to exploring the medieval construction of the origins of English, our examination of Geoffrey’s multilingual evaluation of language contact as history demands reading medieval historical writing as texts open to both literary and linguistic scrutiny.14 Holding up to even a cursory overview, Geoffrey’s narrative as such obviously presented language history as the change of the status of a language due to the aftermath of conquest.15 In the most overt terms, the representation of language contact in the Hengist tradition, which Geoffrey revived in his Latin history, patently affirms and thematizes the often characteristic difference and social distance between the languages of the rulers and the ruled. For bilingual or trilingual readers of texts like his history, then, invasion inevitably produces divergence in the status of vernacular languages whether Roman and Briton, Saxon and Briton, or Norman and Saxon. If Geoffrey’s postconquest revival of this episode of the arrival of the Saxons provided a historical explanation for the subordination of English after the Norman Conquest as punishment for what we will see the tradition preserves as linguistic deceitfulness, it was not immediately evident. However, adaptations of Geoffrey’s depiction of crosslinguistic communication in subsequent centuries do suggest that the low prestige status of the English language after the Norman Conquest was even more widely conceptualized through the figure of the first English speaker.

52

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

A marker of the inevitability of invasion and succession, a narrative centered on Hengist’s speech embodied in effect a history for English across what was conceived by the fourteenth century as the French divide the Norman Conquest imposed. When the Latin narrative of Historia Regum Britannie turns to depict the events leading up to the conquest of the Britons, the Saxon Hengist and the Briton Vortigern have established what would be in especially terms of textual space a short-lived alliance bridging their languages. Even at that point in the narrative in the First Variant Version as in others, Geoffrey constructs contact in terms of the cultural and linguistic outcome of invasion. Unlike the Anglo-Norman Brut, this cultural etymology introduces the theme of language and succession—one it will sustain throughout the Hengist episode—through Saxon place-names (§99) and days of the week (§98) still in use after the Norman Conquest (and to this day). In Geoffrey’s invention of the “wassail” toast not found in PsuedoNennius but clearly compelling enough for its subsequent adoption in the Anglo-Norman Brut, this innovative dialogue serves to introduce an even broader array of strategies for stylizing his themes of language contact and conquest. In what are, in effect, not anachronistic but proleptic signs of that succession, Geoffrey linguistically stages the features of those early exchanges between Briton and Saxon; a switch from the Latin narrative to an English quotation underscores the linguistic gulf between these cultures as they first begin to forge an alliance: Postquam regiis epulis refecti sunt, egressa est puella de thalamo filia Hengisti, aureum uas uino plenum manu ferens, accedensque propius regi f lexis genibus lingua sua ait: “Washeil, lauerd king!” At ille mox uisa puella, miratus est faciem decoram cum uenusto corpore incaluit. Interrogauitque interpretem suum quid puella sermone suo dixerat, et quid eodem sermone respondere deberet. Cui interpres, “Uocauit te,” ait, dominum regum et uocabulo salutacionis honorauit. Quod autem ei respondere debes ita est, “Drincheil.” Respondens Uortigernus ait, “Drincheil” et iussit puellam potare recepitque cyphum de manu eius et ex more Saxonico osculatus est eam et potauit. Ab illo die usque in hodiernum diem remansit consuetudo illa in Britannia inter conuiuantes et potantes ut per “Wasseil” et “Drincheil” se inuicem salutarent. Rex autem multo diuersi generis potu inebriatus instigante Sathana puellam adamauit et ut sibi daretur a patre postulauit, licet gentilis et non christiana esset. Hengistus ergo cognita regis leuitate consuluit Horsum fratrem suum ceterosque maiores natu de gente sua qui omnes partier in unum consenserunt, uidelicet ut fieret regis peticio et peteret ille Cancie prouinciam in dotem dari puelle. Nec mora data est puella Uortigerno et Cancia Hengisto, nesciente Gorangono comite qui in eadem regnabat.

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

53

[After they were refreshed by that royal feast, Rowena, the daughter of Hengist, came forth from her rest, bearing in her hand a gold cup filled with wine and approaching the king in modest pose said in her tongue “Washeil, lord king.” Moved by the girl on first sight, his passion grew at her beautiful face along with her comely figure. He asked an interpreter what the maiden had said in her words and with what he ought to respond in that same language. His interpreter replied to him, She called you lord king and honored you in words of greeting. What you ought to say in reply is this, “Drincheil.” Responding, then, Vortigern said “Drincheil” and he ordered the maid to drink and he took the cup from her hands, and following the Saxon cup he kissed her and drank. From that day forward, the custom has remained in Britain among revellers that they greet each other in turn with “Wasseil” and “Drincheil.” But king Vortigern drunk from kinds of drink grew excessively desirous of the young woman with Satan’s prodding and he asked that Hengist give his daughter to him, even though she was a pagan and not a Christian. Thereupon, recognizing the weakness of the king, Hengist consulted his brother Horsa and the rest of the his native born leaders who equally agreed that what should become of the king’s request would be that Hengist ask for Kent in exchange for his daughter. Without delay the daughter was given to Vortigern and Kent to Hengist without the knowledge of earl Goranganus who ruled over that region.] (§100)16

In an obvious contrast of typology as marker of the cultural differences of Briton and Saxon, switches in languages in the toasting episode introduce themes through multilingual strategies. Switches from Latin narrative to Saxon “wasseil” and “drincheil” pronounce the foreignness of Hengist’s tongue to the king of the Britons and, not wholly incidentally I will argue later, to the language of the Historia itself. In its combination of historical, literary, and linguistic devices, that narrative represents through these shifts from Latin Vortigern’s loss of power by his new found love for Saxon drink equaled by passion for a woman whose foreign language phrases predict an end to the dominion of the Britons. In an act of seemingly both sexual and linguistic dissolution presented as historic in proportion, Vortigern’s repetition of that toast in a language that was not his own preserves for posterity even his initial cooperation as submission to foreign language domination. In a prolepsis of the loss of British power, the site of English intrusion on the narrative of Latin—a language impervious itself to invasion—neatly symbolizes the beginnings of the “passage of dominion” in even initial contact between language groups. If Geoffrey’s invention of the “wassail” episode introduces the theme of linguistic difference, his adoption of multilingual strategies for depicting

54

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

open conf lict between Britons and Saxons, which he borrows from the Psuedo-Nennian Historia Brittonum, builds on the lack of promise— obvious in retrospect—between those opening negotiations in curtailing conf lict. So fraught are the linguistic tensions of that alliance that Geoffrey marks its final end with the burst of Hengist’s voice from the normative language of historical writing. Whereas Hengist speaks only once in Historia Brittonum, Geoffrey’s representation features Hengist’s speech twice through two switches from Latin to English.17 In the depiction of that encounter, which would prove to symbolize the status of English for late-medieval audiences, Hengist plans on decisively defeating the Britons by surprising them in a number of equally nefarious ways: Interea Hengistus noua prodicione usus precepit suis commilitonibus quos ad id facinus ex omni multitudine elegerat ut unusquisque cultrum ex utraque parte incidentem infra caligas in uaginis reconderet, et cum uentum foret ad colloquium, dato a se hoc signo prodicionis, “Nimet eowre seaxas!,” statim extractis cultris uniuersos occuparent inermes et interficerent. Nec mora die prestituta, que fuit kalendis Maii, iuxta cenobium Ambrii conuenerunt Britones et Saxones, sicut condictum fuerat, sine armis pacem constituere. Ut autem horam prodicioni sue ydoneam nactus fuisset Hengistus, uociferatus est lingua sua: “Nimet eoyre seaxas!” Ipse autem per clamidem arripiens tenuit donec in alios scelus perficeretur. Extractis ilioc cultris premoniti fuerant, universos fere principes nil tale metuentes iugulauerunt circiter .ccclx. omnes barones aut consules. [Meanwhile, with new treason in mind Hengist undertook a plan for his men whom he had drawn together for this act of villany: that each bear his long knife hidden in his boot within its sheath, and when the time for their parley with the Britons approached, with this signal of treason given by Hengist “Nimet eowre seaxas!,” his men with weapons drawn would immediately overcome and kill every unarmed Briton. Not much later on that appointed day, which was the Kalends of May, the Britons and Saxons convened next to the monastery at Amesbury, that they might discuss the terms of peace as was agreed with out arms. But when Hengist lit upon a suitable moment for his treachery, he called out in his tongue, “Nimet eoyre seaxas!.” However, Hengist himself held the king, covering him with his cloak, until the crime against the rest of the Britons was carried out. Thereupon, with their long knives drawn, the Saxons followed their plan cutting the throats of the British leaders—about four hundred and sixty barons and earls—who suspected nothing like this at all.] (§104)

The narrative evaluation of Hengist’s actions opens this passage with a comment on the episode as evidence for his deceits. Making one part in this noua prodicione patently clear are the weapons Saxons conceal according to Hengist’s earlier instructions. In multiple versions of the

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

55

Historia, this obvious focus on the weapon from which the Saxons derived their name ref lects Geoffrey’s adoption of the Pseudo-Nennian Historia Brittonum in which the daggers are hidden sub pede: [. . .] unusquisque artauum suum sub pede in medio ficonis sui poneret. [Hengist told all his followers to hide their daggers under their feet in their shoes.]18

Participating in a more widely attested manuscript tradition than the First Variant, one vulgate version of the Historia offers a potentially telling revision of this Saxon subterfuge: [. . .] unusquisque longum cultrum ad latus more suorum habens uoci sue obediret. [. . . each one holding his long knife by his side according to their custom would heed his command.]

In Neil Wright’s discussion of this revision that he finds in Bern, Burgerbibliothek, M.S. 568, the change from the knives hidden sub pede or intra caligas to simply ad latus more suorum habens [by their side according to their custom] suggests a change most convincingly attributed to its scribe as an aim not to downplay Saxon treachery outright but to stress that their rule over Britain was legitimate.19 Clearly, an allegiance here based on Germanic affiliation between the Bern scribe and the history of Saxon migration he cannot disinterestedly preserve invites speculation. However, in the representation of language contact and crosslinguistic conf lict in this episode in the First Variant version, the language of Hengist’s command even more obviously registers both the treachery of the attack and its clear success.20 At both a literal as well as symbolic level in the feigned peace parlay between users of typologically distinct languages, the narrative establishes that the signal in itself was likely enough to take the Britons by surprise. That is, if bilingual or trilingual audiences read Saxon treachery as a verbal sign unknown to the Britons, the switch from the normative Latin narrative of historical writing to Hengist’s command symbolically sustains the theme of carefully orchestrated betrayal. Although their hidden knives make the massacre measurably more successful for the Saxons, the typological fêlure—the obvious switch in languages from Latin to something symbolically English—thematizes the success of the surprise attack predicted by its very linguistic difference. Given the unsuccessful if valiant resistance from the Britons in this episode, one can only read their inability to survive this attack and succession itself as sufficient proof of the effectiveness of the Saxon plan.21

56

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

With likely little interest in minimizing that portrait of Saxon deceitfulness, the Anglo-Norman Brut we have already consulted above nevertheless wholly omits the depiction of Hengist’s signal in its monolingual narration of those same events: Mes Engist auoit garni ses chiualers e comande priuement qe chesqun de eux dust mettre en sa chauce vn lung cotel. E quant il dirroit, “Beaus seignurs, ore est temps de parler de amour,” chesqun tantost sakiroit son cotel e occiroit vn Brutoun. E issint le firent, e occirent iloqe [iii] cent lxi chiualer, e oue grante peine les autres eschaperent. [But Engist had prepared his knights and commanded secretly that each of them should put a long knife in his boot. And when he said, “Fair lords, now is the time to speak of love,” each should instantly draw his knife and kill a Briton. And so they did, and there they killed 361 knights, and the others escaped with great difficulty.]22

Not only substituting an entirely new line that plays on the irony of the feigned parlay as “love day” rather than representing the linguistic dimensions of Saxon trickery, the Anglo-Norman Brut does not depict Hengist’s traditional signal as that earliest English of record as well. Avoiding shifting across languages outright, this version limits its interest in cultural etymology to that first contact represented by “wassail” and to a seemingly ill-executed calque on the Anglo-Saxon practice of “love day” here [“temps de parler de amour”]. With little interest within that Hengist episode in symbolically depicting the linguistic outcome of conquest, the Anglo-Norman Brut does not dramatize conf lict in multilingual terms. In considering the historical dimension of contact as eventual conquest, the linguistic preoccupations of Geoffrey’s Latin Historia explicitly focus on representing one very obvious potential for conf lict between cultures. The historical contemplation and multilingual representation of the Saxons at Amesbury vividly depicts that power on which speakers can capitalize by selecting their first language in the presence of linguistic others. Through that ingroup language choice, the Saxons as “we” speakers effectively exclude “they” addressees of different first language proficiency, specifically here the Britons. In this passage most notably, the switch from the Latin narrative to a demonstrably Saxon tongue portrays the dissociation between speakers who are linguistically at odds. At the same time even this fictional construction of cross-cultural communication could incorporate the dynamic of dissociative language choice, it would have engaged the predispositions of late-medieval audiences already sensitive to the ways in which multiple language negotiation

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

57

defined belonging and exclusion in multilingual culture. It could be argued that the very act of writing in both Latin and English downplays their opposing status.23 However, the juxtaposition of tongues so diglossically opposed within an episode centered on violence and succession suggests the shift from textual Latin to oral English underlines the linguistic tension they depict at the very site of violence, that is, that weapon from which the Saxons took their name, those “saxes” most effectively drawn by the first English speakers and commemorated for history at the command of Hengist’s tongue.24 Minor adaptations of Geoffrey’s Hengist episode throughout the latemedieval period in vernacular versions of his history typically preserve that multilingual fixation on the earliest English. Unlike the Anglo-Norman Brut, French and English translations stemming from the Variant Version of the Historia in the chronicles of Wace, Laʒamon, Pierre de Langtoft, Robert of Gloucester, and Robert Mannyng continued to reproduce the extended linguistic and thematic features of code-switching characteristic of Geoffrey’s Hengist.25 Despite any innovation these vernacular versions might have invited, their textual images of diglossia continued to cast the symbolic status of English in sharp relief not to Latin but rather to French. In their multilingual engagement with the Hengist episode, these writers continued to offer representations of language contact as a source of conf lict in which switches between languages were more than merely literary symbolism. As we examine these vernacular narratives centered on Hengist, it will emerge that their representation of the Saxon invasion as linguistic conquest variously reproduced and elaborated on a medieval history of English—however negative, irreversible or discontinuous— before its own submission to conquest. The first verse translation of the First Variant Version, Wace’s Roman de Brut (1155), preserved at the same time it refined the language contact portrait of Hengist’s tongue. Born in Jersey to a noble family and trained exclusively in Caen and Îl-de-France as a self-identified clerc lisant, Wace would have likely been disinterested in what he describes as “Saissuns” as an even distant ref lection of a language he himself had little need to acquire. Engaged nonetheless by issues of contact and crosscultural communication, Wace expands the “wassail” episode in his French Brut by addressing the necessity of a talented translator in such cross-cultural encounters. In addition to representing the language of the toast Geoffrey had first introduced to the narrative, Wace f leshes out an identity for Vortigern’s translator, Keredic, “li premiers des Bretuns/Ki sout le language as Saissuns” [“the first of the British to know the Saxon tongue”].26 For both the benefit of Vortigern and the reception of Wace’s text, Keredic serves as a figure of the realities of language contact as well

58

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

as a device that alternately serves to interpret “Saissuns” for as well as distance English itself from Wace’s French language audiences. While in the most literal sense in the diegesis of the episode Keredic’s bilingualism ensures his livelihood and survival in the opening negotiations when cultures first meet, his position speaks also to specifically vernacular bilingualism as an inevitable product of contact itself. Wace continues to build upon an especially attuned multilingual sensitivity to language and power in his introduction to that meeting between Briton and Saxon on the Salisbury plain at Amesbury. In an aside that draws his audience into sympathy with the Britons, Wace’s narrator underlines the treachery linguistic difference makes possible—“Ki se creinsist de traïtur?” [Who suspected treachery?]—in order to limit interpretation of the Saxon ploy exclusively to deceit: As granz plaines de Salesbire, Lez l’abeïe d’Ambresbire, Vindrent de dous par a cel plai, Le jur des Kalendes de mai. Henguist ot tuz ses compainuns Bien enseinniez e bien sumuns Qu’en lur chauces cultels portassent Tel ki de ambes parz trenchassent. Quant il as Bretuns parlereient E tuit entremellé serreient, “Nim eure sexes!” criereit, Que nuls des Bretuns n’entendreit; Chescuns dunc sun cultel preïst E sun procain Bretun ferist. Quant tuit furent al parlement Entremellé comunement, E li Bretun entr’els seeient Ki desarmé, sez arme, esteient, Henguist “Nem eure sexes!” cria; Chescuns dunc sun cultel sacha E chescuns feri emprés sei. Henguist, ki fu juste le rei, Le traiset a sei par le mantel Si laissa faire le maisel. E cil ki tindrent les cultels Parmi chapes, parmi mantels, Parmi piz e parmi buëles Firent passer les alemeles. Cil cheent envers e adenz; Sempres en i ot quatre cenz

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

59

E seissante en la place morz Des plus riches e des plus forz. [On wide Salisbury Plain, next to Amesbury Abbey, the two sides came for conference, on the first day of May. Hengist had instructed and taught all his friends to be sure to carry sharp two-edged knives in their boots. When they were mingling with the Britons and talking to them, he would call out: “Grab your knives!,” which none of the Britons would understand. Each would then take his knife and strike the Briton next to him. When they were all at the parley, mingling together, and the Britons, unarmed and defenceless, were seated, Hengist cried, “Grab your knives!” Then each drew his knife and struck the one nearest him. Hengist, next to the king, held him fast by the cloak, and let the carnage happen. And those who held the knives ran the blades through the cloaks, through mantles, through chests and bowels. The Britons fell over and down. Soon there were four hundred and sixty dead there, from among the noblest and mightiest.]27

With Hengist’s sparing his son-in-law, Vortigern, the only Saxon act of mercy (and that, more likely a matter of kinship or ransom), the elaboration from the First Variant’s description of a single collective knife thrust to Wace’s repetitions in “Parmi chapes, parmi mantels,/Parmi piz e parmi buëles” [through the cloaks, through mantles, through chests and bowels] vividly tallies the damage, fixing further the metonymy of treacherous “sexes” to each Saxon’s every blow. Adding to the success of the second language signal, attention drawn to the Britons as “desarmé, sez arme” in the line immediately before Hengist’s foreign language command underlines the futility of resisting both that attack and eventually Saxon conquest itself. Like the normative Latin of his source, Geoffrey’s Historia, Wace’s French casts its literary prestige through the verse of his Roman de Brut into which “Saissuns” itself introduces textual fissure by dramatizing the inevitability of linguistic succession.28 That Hengist’s tongue did not fare well in the French of Wace seems hardly surprising. Yet, in the diglossia of late-medieval England, even the likely allegiances of an English language account of the Saxon tongue did not invite revision. In ways that contrast modern portraits of the history of English, Laʒamon’s version of the tradition of Hengist’s tongue in his English language Brut negates a proud origin for the language even while his alliterative and formulaic poetic language seems to hearken back to it so nostalgically. In supporting the multilingual dimensions of the Hengist tradition, the two extant manuscripts of Laʒamon’s Brut dated to the second half of the thirteenth century are identical despite their stylistic differences. As is well known, Cotton Caligula A.ix preserves Norse regionalisms as well as both thirteenth-century archaisms and

60

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

archaisms invented by the poet; in a thorough reversal in style and diction, Cotton Otho C.xiii replaces the native lexemes and alliterative verse of the Caligula Brut with the French laden language and literary practices that had already infused English itself by Laʒamon’s day. In the disciplinary coupling of literary and linguistic history, modern readings of the language of Caligula as antiquarian and even nationalist in sentiment has warranted critical disinterest in Otho.29 In a linguistic consideration of the Hengist episode in both witnesses, however, it seems clear that their shared lack of revision of the pejorative depiction of his tongue negates any suggestion that either scribe could have had the interests of framing a better origin for their English in mind. If the desire for a more noble beginning for English than Hengist’s treacherous tongue was culturally possible for the Caligula or Otho scribe, medieval multilingualism and the conservative nature of medieval historiography that preserved the language contact features of the Hengist tradition made such radical revision unlikely if not unimaginable. Chief ly because he selected English for his Brut, Laʒamon was compelled to situate his project at that intersection of languages to which his mention of English, Latin, and French sources attest in his proem.30 Clearly sensitive to the power of French and the postconquest bilingualism it occasioned among the most fortunate of native speakers of English, the Caligula Laʒamon’s Englishing of Wace simply had no platform on which to contest its source text’s French language vision of the Saxon past. Consistent with his faithful if exhaustive expansions on Wace, the Caligula Brut exacerbates rather than alleviates the problematic beginnings of a tongue whose textual representation only his multilingual powers of translation could make possible. In addition to the attention to crosslinguistic contact Wace paid to such necessities as “latimers” like Keredic, the English of Laʒamon further pronounces the matter of linguistic difference by strategically expanding on the depiction of Saxon speech in Rowena’s arrival at Vortigern’s hall: Reowen sæt a cneowe and cleopede to þan kinge, and þus ærest sæide in Ængelene londe: “Lauerd king wæs hæil. For þine kime ich æm uæin.” Þe king þis ihærde, and nuste what heo seide. [Rouwenne knelt down and, addressing the king, spoke these words for the first time in England]: “Lauerd king wæs hæl. For þine kime ich æm uæin.” [The king, hearing this, did not understand what she said.]31

While the translators of this edition of Caligula enliven the narration of the code-switch in their juxtaposition of modern and medieval English, the poet’s aside (the king “nuste what heo seide”) speaks to a recognition

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

61

of the loss of multilingual realism his English language poem especially produced for this episode. In likely awareness of their Anglophone reception, both Caligula and Otho seem to anticipate audiences nevertheless frustrated by the loss of that typological difference that Geoffrey’s Latin and Wace’s French preserve as a functional feature of cross-cultural contact. Again in the lines leading up to the toasting ceremony, Laʒamon reiterates Vortigern’s British monolingualism to account for the depiction of his words to Rowena in the English narration of the text.32 Perhaps because its meaning is transparent as the language of narration as well as the tongue of the Saxons, a third person narrator does not recount the events of the toast itself.33 Like Wace, Laʒamon presents Keredic as the voice explaining the tradition to Vortigern; unlike Wace, however, Laʒamon provides Vortigern with a reply to Rowena, which follows Keredic’s translation of the events at hand: Þis iherde Uortiger —of alchen uuele he wes war— and seide hit an Bruttisc (ne cuðe he nan Ænglisc): “Maiden Rouwenne, drink bluðeliche þenne.” [Vortiger—he was skilled in every evil practice—hearing this, replied, speaking in the British tongue (he knew no English): “Then drink with pleasure, lady Rouwenne.]34

Despite or perhaps on account of his French literariness, this rendering of the tongue of the Britons in English the Otho version of the Brut had no interest in challenging: Þis ihorde Vortiger of eche vuele he was war. and saide hit on Bruttesse ne couþe he noht on Englisse. Mayde Rowenne dring bloþeliche þanne. 35

Partially due to the lack of typological difference between the language of the poem and the language of the Saxons, both versions must indirectly explain rather than represent their linguistic difference. By moralizing on Vortigern’s sexual and political interests in Rowena, Laʒamon effectively expands the portrait of the Saxons as tricksters to their most famous female as well. With the trust of the Britons now obtained in that ceremony with Rowena herself as a pledge of peace in marriage to Vortigern, her subsequent poisoning of the king’s son while uttering that same “wassail” thematically compounds the duplicity of the Saxon tongue in Laʒamon’s vernacular representation of the earliest English.36 If the lack of typological if not diachronic difference between the language of narration and the tongue of Hengist negligibly impedes the traditional dramatization of the episode as crosslinguistic, the text goes to

62

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

no lengths at all to challenge its place in the Galfridian tradition of conf lating the blades and tongues of the Saxons. Although the Caligula Brut omits the content of the command that Hengist divulges to the Saxons before their ultimate meeting with the Britons, that version does not sacrifice making very clear the character and intent of the speaker himself: [. . .] Hængest þe leod-swike þus he his gon learen: þat ælc nome a long sax and læiden bi his sconke, wiðinne his hose, þer he hit mihte hæle. [Hengist, the betrayer of nation, advised his men thus: that each should take a long dagger and place it against his calf, inside his leggings, where he could conceal it.]37

Equal to Caligula’s disinterest in revising the tradition of the first speaker of English despite the linguistic allegiance his alliterative verse and native lexicon conceivably demands, the Otho redactor maintains Hengist’s deceitfulness in characteristically appropriate native language epithets here (“the wicked”) and elsewhere as well: [. . .] Hengist þe wickede þus his gan leo(r)e. þat ech neme a long sex and leide bi his soncke. wiþ-ine his hose þar he hit habbe mihte. 38

That the signal itself does not appear until it is actually given and only after Laʒamon makes clear the Britons were disarmed by both the false promise and dissociative speech of the Saxons (“seiden heom bitweonen”) does not constitute a revision of the Galfridian version. On the contrary, the vernacular heightens the murderousness of the plot encapsulated in the traditional signal by expanding the command from simply “draw your knives” to include “spare no one”: Heore wepnen heo awæi senden; þa nefden heo noht an honden. Cnihtes eoden upward, cnihtes eoden adonward, ælc spac wið oðer swulc he weore his broðer; þa weoren Bruttes imænged wið þan Saxes. Þa cleopede Hengist, cnihtene swikelæst: “Nimeð eoure sexes, sele mine bernes; and ohtliche eou sturieð and nænne ne sparieð!” Bruttes þer weoren riche, ah ne cuðe heo noht þa speche, Whæt þa Saxisce men seiden heom bitweonen. Heo breoden ut þa sæxes alle bihalues, Heo smiten an riht half, heo smiten an lift half, biuoren and bihinden heo leiden heom to grunde;

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

63

alle heo sloʒen þat he neh comen. Of þes kinges monnen sone þer feollen Feouwer hundred and fife; wa wes þan linge on liue. [They sent away their weapons; then they had nothing in their hands. Warriors went to and fro, speaking to each other as if they were brothers; and so the Britons were intermingled with the Saxons. Then Hengest, the most treacherous of men, called out: “Draw your knives, my brave warriors; set to boldly and spare no one!” The Britons present were powerful men, but they did not understand the language, did not what know the Saxons were saying to each other. They, as one, drew out their knives, striking to right and left; they struck down those before and those behind them; they slew all within their reach. There four hundred and five of the king’s men fell in an instant; the king was sorry to be alive.]39

Not at all curiously here because of the late-medieval status of English, the Anglo-Saxon epithets, which one might anticipate would exonerate Hengist, rename his treachery in what would be his own eventually conquered tongue. The Saxon’s superlative treachery (“swikelæst”) is retold rather than rewritten by his linguistic progeny Laʒamon, who unavoidably replicates the resonance of Saxons and their “saxes,” seemingly incapable of resisting the damning delight of so mnemonic an etymology.40 Even if his choice of English was enlivened by an interest in English history “fostered by contemporaries at Worcester Cathedral Priory” in position against Norman prelates or even stimulated by his likely Norse roots, Laʒamon’s linguistic interests in English may well have been a matter of very specific resistance rather than English language self-esteem and then only a matter of regional affiliation rather than national pride. Clearly, whatever this Englishness was, it did not also demand disowning the first father of the language of his poem.41 If medieval writers were untroubled by this origin, it is not the case in recent readings from modern language perspectives more decidedly invested in a triumphal history of English. In modern readings of these Galfridian Saxons as seemingly precursors of modern Englishmen, an attempt to disown them as linguistic ancestors has prompted the untenable position that Laʒamon had aimed to distinguish between Hengist’s perfidious Saxons and that second wave of Germanic migrants, the Angles, who received the donation of Gormund.42 Based on his research in the Historia tradition and its transmission, Neil Wright offers a more convincing textual argument for this distinction: Laʒamon was simply transcribing the names of Saxon and Angles that Wace adopted from Geoffrey and that Geoffrey himself had copied from his preconquest sources. Thus, the turn from the name Saxon to Angles after Hengist shrinks from the

64

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

scene in Geoffrey’s Historia ref lects less a new moral order than simply his twelfth-century redaction of Saxon from Gildas and Psuedo-Nennius, which turns to the Angles as his reliance on material after the Saxon conquest turns necessarily to Bede.43 More recent nationalist desires enforcing this division of Angles and Saxons aside, the modest rate of survival for Laʒamon’s verse suggests a purist legacy for the English tongue was neither in the making nor within his linguistic imaginary.44 Whether expressed in Laʒamon’s Brut as a history long past or still in its dying gasps, whatever Caligula offered up in allegiance to the linguistic past was clearly not binding for the Otho scribe, who pointedly preferred the French-infused vocabulary of his contemporary English.45 Even in entertaining the possibility Laʒamon was the author of both versions precisely because of the range of lexical choices at his disposal due to English contact with French, the lack of difference in the Caligula and Otho versions themselves with respect to the depiction of Hengist would attest to a literate identity neither national nor monolingualist in attitude toward that linguistic origin.46 In so faithfully retelling the tradition of the earliest English whose speakers must have struck many late-medieval audiences as ignoble, the Laʒamon poet in all his possible literary and linguistic guises did not seem conf licted. In the Hengist narrative of contact and conf lict that these Latin, French, and English histories collectively hand down, successive waves of vernacular acquiescence to invasion constitute the course of language history writ large. Neither self-consciously resigned nor bemoaning the challenge of the appearance of new languages to national linguistic unity, these postconquest representations of preconquest English stood witness to the linguistic compliance of even Middle English writers. Thus Laʒamon’s choice of the vernacular would not recast the story of Saxon ignobility memorialized as specifically linguistic in the Hengist tradition in the ways Walter Scott could so successfully construct the monolingual resistance of late-medieval Anglophones to the injustice of Norman French oppression. The absence of those monolingualist discourses, which only much later would essentialize English speakers as citizens and avid lexical borrowers if never even minimally bilinguals, could incidentally accommodate so ignoble an origin through the Hengist tradition. If the timeline of that medieval history for English was neither recursive nor continuous, its specific centering on Hengist was itself an ellipsis of the intervening centuries marked only by succession and submission to another ruler’s language; and if multilingual preoccupations with Hengist’s tongue simply restated the shortcomings of medieval monolingualism, it was not likely in the interests of bilingual or trilingual historical writers—when multilingualism was itself power—to fashion a more illustrious origin for

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

65

the only language lacking a distinguished literary history among those at hand among the powerful. Not in the interests of these elite and multilingual literates was a construction like that of “Chaucer,” which has played so central a role in extending the genealogy of the language in the modern interests of the discipline of English studies overall. As scholars have recently argued, writing through rather than against Chaucer’s English has served a postmedieval tradition of constructing literate authority and masculinist privilege, an issue to which the fourth chapter will return.47 By appropriating rather than subverting the rhetorical tropes and textual postures of Latin as studies in vernacular theory and translation have demonstrated, Anglophone writers had not collectively invoked a single English language writer in similar ways.48 Rather than simply failing to be a rallying point for vernacularity, the Hengist tradition encapsulates the shortcomings of English through multilingual formulations of the language that pair its status and history. Although the tradition of Hengist as a linguistic if not literary father for medieval English existed through the early and late-medieval period, then, that figure could hardly have been for medieval Anglophones what constructions of Chaucer could embody for modern monolingual identity. While Hengist was at best a likely linguistic father for medieval English, Chaucer’s paternity has extended to both modern English language and literature. Very recently, critical examinations of that paternity have aimed at decoupling fourteenth-century English from the monolingualist literary and linguistic histories that have largely preserved it within the discipline as well as the classroom. On that account, Wendy Scase has called into question the institutionalized practices bonding Chaucer’s language to literary history. Pointing to the structural principles of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, she argues that undergraduate text promotes a sense of “Chaucer’s English as ‘modern’ and his writing as ‘English literature.’ ”49 Quite unlike this interwoven literary and linguistic history of English, which places Chaucer on a timeline of progressive growth with our modern present as the culmination, the tongue of Hengist simultaneously marked the beginning and end of English language power. And, unlike modern constructions of Chaucer as the first Englishman who most successfully suborned French to our native tongue, then, the Hengist tradition—in its themes of contact and succession—marked the inevitable subservience of English at precisely that point when the narrative dramatized how the English language had so decisively if nefariously succeeded the Britons. Just as both verse and prose chronicles built their continuances upon Geoffrey’s British history, in effect, further shrinking the scope of AngloSaxon history within their Brut narratives, so could the figure of Hengist

66

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

even more effectively serve as a singularized figure on which to center English language history. Thus, in its extension of the trajectory of the Brut tradition to the reign of Edward II, the late thirteenth-century French language chronicle compiled by Pierre de Langtoft witnessed the contemporary subordinate status of postconquest English in terms of its origins increasingly eclipsed by a Brut narrative incrementally longer in historical scope with every continuance.50 With Galfridian themes of succession giving way to the chronicles confidently recording French language hegemonies since, Hengist must have marked even more inversely the loss of English language dominion. Just as Hengist could still more densely encapsulate English language subordination, so it was characteristically multilingual strategies that could most sweepingly stage conquest itself as language history. Based on Wace’s Brut as well as the First Variant Version, Langtoft’s chronicle faithfully represents the Britons and Saxons as distinct linguistic communities across which communication demands practical solutions. As in the verse of Wace and Laʒamon, Pierre’s chronicle presents a translator—here not named Keredic as in those earlier versions—who interprets Rowena’s speech for Vortigern: Al chastel de Thauncastre vynt sire Vortiger. Devaunt li en la sale, tost après manger, Vynt Rouenne la bele le ray saluer, Of un coupe de or playn de vyn cler, E dist, “Sir, wessail!” Le ray fet demaunder Ke ceo sayt à dire, e dist ly translater, “Sire, ele bayt à ws, e ws resaluer La devez par Drinkhayl e la baiser.” Hengist par cautel le ray fet enyverer, Ensi ke Vortiger va Rouenne exposer, E donne à sire Hengist Kente tut enter, Saunz sue sir Gorangoun, ke là devait regner. [Sir Vortigern came to the castle of Thangcaster. Before him in the hall, immediately after dinner, Came Rowena the fair to salute the king, With a cup of gold full of clear wine, And said “Sir, weshail!” The king inquired What that meant, and the interpreter told him, “Sire, she drinks to you, you ought the salute To return by Drinkhail! And kissing her.” Hengist had craftily intoxicated the king, So that Vortigern goes and marries Rowena And gives sir Hengist the whole of Kent, Without the knowledge of sir Gorangon who went to reign there.]51

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

67

Unlike Wace but attentively in line with the First Variant Version, Vortigern’s remarks to Rowena in Langtoft’s French do not signal the king’s compliance after his unnamed translator speaks. Instead the rapid movement from the translator’s words and Vortigern’s willingness to drink deeply preclude even mentioning the irresistibility of Rowena, subsumed here as part of Hengist’s plan to intoxicate the king “par cautel.” In contrast to developments in Wace and Laʒamon that underscore Rowena’s deceitfulness, Hengist’s treachery—linguistically succinct and singularly brutal—again takes narrative center stage. Within the scope of the narrative centered on first contact, the alexandrine laisses of the chronicle move quickly from the marriage of Vortigern and Rowena to the consummation of the multilingual dimensions of the episode overall with Hengist’s attack on the Britons at Amesbury. Although Langtoft’s Anglo-French appears to replace Latin for narrative control of the text, that first language of his chronicle nevertheless dictates diglossic sway over representation by both exercizing and dramatizing its subjugation of English in ways that were not likely selfref lective.52 Gathered again under the Hengist tradition, hidden weapons and secret signals accompany the shift to the English that constitutes the linguistic kernel of the plot: Chescoun de Saxonays bon coutel portayt Privement desuz, ke nul homme l’aparçayt, E kaunt l’un hoste à l’autre ensemble serrayt, Neme yhoure sexes, sir Hengist dirrayt, Chesoun Saxonais un Bretton tuerayt. En kalendes de May, kant f lorisent les prez, Al meme de Anbrebire là sount assemblez, Le ray Vortigern of cent desarmez, E Hengist of soun host de tresoun avisez. Saxonays à Brettouns kant sount acostez, Neme your sexes, Hengist ad comaundez. Els sakent les cotel, si ount là tuez Ccc. e xl. de barouns renomez. [Each of the Saxons carried a good knife Privately under the dress, that no one perceived it; And when one army should be together with the other, Sir Hengist should say “Take your knives,” Then each Saxon was to kill a Briton. On the calends of May, when the meadows are in f lower, At the abbey of Abresbury, there they are assembled, King Vortigern with a hundred men without arms And Hengist with his army meditating treason. When the Saxons are side by side with the Britons,

68

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Hengist has given the order, “Take your knives.” They draw their knives, and have there killed Three hundred and forty barons of renown.]53

This representation of direct speech in Hengist’s command again typologically restates his motivated language choice according to what would have by then been a centuries old tradition for that episode. Although an unmarked choice for Hengist’s men simply because it was their first and only language, within the linguistic fictions of the text it constitutes a marked disruption of the language of narration in Galfridian terms. Even with the vernacular confidence of French verse over Latin prose in Langtoft’s chronicle, Hengist’s command persists with obvious sensitivity to diglossic culture in which French was by far the closer of the two vernaculars to the prestige of Latin. Taking on the textual normativity of Latin in Geoffrey’s text which took no pains to explain the Britons were confused by a language they did not know, Langtoft’s verse unf linchingly places English in cultural subordination to the French language textual traditions ref lexively reproducing it as either an earlier conqueror’s lost power or, more synchronically, simply undesirable or disreputable speech. Most evidently because English characterized monolingual powerlessness, vernacular narrations of Hengist’s signal continued to fare no better in rehabilitating the mother tongue of the majority for the literate ends of a multilingual minority. In versions of the Metrical Chronicle (c. 1300) traditionally attributed to Robert of Gloucester as well as the Chronicle (1338) of Robert Mannyng, English language narration of the story of Hengist’s tongue continued to ref lect the cultural state of affairs of monolingual subordination. If the preference in these fourteenth- century chronicles for the Galfridian Hengist seems to f ly in the face of their vernacular projects, Thorlac Turville-Petre has suggested it was because their English language redactors had little choice since this tradition provided material that Henry of Huntingdon and William Malmesbury had simply left out of their Anglo-Saxon histories. But why did these English language chronicles continue to perpetuate so negative an image of their linguistic forefather even as they chose to write in his tongue? More in keeping with modern constructions of medieval English, Turville-Petre’s interpretation, which relies on an earlier critical distinction between Saxons and Angles, ultimately serves to gain less treasonous ancestors for medieval, and, implicitly, modern Englishmen as well. And, in similarly recursive monolingualism characteristic of modern rather than medieval English, Turville-Petre’s brief treatment of the treachery of Hengist’s tongue overlooks the multilingual context, which underwrote

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

69

its persistence as that language contact tradition that ref lected the lot of medieval Anglophone monolinguals then subject to linguistic succession themselves.54 In the end, if we are disappointed that either mitigating redactions or complete erasures of Hengist’s signal are wanting in these English language chronicles, it may be because modern popular and scholarly narratives in tandem demand that our Middle English fathers ought to have better linguistic self-esteem. With those modern monolingualist stories of Anglophone origins set aside, on the contrary, it is clear that the verbal deceit of Hengist could retain its traditional force for both these early fourteenth vernacular chronicles largely because diglossia exclusively rendered Hengist’s tongue the most undesirable marker of linguistic difference. To that undesirability of Anglophone monolingualism, the English language chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and Robert Mannyng of Brunne also stood witness in the early fourteenth century not at all ironically. Perhaps the more ambitious by virtue of being the first of the two chronicles to extend in the English language Geoffrey’s history beyond its preconquest bounds was the Metrical Chronicle attributed to Robert of Gloucester. If this chronicle extended the continuity of the matter of Britain to the reign of Edward I, did it also constitute a matter of linguistic nationalism in its critique of French language dominion? Since this chronicle had to have written succession as much as a matter between Saxon and Norman as Saxon and Briton, simple one-sided linguistic allegiance likely could not be brought to bear on the traditional depiction of conquest through language inherited from Geoffrey of Monmouth. Moreover, the faithful narration of contact unremittingly centers on that English language plot: In a nywe maner hengist þoʒte . þe king & is bytraye . He het al is kniʒtes . þat mid hin þere were . Þat in is hose stilleliche . ech of hom a knif bere . & wanne hii his semble . among þis brutons come . Þat ech of hom an heyman . In conseil to him nome . & suiþe vaire speke wiþ him . & wanne he þanne sede . Nimeþ ʒoure soxes . þat ʒe anon mid þe dede . rou is knif & slowe anon . al an onywar[.]55

English here seems to have the upper hand over the Britons who “non engliss ywys,” which Robert of Gloucester makes clear is “saxons speche” in the proceeding lines. The trickery here, however, revolves not around typological tension in a shift from Latin or French to English but in a plainly negative representation of English itself. Such a negative depiction of speech could be repeated in complicity with the narrative

70

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

because English constituted symbolic treachery in the past as much as its monolingualism guaranteed social subordination in the present. In his opening remarks on the Norman invasion, Robert of Gloucester contemplates the status of his first language in terms of this subordination in diglossia: Þus com lo englelond . in to normandies hond . & þe normans ne couþe speke þo . bot hor owe speche . & speke French as hii dude atom . & hor children dude also teche . So þat heieman of þis lond . þat of hor blode come Holdeþ alle þulke speche . þat hii of hom nome . Vor bote a man conne frenss . me telþ of him lute . Ac lowe men holdeþ to engliss . & to hor owe speche ʒute . Ech wene þer ne beþ in al þe world . contreyes none . Þat ne holdeþ to hor owe speche . bote engelonde one . Ac wel me wot uor to conne . boþe wel it is . Vor þe more þat a mon can . þe more wurþe he is.56

As Tim William Machan cautions, this putative stance against French should not be mistaken for linguistic truth if the Normans were as linguistically assimilated by the thirteenth century as scholars argue.57 But if French monolingualism as a marker of nobility was increasingly uncommon by the date of this chronicle, the acquisition of French as a second language nevertheless characterized that instrumental bilingualism by which all English men were socially measured. In that culture where second languages constituted power, the monolingualism common to most English men could not culturally render them vernacular brothers aligned against a proliferation of varieties of French increasingly regarded less as ethnically invasive than socially advantageous. Whether acquired as Law French or learned as a part of one’s membership within such religious communities as Chaucer locates his Prioress as “Stratford atte Bowe,” French in England had increasingly marked either professional and practical or prestigious and literary ends.58 Based on the social disadvantageousness Anglophone monolingualism predicted in late-medieval England, the English language frustration aired by Robert of Gloucester does not lie in not wanting to acquire French in a stance of monolingual pride but rather in desiring to do so barring even critiques of the fact most had neither the access nor social status that would make that possible.59 With French always a more desirable and profitable vernacular than English in late-medieval England, the apparent allegiance of Robert to the majority language and his sense of its unique status after the Norman Conquest should not def lect our consideration from his own multilingual privilege. Paired with his depiction of Hengist’s tongue, Robert’s

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

71

choice of English cannot favor the likelihood of exclusive linguistic Anglo-Saxonism for his project overall.60 Not a celebration of the sufficiency of English and its democratizing qualities, the troubled linguistic paternity of Hengist demands gauging its vernacular affiliations against the practices and interests of the literate multilingual elite who articulate an Englishness vastly different from the experience of the monolingual majority. The chronicle’s invocation of “low” men frames the Norman presence in the terms of its introduction of French into England from which only the bilingual members of Robert of Gloucester’s audience would have reaped obvious social benefit. In just such a sober evaluation of second language power, Robert Mannyng approaches the English language audiences of his chronicle approximately forty years after Robert of Gloucester in ways that continue to seem disengaged from monolingual suffrage.61 Were Robert Mannyng himself frustrated by this linguistic situation, the superior power of multilingualism was all he would have known and, in the end, his choice of English even to describe its troubled origins was at crosspurposes with any protestations of monolingual oppression. Attributing his disinterest in English to his more immediate inf luence of Wace and Langtoft seems too convenient a dismissal in an account of translations that characteristically preserved double-edged depictions of English in contact. In Robert’s faithfulness to that conf lict tradition of the earliest English, the tongue of Hengist—as problematically wielded as his men’s weapons—must instigate the Saxons to attack the defenseless Britons at the moment the historical record recalls it: To þat plein þei come þat day, of Salesbery, þe first of May. Mani a man þoru somouns of þe Sessons & of þe Bretouns, heres now hov Hengist wroght þis tresoun who wild haue þoght. “ffelaus,” he said, “what so be tides” puruey ʒou kniues egid boþe sides & bere þaim priuely þat non ne se, in ʒoure bosums be ʒour the. When wee haue þem & þei vs grett, ilkone be sidyn oþer sett; on all manere fondis hov on of þem & on of ʒow. Takis oute ʒour sexis when I seie, handis on ʒoure felawe leie, on þe Breton þat sittis ʒou next,

72

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

& smyte with knife þrou bak or brest; alle gate þat ʒee him slo, no poer haue ferer to go.” Whan þis treson to þem was said, ilk a man a sexe puruaid & come to þe playn of Salesbiri, ffair felichip & ful meri. Whan þei were all sett in fere as he had said on þat manere, “Takis out ʒour sexis,” said Hengist. What it ment, þe Bretons ne wist, Bot þe Sessons þer sexis droh, his felau next þe Sessons sloh.62

Where switches from Latin or French constituted a comment in themselves of the subordinate status of English in French and Latin chronicles, Robert Mannyng uniquely underlines violence and powerlessness as an attendant danger of linguistic difference. Like the chronicle attributed to Robert of Gloucester, the sensitivity of Robert Mannyng to the disadvantages of monolingualism motivates his noting the British weakness at the cry of Hengist for “What it ment, þe Bretons ne wist.” Thus, as Robert Mannyng takes pains to explain, Hengist’s command in execution if not initial conception impedes the Britons from finding time simply to f lee. This narrative also expands on that attack plan considerably, explaining that Hengist commands them to bear their knives “priuely þat non ne se” and to strike at whatever point is advantageous whether “bak or brest.” As unfavorably as the earliest English speakers appear, it is only by rerecording that their plan was “treson” in respect for historical tradition that could enable a choice to write history in English. Despite expansions that finally revise little of the narrative’s thrust, neither of these English language verse chroniclers had at his disposal a typological rift to mark the conf lict; this loss comes across as a f law in the multilingual sensitivity of their scribes for which compensation in additional verse came at the expense of either exculpating or more simply disowning their linguistic ancestor. Without the typological difference that characterized Latin and French narration from English chronicles to sharpen Hengist’s tongue, however, that violent code of linguistic difference itself is absorbed in this vernacular verse in ways that drew new kinds of unf lattering attention to the father of English. Thus, if the English writer composing this English-only text was at pains to explain why his command constitutes a trick, it is not because Hengist’s tongue had lost its fame as divisive, for the tongue of that Saxon had already been nativized as an English language legacy of succession and subjugation itself. In

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

73

postconquest England, Saxon speech could not ratify monolingualism as symbolic dominion nor cordon off English from its negative depiction in language contact in ways modern English traditions have so successfully “reversed the conquest” in colonialist and masculinist discourses of borrowing.63 Perhaps most perplexing from our monolingualist vantage point, this episode hints that an inability to understand the language of the invader buys the Britons their death; surely this linguistic portrait of powerlessness echoes the social frustration of any new language conquerors impose and the vanquished can only hope to acquire, a matter for which Robert of Gloucester cites the Normans for introducing if not enforcing in the prestige of French to his day. In symbolically widening the gulf between vernacular languages, even the Englishing of Hengist finally treated here constitutes a reminder of contemporary monolingual subordination, one in which chroniclers like Robert of Gloucester and Robert Mannyng were less likely to languish. By the end of the fourteenth century and through the period of Gower’s composition of the Confessio Amantis, Geoffrey’s depiction of the origin of English had widened even further when Latin versions of the Hengist tradition persisted among another generation of second language learners in England. The Metrical History edited by A.G. Rigg suggests the story of Hengist’s tongue retained its negative currency by serving as a likely mnemonic device for educating boys.64 In both the Latin Metrical History and the prose version on which it was based, the traditional switches from Latin to English are preserved in both Rowena’s toast as well as Hengist’s signal.65 It is irresistible to imagine that that problematic legacy was goad enough to remind medieval Anglophones of precisely why they needed to learn Latin. As central to the education of fourteenth-century boys as Victorian children’s knowledge of “King Alfred and the Cakes” as Rigg suggests, the tale of Hengist and his deceitful Saxon tongue, which the Metrical History included, minimally commits the young students to memorializing their first language unfavorably at the same time they master Latin by rote. In the Latin record of vernacular language history encapsulated in the tradition of Hengist’s tongue, the status of the students’ English speech existed inversely to even their oral recitation of Latin verse. Contact between Latin, French, and English carefully preserved in these verse and prose versions of Geoffrey’s depiction of Saxon speech demonstrate how the Hengist tradition could constitute an explanation for the status of late-medieval English. Symbolically, it was a problematic tongue because of the treacherousness of its founding father; in more practical terms, it encapsulated how language change characterized conquest and the passage of history itself. As we have seen, minor mutations

74

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

in narratives never compromised an interest in linguistic difference nor neglected to reproduce or elaborate on that difference and its doubled performance of solidarity and dissociation. What is clearly evident in the Hengist tradition is that that English which the Saxons were remembered to choose in order to defeat the Britons so decisively could not predict similarly successful English monolingual dissociation from their linguistic superiors after the Norman Conquest even when multilingual men had decided to write in the language most spoke.66 The resilience of the tradition of “Night of the Long Knives” demonstrates that troubled linguistic patrimony not through but against which Gower conceptualized English in the presence of much less problematic Latin or French. And whereas their heritage was unshakably literate and culturally or institutionally prestigious, English with its roots in Saxon was continuous only under the name “Hengist,” a sign as symbolically furtive and foreign to unf linchingly confident textual representation as its vast majority of contemporary monolingual speakers. However, when Gower invokes Hengist without also retelling the tradition in whole, one cannot help but wonder whether the medieval representation of the earliest English was itself only incidentally a history, the survival of a preconquest narrative into postconquest England. Neither continuous like modern biographies of English, which imagine old, middle, and modern periods, nor a recuperation of contact offered by modern discourses of borrowing, this medieval story of the earliest English nevertheless ref lected the scope of time over which historians had adhered to a language contact tradition. No doubt largely due to the reproductive nature of medieval historical writing, the absence of the rewriting or recursive refashioning of Hengist’s tongue speaks to medieval multilingualism as well. The contact features of the Hengist episode resonate across vernacular versions as evidence of the multilingual appreciation of linguistic difference as well as the status of English itself relative to the succession of French. For his poetic ends, Gower’s sensitivity to the multilingual dimensions of the Hengist episode and its themes of contact underline the multiple gestures of his invocation of the earliest English tongue. By linking the Hengist tradition to his vernacular undertaking, Gower may appear to sharpen the self-congratulatory risk of the Confessio Amantis, but the vernacular deprecation that the name of Hengist encapsulates also places English and Gower’s project within that tradition, which, he also argues, challenges his poetic craft. Because Hengist’s tongue had been widely spoken but held little guarantee of social mobility, the Latin of Carmen, as inventor of Roman letters and, therefore, literacy, must in Gower’s diglossic formulation lend both her textual and metrical potency to that project.67 But if “Gower is indulging in deliberate syntactic gender play”

H ENGIST’S TONGU E

75

by juxtaposing Hengist and Carmen even more specifically in the prologue than in the Latin and English design of the Confessio overall, it is most plainly his multilingualism that allows him to write in the language of cultural powerlessness as a feat of his second language training and strength.68 Rather than engaging English to defeat Latin, which the gendering of English demonstrated only many centuries later against French, Gower here pairs languages in what is even more patently and normatively a gendered move of displaying his masculine powers of multilingual literacy. If the juxtaposition of Latin and English also underlines “the failure of Latin to repair English,” Gower’s lack of confidence in any language to signify adequately may most plainly speak to why both languages exist in his text.69 However, their contact alone constitutes neither a subversive vernacular maneuver nor a wholly bald move at showing up the inadequacies of the languages also most opposed in medieval diglossia. In another more linguistic line of exploration, analyzing that Latin and English contact instead as a not uncommon textual pairing can help us draw on commonly established means of writing in several languages in late-medieval England. In the next chapter, we will see that contact between Latin and English could also characterize modes of discourse that simultaneously marked literate status in their articulation. Not a poetic matter of negotiating or cobbling together several kinds of linguistic authority at once to accommodate both clerical and lay audiences, the coexistence of languages in many forms of late-medieval writing was normative and not always only permitted free rein in verse. If Gower did widen the divide between Latin and English to distinguish his project from their more mundane pairing within many other forms of multilingual writing, he might have also in imposing that difference invoked Hengist’s tongue—quite strategically in Latin—to impress the Confessio Amantis upon those whose multilingualism very specifically rendered them his literate equals. In validating his vernacular efforts among those peers, Gower’s reference to the Hengist tradition also effectively restates that the foundation of vernacular poetry self-evidently builds itself upon the cultural fact that no Anglophone monolingual would have been conceivably up to the task. But if Engisti lingua—Gower’s reference to that diachronic portrait of language contact as conf lict—served to address his ability to meet the challenge of writing in the language whose subordination medieval histories had rendered inevitable, his project naturally would not also disclaim the social profit and privilege that amassed among those who could fashion and sustain such instances of language contact so easily.70

This page intentionally left blank

PART II “AND IN LATYN . . . A WORDES FEWE”: CONTACT AND MEDIEVAL CONFORMITY

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 3 MULTILINGUAL WRITING AND WILLIAM LANGLAND

F

or examining how late medieval multilinguals had conceptualized the status of the English language, the field of studies in medieval vernacularity has already established the cultural if not linguistic terms of discussion. In their critical project of describing what had constituted vernacular literary theory in late medieval England, the editors of the comprehensive collection The Idea of the Vernacular have explained that [v]ernacular writers do not only see themselves as engaged in an attempt to make their language the equal of Latin; they are acutely aware, in a broad variety of ways, of the differences between languages and the need to theorize their own projects in light of those differences.1

Although such protestations directly ref lected the linguistic status quo of late medieval England through the English-language writer’s authorial intention, studies of vernacular writing may have calculated the risk of privileging the creative will of that author over the linguistic constraints determining his literary ambitions, in effect, linguistically modernizing the medieval maker by de-historicizing the interdependent status of languages informing his authorial practices and literate identity.2 In awareness of those pitfalls, scholars within that field as well as medieval translation studies even earlier had cautioned against reading English writing as efforts to subvert the prestige of Latin or share the power it bestowed.3 Arguably, however, that construction of vernacular resistance against which scholars have warned had already existed before and, therefore, has also always constituted the foundations of English-language studies itself. By virtue of its inception, the discipline of Middle English language and literature has offered to modern scholars their membership in an immemorial Anglophone community, one that by its imagined boundaries might

80

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

allow those within the discipline to imagine the highly trained literates of the past as just as carefully fostering English as themselves.4 Yet, along with professional responsibilities to English present and past foundationally conf lated in this way among scholars of medieval English, popular discourses centered on medieval language conf lict have also implicated themselves in the discipline’s genealogy. Modern constructions of medieval language contact as itself an inevitable source of strife have promoted readings of borrowing, switching languages or selecting one language over another as often a matter of picking sides. In that sense, any professional gesture to exclusive linguistic allegiance with Middle English proves to be fraught in consideration of the fact its witnesses were not commonly written by monolingual Anglophones. Subject to and ref lected by the medieval tradition of Hengist’s double-edged tongue, Middle English had inevitably preserved diachronic portraits of conf lict and conquest in fictionalizations of contact; however, far greater in evidence are the mundane ways in which medieval languages in contact were not at odds and could hardly have exacted a pledge of single language allegiance. Approaches to texts naturally informed by modern monolingual critical habits have traditionally made an exception of the commonplace nature of such multilingual phenomena in late medieval England.5 In the contact between Latin, English, and, to a much lesser degree but to no less of purpose, French in likely the most famous multilingual text in medieval English literature, Piers Plowman, such exceptionalism finds a case in point. Scholarly positions toward contact between languages in the poem have been roughly of three sorts: the mixing of the vernacular with Latin witnesses the burgeoning national status of English; such medieval traditions as sermons inspire its part oral, part textual structure; and, perhaps most irresistibly, language contact in the poem constitutes evidence of the artistry of its poet, traditionally identified as William Langland.6 Literary critics, until very recently the only scholars to examine this multilingual literacy, have selected such expressions as “interlarded” and “embedded” or “woven” to describe how medieval writers—often exemplified by William Langland in their analyses—integrated Latin and English in verse. Limited by terminology that can only address multilingual phenomena through these kinds of metaphors, literary analyses of mixed-language hymns and lyrics in late medieval England have also adopted the term “macaronic,” which was coined only later in the early sixteenth century to describe poetry that combined Latin and Italian.7 Although medievalists and medieval language historians have recently applied “macaronic” as a nontechnical term to introduce nonspecialists to multilingual writing in business writing and sermons, linguists examining literary texts including medieval drama and poetry adopt such terms

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

81

from the field of linguistics as code-switching to describe this written contact phenomenon.8 As exotic as such writing appears to modern readers accustomed to unilingual habits of writing shaped by centuries of standardization, this far from exhaustive list of medieval texts containing several languages—often together within the same sentence and even within a single word—demonstrate multilingual writing characterized working literate practice that typically passed without comment in late medieval England. I will argue in the chapters in this section that it was by drawing on their authority from within these commonplace multilingual practices that medieval writers—and multilingual speakers very likely as well— could self-interestedly engage but not wilfully improve Anglophone monolingual interests. Looking at the integration of first and second languages in poetry, hymns, sermons, and drama as well as technical writing in law, business, and medicine, medievalists within the last few decades had collectively begun to consider multilingualism in terms of late medieval experience rather than literary practice in England. Attuned to such language-mixed literate practices as medieval commonplace, those first studies of medieval multilingualism suggested that literary critical stances could no longer reductively attribute language contact in writing to the effusions of a polyglot poet or lamentable improficiency of the Latin of medieval writer or scribe.9 Rather than challenging monolingual methodologies outright, much of the earliest body of research on medieval multilingualism clustered within the 1990s had asserted the necessity of conceptualizing the medieval period as uniquely multilingual without always also exploring which tools were best for this new project.10 Thus, seemingly in contradiction to his position that English-language nationalism existed in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth-century England, Thorlac Turville-Petre had nevertheless argued that French, Latin, and English shared no “clear-cut linguistic divide . . . [t]hree languages existed in harmony, not just side by side but in symbiotic relationship, interpenetrating and drawing strength from one another.”11 Similarly observing this conf luence of languages over the twelfth and thirteen centuries, Michael T. Clanchy had noted this “amalgam of Anglo-Saxon, French and Latin culture [was] a distinct entity rather than a mere accumulation of parts.”12 Focusing on the relationship between English, French, and Latin as societal characteristics imbricating daily working practice where these languages co-occur within sentences in writing, William Rothwell has insisted repeatedly and in more than one formulation over at least the last decade that “[a]ll three languages of medieval England need to be studied as making up a unitary linguistic situation.”13

82

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Initially, only a handful of medievalists had supplemented these general observations on multilingual writing with new sensitivities to the utility perspectives from the field of linguistics could offer. Linda Ehrsam Voigts, linking the overlapping role of Latin and English in scientific and medical manuscripts to common social practice, urged medievalists more than a decade ago not to “overlook the variety of ways in which this bilingual culture exploited the linguistic resources of two languages.”14 Attending to the social implications of similar language-mixing in medical texts, Tony Hunt equally observed that “the linguistic description of medieval England [. . .] has been undertaken in almost complete ignorance of sociolinguistics.”15 Suggesting the utility of describing multilingual writing as a social phenomenon rather than textual idiosyncrasy, Alan J. Fletcher and Siegfried Wenzel concluded mixed-language sermons were evidence not of improficiency in two languages but normative forms of bilingual literacy.16 And, in the earliest application of sociolinguistics on medieval multilingual writing, Tim William Machan described the features of switching languages in Piers Plowman as grammatical and rule-bound.17 Overall, then, though differing in the degree to which they embraced linguistic methods, the first medievalists studying medieval multilingualism collectively agreed that mixing languages for writing in the Middle Ages was neither unusual nor ungrammatical, and, therefore, should not be dismissed from a disciplinary standpoint. More than that for some of these first scholars in medieval multilingualism, language contact urgently invited a disciplinary challenge. The first effort to unify studies in medieval multilingualism emerged in the collection Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain that aimed at linguistic inclusion by treating English, Latin, and French as well as Welsh as languages in contact.18 Attempting to stimulate interdisciplinary efforts and multilingual proficiency in medieval languages among scholars of linguistics, lexicography, and language history, the collection’s editor, David Trotter, openly chastised monoglot approaches to medieval culture: [T]hose whose interest lies in language find that one language alone is not sufficient if they wish to examine a period and a society where one language was emphatically not enough. The monolingual approach makes it impossible to apprehend this world, and it simply perpetuates the compartmentalized and misleading information transmitted by outdated, but consistently revered and no less regularly reprinted, manuals of history of English or French. The study of the linguistic situation of medieval Britain cannot be carried out by specialists working in isolation, but requires a convergence of attention, and a determined refusal to hide behind the artificial barriers of either allegedly separate languages, or (perhaps, above all)

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

83

conveniently separated academic disciplines, each hermetically sealed against the dangers of contamination from adjacent fields of enquiry, and each buttressed by its own traditions or (less charitably) insulated by its own uncritical and self-preserving preconceptions.19

As persuasive as Trotter’s dissection of the situation is, it seems that the linguistic and disciplinary investments he amasses here can be even more conveniently placed under and compellingly explained by that linguistic nationalism that renders language-mixed writing aberrant to modern critical eyes. While the studies in Trotter’s collection assure modern scholars that neither exoticism nor improficiency characterized medieval multilingual writing, none broach how multilingual practices constituted identity in those cultural ways that distinguish medieval linguistic belonging from modern formulations of language identity, a distinction that the first section of this book argued was divergent on the basis of Anglophone attitudes toward multilingualism across periods. Moreover, the linguistic approaches to medieval multilingualism in Trotter’s collection have similarly suggested but not more thoroughly examined how writing in several languages might have also articulated identity in late medieval England. In supplementing these studies and building upon relationships between language awareness and contact examined in section one, both this chapter and chapter four will focus even more closely on how language-mixing might have characterized practices and expressions of authority as well as ref lected attitudes toward both monolingualism and multilingualism in fourteenth-century England. In beginning to explore the connection between practice and identity, chapter two suggested the ways in which Gower positioned his first major foray into English-language writing revealed at least the bilingual negotiation of his persona or literate identity through the poetic contact of Latin and English in the Confessio Amantis. Unlike those long-standing historical traditions that informed his reference to the first father of medieval English, Hengist, however, Gower could switch between languages perhaps as often as much due to choice as convention. Of course, in the context of Gower’s multilingual skills, there was nothing preventing him from referring to Engisti lingua as “Hengist’s tongue”; yet, we have seen how Gower underlines his awareness of what writing in English culturally means in his invocation of that name-as-tongue through Latin. Turning later in this chapter and the next to the wide range of functions changing and choosing languages might have achieved, it is likely too obvious to note that what characterized that ability and authority was literacy in a nonnative language, most frequently Latin. But the nature of its acquisition and application is worth elaborating on brief ly. While more

84

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

than one literate community developed forms of Latin as a specialized working language, what most broadly characterized their membership in those communities was masculinity. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor have suggested that the medieval acquisition of Latin likely even gendered literacy itself: The auctoritas that accrued to Latin was rooted precisely in its status as a language whose acquisition, chief ly by men, was dependent upon alienation from associations of birth origin and upon bonding with other male pupils in submission to the master and his command of grammar.20

Of course, the loss of connection to the mother tongue in exchange for the homosocial affiliation to what Townsend and Taylor term “the tongue of the fathers” was the basis of multilingual experience among many literate males in the medieval period. Yet, obviously unlike nineteenth-century proscriptions of second-language speech for national English-language identity, the linguistic performance of masculinity across medieval literate communities demanded the daily negotiation of often as many as three languages in both speech and writing. Unlike the modern monolingualist construction of English as self-sufficiently manly, medieval English was a majority tongue without literate authority and overt prestige in its own right. If homosocial Latinity shaped even one’s self-conceptualization as primarily a man and secondarily an Anglophone, discarding that secondlanguage privilege to articulate linguistic national identity and exclusively mark one’s secular belonging in English-language citizenship for this literate minority was likely inconceivable. In examining expressions of this masculine identity as multilingual, this chapter argues medieval writers switched languages either because their membership in particular literate communities demanded they must by convention or simply at times because they could for a wider variety of often social aims. In the proceeding analysis of several types of texts, the variety of points of contact—across and within clause boundaries as well as within words themselves—predicts that the practice of writing in several languages was commonplace enough to occur in English speech. Likely because of current perceptions of such language contact phenomena as code-switching as anomalous, the ways in which fictional speakers in medieval texts switch languages may similarly strike modern readers as absurd.21 Most notably in that regard, Myscheff in the early fifteenth-century play Mankind mixes English and Latin not simply across clauses but within words themselves: And he prouyth nay, as yt shewth by þis werse: [C]orn seruit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque.22

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

85

By formulating a mock-Latin quotation, Myscheff appears to mimic how clerks cite Latin by engaging in their multilingual practices, a performance that the Latin inf lection of English lexis underscores. 23 Rather than a linguistic absurdity, however, for medieval audiences the rhetorical force of combining Latin and English so intimately likely also derives from the commonplace of such multilingual practices and their attendant privileges.24 As historical linguist Laura Wright has shown, this kind of language-mixing even within lexemes was not restricted to medieval plays but characterized the mundane practice of some record keeping in late medieval England, which she argues constituted a “deliberate, formal register.”25 The widespread use of language-mixing across texts we could currently term both technical and nontechnical writing likewise proves to historical linguist Herbert Schendl that language contact formalized within writing was itself a “mode of discourse.”26 Neither improbable nor idiosyncratic, multilingual writing clearly characterized literate practices rather than aliterate struggles. What Myscheff appears to speak in the fictional dialogue of Mankind, then, may not solely be the linguistic absurdity of an Anglophone attempting to imitate Latin but a parody, which sends up the language-mixed features of more than one variety of literate discourse. And, as Myscheff ’s playful gesture to glossing suggests, it was a practice linked especially to those whose authority most obviously in that culture rested on restricted access to and specialized interpretation of texts written in the minority prestige language of Latin.27 The characterization of the Pardoner’s speech in the Canterbury Tales presents a case, one to which we will return again in the next chapter, which narrows the portrait of shifting between languages to specifically clerical authority. Ref lecting the traditionally perceived effrontery of the pardoner, Chaucer’s Pardoner professes his clerical Latinity among the pilgrims by boasting he switches to Latin to spice his English sermons: And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe, To saffron with my predicacioun, And for to stire hem to devocioun [. . .].28

Although the Pardoner argues that he shifts to Latin in order to inf lame spiritual devotion, clearly this strategy also serves to construct his clerical authority. Whether feigning shame or expressing pride in his ability to “saffron” sermons in so mercenary a fashion, at the very least the Pardoner identifies that mixing languages opposed in typology and status has desirable, and, in his case especially, highly rewarding rhetorical effects. Even this indirect mention of the juxtaposition of Latin and English reveals the link between exclusivity and clerical discourse. In Piers Plowman, an

86

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

even more pronounced attempt at wielding language-mixed discourse occurs within the fiction of a conversation between Piers and the Priest, two interlocutors symbolically distinguished by their second-language facility. In what appears to be a clerical in-joke or an aside for some of the poem’s readers, the Priest inserts the phrase dixit insipiens when addressing Piers in their shared first language, English: “Were þow a preest, [Piers],” quod he, “þow myʒtest preche [whan þee liked] As diuinour in diuinite, wiþ Dixit insipiens to þi teme.” (B.7.140–1)29

The Latin constituents the Priest inserts in his speech here had served as a title commonly used to refer to Psalms 13:1 and 52:1: Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus [The fool has said in his heart there is no God].30 Although lexicalized as a psalm title, the phrase has added meaning by virtue of the assumed linguistic difference of the interlocutors. By the very presence of Piers, the priest linguistically performs and alliteratively underlines an equation of ignorance with a lack of Latin learning. In effect, the Priest linguistically positions Piers as insipiens in an attempt to assert his authority as one who can preach. At this intersection of language and social position, depictions of Pardoner, Priest, and Myscheff offer portraits of Latinity as multilingual performance seemingly singled out or parodied because of its potential for abuse among clerks. In the absence of clerical users or their most likely interlocutors, however, the symbolism of multilingualism could reveal meanings considerably less antagonistic perhaps than some of the instances considered thus far. Indeed, where audiences understand Myscheff ’s word play as satire on clerical pretensions rather than on mixing Latin within English words itself, audiences can equally interpret the suspension of such pretensions in similar instances of English and Latin contact in dialogue. In his comprehensive analysis of the ways in which multilingual awareness can characterize dialogue in medieval drama, Hans-Jürgen Diller has concluded that co-occurrences of languages in dialogue respond to an audience already receptive to code-switching, that is, sensitive to its meanings and rhetorical effects. Looking specifically to N-Town, Diller examines the weaving of the Magnificat between Mary and Elizabeth as a multilingual technique that creates rhyming stanzas across Latin and English: Maria: Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, Et sanctum nomen eius.

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

87

Elizabeth: For grett thyngys he made, and also myghtyest, And right holy is þe name of hym in vs.31

While Diller notes the final rhyme here “is bought at the price of an idle expletive (‘in vs’),” he contends “this is hardly the point” for the point is that the two cousins and expecting mothers are to be shown in complete harmony, sharing and expressing the same feelings. The two languages are a convenient device to differentiate the women’s status, but by rhyming the English with the Latin the latter is made less distant from the former than it usually is.32

While the performance of multilingualism in medieval drama invites a consideration of mixed-language dialogue, it also brings to critical attention how sensitivity to the rhetorical effects of multilingual speech elicits audience expectations more generally. Thus, although the linking of English and Latin in the exchange between Elizabeth and Mary momentarily effaces social distance at the same time it creates linguistic difference, the harmonious juxtaposition here of mother of God and mother of John, Latin and English, and liturgy and the vernacular presents multilingual speech as sacred when it seems most cooperative. Potentially also a means for translating Latin for monolinguals in N-Town’s audience, the mutual accommodation here seems distinct from the ends for which the Pardoner boasts of his Latin “wordes fewe” for duping the laity and the Priest culls dixit insipiens from Psalms to position himself over Piers. Neither as radical nor risible as they might appear to modern monolingualist reading habits, these instances of specifically clerical language switches implicitly represent and reinscribe linguistic segregation, if only Latin literates can conceivably integrate languages successfully in both speech and writing. Their choosing to accommodate monolinguals constitutes another social matter as we will see shortly. As this overview of only a few instances of medieval multilingual writing suggests, switching languages was likely both an oral and written phenomenon. On account of its clerical associations especially, however, metalinguistic sensitivities to the practice of citing and glossing secondlanguage texts as articulations of authority in speech, which find expression in these fictional interactions, clearly also occurred. The mundane multilingual expression of clerical authority Chaucer’s Pardoner extols, Piers’ Priest exploits, Mankind’s Myscheff satirizes, and N-Town’s holy women blessedly share marks not wilful linguistic subversion but a reproduction of the conventionally contrastive status of Latin and English in late medieval England. Their mixture conveys neither the vernacular

88

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

self-sufficiency of English nor challenges to Latin textual authority. The commonly monolingualist description of most of these instances of language-mixing as “macaronic” literature, then, can only impart to verse an exclusive license to write in two languages. And this is partially true; however, by not privileging a literary interpretation of such texts over their linguistic features, we can see that normalized writing in several languages simultaneously was common to literate practices across clerical communities. In these instances especially that imagine interlocutors, language-mixing does not escape representation as an expression of authority or literate identity. Traditions accounting for the composition of Piers Plowman on the familiar disciplinary terrain of the medieval sermon have unwittingly dispensed with the dimension of language-mixing that it shares with the instances we have just examined. That is, such accounts of the poem as based in sermon composition have effaced both the features of dialogue in Piers Plowman as well as its language contact textuality.33 But if no other medieval multilingual text exists “in which so many speakers change languages so pervasively,” it seems likely that the poem also stands on its own as representation of multilingual speech as well as a fictionalization of interactions.34 Considering these elements of speech in Piers Plowman manuscripts more specifically, C. David Benson argues that markings such as rubrication “emphasize what many modern critics sometimes overlook or simply cannot keep track of: the number of different voices that occur in Piers, which was apparently recognized by the scribes of several manuscripts of the B version who label the work a ‘dialogue.’ ”35 Clearly, its scribes as much as the likely audiences of the poem received the representation of these shifts without complaint or fanfare. In addition to matters of transmission and reception of the poem, this medieval ease with multilingual texts would implicitly call into question any modern construction of the poet of Piers Plowman as a necessarily idiosyncratic versifier. Rather than an exclusively poetic practice, the poem’s linguistic “give and take” survives as evidence of the contrastive status of Latin and English in fourteenth-century England as well as of the authority of those who could engage often both in either speech or writing. Even if Piers Plowman is “committed to conveying its knowledge to a large audience” because its “Latin quotations are almost always translated into English and often analyzed,” its commitment to conveying that knowledge is nevertheless constituted through the means by which knowledge counted, that is, the authority that a seemingly effortless ability to move between languages commanded.36 Outlining the emergence of the scholarly tradition in Piers Plowman studies over more than a century, Benson has recently described how

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

89

current critical appraisals and editorial practices attempt to unify more than fifty manuscripts containing Piers Plowman texts by identifying and describing an author who has come to be known as William Langland. Tracing this biography to the poem’s earliest editors, most notably William Skeat, Benson outlines the tradition hypothesizing definitive versions A, B, and C sequentially-realized as revisions by an author, William Langland, to which the recent addition of a Z version to the A, B, C canon—a sequence itself occasionally challenged—has been variously received as antedating these versions.37 In the absence of the kinds of biographical evidence surviving for Chaucer and despite cautions voiced by George Kane decades ago against the “autobiographical fallacy” that would construct William Langland like Chaucer as a “legendary national figure,” the organizing principle an authorial identity offers for a corpus of texts few currently read in addition to Chaucer—perhaps most immediately because of their multilingual complexities—has proven irresistible for finding some point of entry for modern readers.38 In her study of ways in which medieval writers could impose an “internal signature” on their works, Anne Middleton had revived critical traditions that had rested on the assumption the poem can be “explicable only by reference to the identity of the author.”39 Even when cautious of whether these texts ref lect the actual experience of its poet, Langland’s biographer Ralph Hanna III has concluded the accepted sequence of the poems constitutes the narrative of a very particular life lived.40 Sharing confidence with Middleton and Hanna that the poem ref lects a discernable authorial identity, Alan J. Fletcher has offered the elusiveness of that poet as a feature of his unique character. For Fletcher, the revisions of the poem—curiously both an authorial habit specific to Langland as well as a shared practice among professional writers generally—attest to an ephemeral and, therefore, ethical author.41 More suggestive yet, a psychological profile of this elusive poet emerged in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s discussion of Langland’s “bibliographic ego.” Pointing to self-referential points most notably in the apologia constituting C.5, Kerby-Fulton amasses the effects of its design for numerous audiences as evidence for an authorial presence pulled in several directions by his conf licted affiliation with diverse linguistic communities.42 Similarly constructing an author from an effect of the scribal practices of literate communities, Emily Steiner has treated Piers Plowman texts as an autobiographical trace of a discrete reaction to a literate practice she terms “medieval documentary poetics.”43 This focus on an authorial presence in the text produce compelling portraits of a poet; yet, for modern audiences, the potential for a poet to emerge as also singularly and conspicuously multilingual seems inevitable. As credible as it is to name this poet William Langland based

90

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

on admittedly limited internal and external evidence, looking to the text for evidence of the poet’s literate predispositions may very well detract from the possibility of our reading for the negotiation of literate power in domains as f luid as the switching of languages within medieval speech to which we have seen Piers Plowman is not a unique witness. If critical interest in the poem as poet draws attention away from the oral and, therefore, most public dimension of Piers Plowman as a “diversity of utterances,” “dialogue” or “forum,” scholarly investments in the poet as William Langland can offer a similarly unified way to read against the linguistic conditions that determined how that public junction where English and Latin met also constituted a form of multilingual discourse.44 It is by no means the aim of this chapter to challenge the traditional attribution of Piers Plowman to William Langland. Rather, this analysis distances itself from any critical preoccupation with an authorial voice that could also disinterestedly efface the multilingual exchanges the texts of the Piers Plowman corpus share, of which the B version is exemplary.45 Central to making cultural and linguistic if not literary critical sense of this fact lies not in positing an exceptionally talented trilingual poet, but more simply in considering its multitude of texts within their multilingual context of production and reception in late medieval England. At this Gillian Rudd seems to hint when she suggests that for “the reader [who] is both interpreter and an integral part of the text,” “the text itself includes and takes its life from constant shifts and changes in mode, style, and even language.”46 For the medieval audiences rather than modern readers, the extent to which shifting between Latin and English in Piers Plowman placed an especially high premium on their efforts to make sense of their contact in the poem would seem in doubt in a culture whose most literate readers were commonly exposed or comfortably well disposed themselves to switching between languages daily. The cultural if not linguistic challenge that the fact of language contact in the poem posed to its earliest audiences was more likely very minimal. Indeed, as James Simpson makes clear, “[t]he fact that there are two languages need be no problem for a “realistic” narration in itself—many multilingual speakers will pepper discourse in one language with phrases from another.”47 Language historians of multilingualism in late medieval England have already offered a more accurate picture for the features of spontaneous “peppering” at which Simpson hints. As the earlier discussion of switching between Latin and English in this chapter argued, such forms of language-mixing were themselves “modes of discourse,” which were realized rather than occasional and often formalized rather than haphazard.48 Like multilingual writing in many medieval domains, the

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

91

Latin and English of the poem constituted a social practice by virtue of the fact it identified the community of its practitioners. Less critical of its own linguistic privilege than clerical culture more broadly, Piers Plowman explores the multilingual practices of preaching and pastoral care in its own language-mixed meditation on those very responsibilities.49 In professional scrutiny of itself, language-mixing in the poem effectively ref lects what Fletcher terms “clerical discourse” or, more specifically for Fiona Somerset, “extraclerigal” discourse.50 As ref lexive and motivated as literary critics suggest these self-formulations likely were, the syntactic particulars of such clerical discourse seem obvious in the social distance it could enforce between clerk and lay just as when Piers’ Priest engages several languages simultaneously to label him monolingual. Even if the Priest inevitably had to switch to the Latin Dixit insipiens to cite Psalm 13:1 or 52:1, that switch from English also plays on the linguistic difference imposed upon or imagined between interlocutors. In that specialized proficiency, the integration of languages in Piers Plowman engaged clerical discourse itself in ways that reproduced rather than called into question this literate authority. Rather than wholly marking the “the demise of diglossia in medieval England” and the attrition of Latin by English, their syntactic coexistence marks their complementary rather than competing typologies in the clerical discourse of the poem.51 And, in service of the poem’s themes, the interrelated status of languages can define the multiple speakers as interlocutors who address and define each other in terms of their relative position to that multilingual discourse. Not exclusively biographical evidence for the linguistic identity of a clerical poet, then, movement itself between languages in Piers Plowman suggests its syntactic combinations engage rhetorical possibilities and linguistic repertoires not uncommon in multilingual cultures and among bilingual speakers.52 Given the diglossia limiting if not restricting second-language acquisition in even late fourteenth century, it is not surprising that the minority status of Latin empowered literates in exclusive practices that could extend even to their speech. The insertion of Latin in English narration—the shared language of the majority—did not challenge the power of Latin. Instead, Latin in English speech could most effectively critique the linguistic responsibilities of some multilinguals, most bitingly, friars: [“] Ac o word þei ouerhuppen at ech a tyme þat þei preche That Poul in his Pistle to al þe peple tolde: Periculum est in falsis fratribus!” Holy writ bit men be war—I wol noʒt write it here

92

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

In englissh, on auenture it sholde be reherced to ofte, And greue þerwith [þat goode ben]—ac gramariens shul re[d]e: Vnusquisque a fratre se custodiat quia vt dicitur periculum est in falsis fratribus. Ac I wiste neuere freke þat as a frere yede bifore men on englissh Taken it for his teme, and telle it wiþouten glosyng. (B.13.68–75)

Commenting on Will’s complaint to Patience that preachers skip over that portion of Scripture in which Paul warns of false brothers, the narrator-Dreamer presents a language-mixed statement directed at addressees who share his Latin proficiency.53 Concurring with Will’s allusion to 2 Corinthians 11:26 (Periculum est in falsis fratribus) as a demonstration of the distrust that should be held toward one’s brothers in the general sense of fratribus as brethren at line 71 (“Holy writ bit men be war”), the narrator as writer (“I wol noʒt write it here”) expands on its narrower meaning in Latin rather than English (Unusquisque a fratre se custodiat quia ut dicitur periculum est in falsis fratribus [Let each protect himself from his brother (friar) since it is said there is danger among false brothers (friars)]). In wanting to avoid leaking too widely an interpretation of that fratribus as narrowly “friars,” the narrator conceals admonitions to clerical readers by elaborating only in Latin. Yet also by explicitly stating in English that he will not expand on the phrase in English, the narrator constructs as linguistic others those “goode” men who, though laity lacking Latin, conceptually contrast the corruption of their potentially false brothers, that is friars, who gloss in service of themselves rather than the laity.54 Openly defining in English (“ac gramariens shul rede”) the intended literate audience for the subsequent Latin phrase, his switch to Latin simultaneously envisions monolingual audiences—even if he does not accommodate them in English—as well as those bilinguals with whom he shares Latinity. The switch back to English (“Ac I wiste neuere freke”), in which the narrator argues that fratres as specifically friars more often gloss this Latin phrase to undermine its attack on them, however, denotes a message all audiences understand even as it directly addresses the linguistic behavior of preachers. This final switch back to English in lines 74–5 temporarily permits clerical solidarity with monolinguals by cautioning them that, although friars often misconstrue, the “lewed” can nevertheless place their trust in the clergy whose pastoral principles the narrator invigorates here by taking to task friars who “overhuppen” words of scripture. In effect, through that final switch at least and however temporarily, the narrator negotiates a vernacular alliance of “we” through which he ostensibly reproves bilingual clerks on the behalf of a laity constructed as monolingual.

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

93

Through this very brief sequence of switches, the narrator negotiates both clerical association with and dissociation from an idealized monolingual audience. Rather than one choice of language for any one clerical expression of “we” versus “they” that would consistently distance the laity, this specific sequence of shifts demonstrate that Latin does not always simply code “lered” and English only mark “lewed.” The multilingual sensitivities such strategies depict for describing “we” and “they” as clerical ingroup and lay outgroup respectively suggest the text anticipates but does not exclusively address or slavishly accommodate a lay audience by writing from an unlikely English-only position. In ref lecting clerical concerns in this passage over scrupulous glossing as part of pastoral responsibility to the laity, shifts between Latin and English emphasize instead that monolingual souls require bilingual care. In the interests of at least the spiritual solidarity between clerks and “good” men negotiated in this passage, the language-mixed discourse of the poem also sustains linguistic distance between clerk and lay; in fact, it must as an expression of its clerical competence. No doubt, the contrastive terms of English as monolingual and bilingual as Latinity—which the poem addresses often throughout if not in exactly those terms—were far more likely f luid in that culture at large; but the conversational features of the poem also goes some way to adumbrating that reality of bilingual speech as clerical discourse. In several instances of that nexus of both Latin and English and textuality and speech in Passus 15, Anima shifts between languages in ways that disclose a range of contracts and obligations both actual and metaphorical between clerk and lay. In the language-mixed terms of clerical discourse and without stating it as such, the poem presents his setting out the interdependency of “lered” and “lewed” across two identical sequences. Although Anima’s switches to Latin appear to exclude outgroup laity, this Latin also rhetorically enforces his call on ingroup addressees, “preestes, prechours and prelates manye” (B.15.114), to consider issues of reform to benefit “lewed” men. In what initially was his exposure of the “hypocrisie in Latyn” (B.15.111) of that alliterative trio of clerks, however, Anima switches to an extended Latin citation, which not only literally disrupts the proceedings of the verse but also seems to cloak his initial exposure of that clerical corruption: Iohannes Cristostomus of clerkes [carpeþ] and preestes: Sicut de templo omne bonum progreditur, sic de templo omne malum procedit. Si sacerdocium integrum fuerit, tota f loret ecclesia; Si autem corruptum fuerit omnium fides marcida est. Si sacerdocium fuerit in peccatis totus populus conuertitur ad peccandum. Sicut cum videris arborem pallidum & marcidam intelligis quod vicium

94

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

habet in radice. Ita cum videris populum indisciplinatum & irreligiosum, sine dubio sacerdocium eius non est sanum. (B.15.117–18) [ Just as all good comes out of the temple, so does all evil. If the priesthood has integrity, the whole church f lourishes; but if it is corrupt, the faith(ful) as a whole wither up. If the priests live in sin, the whole people turns to sin. Just as you see a people undisciplined and irreligious, you can be sure their priests are diseased.]

A translation of this detailed citation, which would accommodate lay readers does not follow in the text.55 Instead, offering his own gloss in the fiction of interaction in the poem, Anima immediately adds: If lewed [ledes] wiste what þis latyn meneþ, And who was myn Auctour, muche wonder me þinkeþ But if many preest [forbeere] hir baselards and hir broches [And beere] bedes in hir hand and a book vnder hir arme. (B.15.119–22)

Resembling the positioning of clerk and lay as “we” through the gloss of frater, the sentiments of the if-clause here (“If lewed [ledes] wiste what þis latyn meneth”) does not only constitute an overt warning to “lewed” men about negligent priests more likely to bear “baselards” than books. Even more sweepingly by addressing those clerks who would come under the justifiable if unvoiced ire of monolinguals, the English speech of Anima constitutes a double threat by engaging bilingual clerks in the only language of the “lewed” majority. Those monolingual interests Anima indirectly brings to the attention of clerks again just lines later by the threat of disclosure in the English phrase, “Allas, ye lewed men, much lese ye on preestes!” (B.15.128). For a second time in Passus 15, Anima calls ingroup clerical behavior into question by referring to the interests of outgroup “lewed” men by deferring to their lack of Latin proficiency. In a similar procedure of citation and gloss as much conversational as textual, Anima indirectly addressees this lay outgroup’s limited Latin despite their absence from the fictional interaction for a second time in the passus. This second sequence of switches opens with an extended Latin quotation that incorporates Job 6:5 and an anonymous commentary on Job: Num[quid], dicit Job, rugi[e]t onager cum herbam habuerit aut mugiet bos cum ante plenum presepe steterit? brutorum animalium natura

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

95

te condempnat, quia cum eis pabulum commune sufficiat; ex adipe prodijt iniquitas tua. (B.15.317–18) [Will the wild ass bray [says Job] when he hath grass? Or will the ox low when he standeth before a full manger? ( Job 6:5). The (very) nature of brute beasts is a condemnation of you, since with them common (?shared/ ordinary) food suffices; your evil has originated from excess.]56

Shifting from Latin to English without transition or translation, Anima— sounding much like the narrator in the passage on glossing frater— offers an aside on the issue of access and language difference by adding: If lewed men knewe þis latyn þei wolde loke whom þei yeue, And auisen hem bifore a fyue dayes or sixe Er þei amortisede to monkes or [monyales] hir rente[s]. (B.15.319–21)

Continuing in English, Anima extends a direct address to outgroup laity whose withholding of rent ingroup clerks might have reason to fear: Allas! lordes and ladies, lewed counseil haue ye To ʒyve from youre heires þat your Aiels you lefte, And [bisette] to bidde for you to swiche þat ben riche, And ben founded and feffed ek to bidde for oþere. (B.15.322–5)

In this identical sequence of Latin citation, non-translation, and outgroup address marked again by the speech features of the interjection “allas,” switches to extended Latin quotations initially distance “lewed men” who are then ostensibly addressed again at line 322. Like that first sequence apparently also in Anima’s voice, this address to outgroup members in effect threatens or at best warns those clerical readers whose dispossession may come at the increased knowledge of “lordes and ladies” for whom “lewed counseil” seems enough here to protect their own interests in temporal if not spiritual affairs.57 Even while inserting Latin text into English verse, the conversational procedures and narrative asides of these instances of switching between Latin and English clearly exceed the sermon-like nature of citation and gloss, especially since the instances examined thus far exhibit an awareness of gauging translation against the negotiation of “we” and “they” interests and identities. But where English and Latin meet in exclusively clerical exchanges, their integration as articulations of authority that

96

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

anticipate the demands of clerical interlocutors belies the structure of sermon as monologue even more definitively. Especially in the procedures of argumentation, literate membership and authority demand this language-mixed discourse. In these terms that entitle him to do so, Will can engage and even rebuke friar confessors: For a baptiʒed man may, as maistres telleþ, Thoruʒ contricion [clene] come to the heiʒe heuene— Sola contricio [delet peccatum]— [Contrition alone (can) blot out sin.]58 Ac [a] barn wiþouten bapteme may noʒt be so saved: Nisi quis renatus fuerit. [Unless a man be born again.]59 Loke, ye lettred men, wheiþer I lye or noʒt. (B.11.80–3)

Speaking to addressees with whom he asserts that he shares access to Latin (“ye lettred men”), Will does not translate the sources he cites by reiterating them in English. Instead, in order to authorize his view for clerical comembers in this interaction among second-language equals, Will punctuates his argument with theological and scriptural citations. More than citing Latin, Will performs his Latinity as bilingualism. By virtue of this performance for which he cites scripture as a kind of shorthand, here part of John 3:5, Will can claim his place among lettered men. While topics in theological argumentation inevitably trigger the citation of scripture and biblical authorities, such quotations are not simply incidental insertions or necessarily nodes for expansion; an expression of authority, the switch in languages formulates and underlines the matter of the exchange as well as the relatively equal social positions of the interlocutors. In the diegesis of interaction in the poem, this representation of language-mixed speech also discloses an awareness of what constitutes clerical communication among the characters and likely also the expression of clerical bilingualism more commonly. In this excerpt from an extended scholastic discussion between Will and Scripture, the emphatic insertion of contra by Will constitutes a second-language cue for Scripture to continue in the same (in extremis); together such switches declaratively articulate shared clerical identity: “Contra,” quod I, “by crist! þat kan I [wiþseye], And preuen it by [þe pistel þat Peter is nempned]: That is baptiʒed beþ saaf, be he riche or pouere.”

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

97

“That is in extremis,” quod Scripture, ‘[as] Sarʒens & Iewes Mowen be saued so, and [so] is our bileve [.] (B.10.349–53)

As this exchange between Scripture and Will demonstrates in comparison to Will’s words to “ye lettred men” above, untranslated quotations share identical functions with such phrases as contra and in extremis. Despite their formal differences as semantic and syntactic units, their identical form—as switches to Latin within English speech—marks their shared second-language membership by which Will’s bilingualism allows him to speak with the very embodiment of the Book. In that same passus, Will continues to perform within the bounds of clerical discourse in seemingly contradictory language-mixed declarations of sensitivity to lay monolinguals: The douʒtiest doctour and deuinour of þe trinitee Was Austyn þe olde, and heiʒest of þe foure, Seide þus in a sermon—I seigh it writen ones— “Ecce ipsi ydiot[e] rapiunt celum vbi nos sapientes in inferno mergimur.” [Lo, the unlearned themselves take heaven by force while we wise ones are drowned in hell.]60 And is to mene to [Englissh] men, moore ne lesse, Arn none raþer yrauyssed fro the riʒte bileue Than are þise [kete] clerkes þat konne manye bokes [.] (B.10.458–64)

Will’s switching procedures in this instance indicate his alliance with “Englissh men” for he does not need to accommodate Scripture, who can clearly understand Latin without translation, most apparently because she herself is sacred Latinity. In his clarifying paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 9:1 (B.10.436a) and Mark 13:9–11 (B.10.450a), Will had lines earlier accommodated “Englissh men” he treats as lay Anglophone monolinguals. But, at the same time this glossing accommodates potentially monolingual audiences of the text, Will’s Latinity also necessarily aligns him as well with their bilingual spiritual advisors. Similarly engaging in second-language gestures rhetorically aimed at “Englissh men,” Will critiques scriptural misappropriation as exclusive Latinity in the closing lines of Passus 10. These vernacular sympathies motivate a reading of Scripture, which seems with excessive scrupulousness to avoid its mistranslation: Right so lewed [laborers] and of litel knowyng, Selden falle so foule and so fer in synne

98

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

As clerkes of Holy [k]ir[k]e þat kepen cristes tresor, The which is mannes soule to saue, as god seiþ in þe gospel; Ite vos in vineam meam.61 (B.10.478–81a)

Despite Will expressing the necessity of accommodating “lewed” “of litel knowying” in English, he does not translate Matthew 20:4. Is this an ironic gesture aimed at estranging the lay audiences of the poem? Or is this a linguistic representation of clerical practices within their own restrictive communities? If it is the latter, does Will emphasize his point about clerical responsibility in sharing “cristes tresor” by avoiding translating Matthew 20:4? If this does allow Will to convince those who can translate that they should, his gloss at that moment would be an affront to the honest construing he attempts to mobilize among clerks. Just as Will critiques pastoral responsibility through mixed-language discourses common to clerks, Reason explores secular governance in sensitivity to the power of linguistic difference. Urging the King to seek spiritual advice after his attempts to marry Mede to Conscience, Reason offers his reasons in Latin from penitential sources. To avoid another secular misappropriation by the King, Reason leaves the text “un-Englished”: Ne for no Mede haue mercy but mekenesse it ma[de], For Nullum malum þe man mette with inpunitum And bad Nullum bonum be irremuneratum.62 Late þi Confessour, sire kyng, construe [it þee on englissh], And if [þow] werch[e] it in werk I wedde myne eris That lawe shal ben a labourer and lede afeld donge, And loue shal lede þi lond as þe leef likeþ. (B.4.142–8)

Supporting Conscience’s refusal of marriage to Mede proposed by the King, Reason employs an untranslated authority in order to place Mede’s temporal enticements out of the King’s hands and those of his confessors. However, in alignment with the King’s secular concerns, Clerkes þat were Confessours coupled hem togideres Al to construe þis clause for þe kynges profit, Ac noʒt for the confort of þe commune ne for þe kynges soule. (B.4.149–51)

Reason’s call for confession—already having alluded to confession with his quotation of a penitential maxim itself—seems to make his instructions

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

99

less than transparent, of course, when underscored in a second language. It renders it possible, however, for the narrator to frame how the Divine standards of punishment and reward established by confession and penance might be frustrated by the second-language interests of clerks. In this case, the immediate disregard of Reason’s instructions constitutes a contemporary witness to the pairing of the temporal interests of some clerks with linguistic scurrility. While it is unlikely all instances of language-mixing similarly characterize the fiction of speech and dialogue in Piers Plowman, the overall complexion of the poem as multilingual surely attends to the spiritual authority and literate privilege that only an ability to switch languages guaranteed. Thus, as multilingual discourse normatively invested in clerical matters, the languages of the text are not necessarily a cacophony of competing interests.63 Not likely the mirror of the sociolinguistic battleground on which English challenges Latin, the texts of Piers Plowman are evidence instead of the ongoing practices of clerical community as an integration of English and Latin, which reproduces its own interests as at best functionally literate and at least symbolically Latinate but in every case expressly bilingual. The instances examined thus far consider Latin not only as scriptural insertions but rhetorical gestures that discursively organize the themes of preaching and governance in the poem. For rendering interactions meaningful as dramatic dialogue, the orality of Latin does not demonstrate Piers Plowman constitutes a poetic analogue of such medieval texts as sermons or “macaronic” verse. Rather, language contact within interactions can mark clerical participation in the socioreligious welfare of those men clerks designate “Englissh” in their monolingual and spiritual dependency. From within these clerical discourses, which selfinterestedly construct and variously totalize monolinguals as blessedly “lewed,” French can also ref lexively mark that English vernacularity as simplicity.64 Critics have noted that French in the text demonstrates William Langland’s ability to engage in such crosslinguistic punning as English “payn” for French “bread” (B.7.126). In the context of the social rather than stylistic capacities within the poem, however, I contend that French serves as a linguistic “other” to both Latin and English. In their rhetorical effect and ref lection of social meaning, several switches to French words and phrases especially characterize interactions in which clerical discourse writes its own vernacular membership by emphasizing the lack of French “lered” and “lewed” share. In a gesture to the social gulf distancing Latin bilinguals from English monolinguals, the poem offers the vernacular f luidity of French as a language of shared rejection and, therefore, an inverse marker of solidarity with the audience both the poem and its mixed-language discourse imagine.

100

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

While quotations as intersentential switches constitute the majority of Latin constituents, not surprisingly, similar switches to French—only two—are restricted in the poem to proverbial expressions of hardly the theological weight of Latin.65 In three other instances, French occurs in phrases either formalized as honorific address or simply fossilized in song.66 In three passages only do switches from English to French appear to engage the poem’s themes of the spiritual simplicity in what seem to be at first jarringly obvious sequences. In the first, with French symbolically designating neither literate nor lay in their totalized difference, clerical discourse can participate in yet condescend to that linguistic simplicity attributed to the workers in the field owned by Piers. Undoubtedly English monolinguals, nevertheless attributed to their hunger for piping hot food to keep away their chill is French: Laborers þat haue no land to lyue on but hire handes Deyne[þ] nouʒt to dyne a day nyʒt olde wortes. May no peny ale hem paie, ne no pece of bacoun, But if it be fressh f lessh ouþer fisshe [y]fryed, And that chaud and plus chaud, for chillynge of hir mawe. (B.6.307–11)

If the first audiences of the poem had imagined that these field workers had used French, no doubt these adjectives inversely marked that tongue as out of their collective linguistic reach. More specifically within the clerical discourse of the poem, this narrative account designates the nameless workers as necessarily limited language-shifters precisely because they are depicted as desirous of so little.67 As figures of the most idealized spiritual labor as well, the appropriation and embodiment of the field workers as monolinguals shores up a clerical conception of linguistic and spiritual simplicity as lacking in French. In centering on more likely bilinguals, however, shifts to French constitute a critique of failed simplicity, most especially clerical failure. Its invocation is so negatively charged in the poem that French f lags all language affectations including the spiritual misuse of Latin: [For ypocrisie] in latyn is likned to a [loþly] dongehill That were bisnewed wiþ snow and snakes wiþInne, Or to a wal þat were whitlymed and were foul wiþInne. Right so [preestes, prechours and prelates manye], Ye aren enblaunched wiþ bele paroles and wiþ [bele clothes], Ac youre werkes and wordes þervnder aren ful [wol]ueliche. (B.15.111–16)

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

101

Addressing the Latin-proficient involved in the Church’s work, Anima neither intends his statements for French addressees nor co-opts the symbolic power of the minority language French; instead, he morally and linguistically distances the “preestes, prechours and prelates” as an outgroup who disguisedly whiten themselves through language. Similarly in Passus 14, Patience distances immoral behavior by commenting on the eventual punishment of the rich man by a shift to French: Aungels þat in helle now ben hadden ioye some tyme, And diues in deyntees lyuede and in douce vie; Right so reson sheweþ that [þo renkes] þat were [lordes] And hir [ladies] also lyuede hir lif in murþe. (B.14.122–5)

Like Anima, Patience shifts into French in order to create ingroup consensus by bracketing questionable conduct in that language constructed as outgroup.68 Without specifying any variety of French that it constructs as exclusive to “soft-living,” within the scope of the poem such shifts can only reveal that French was socially common to neither the clerk nor lay audiences that the text imagines as its spiritual readers. This alliance of monolinguals and clerks—although clerks were themselves ideally bilingual with Latin—consensually constructs and distances such vice as characteristic of a linguistic outgroup of “Frenche men and fre men” (B.11.384) to which neither belong. The designation of an outgroup by shifts to French at least momentarily aligns Latin-proficient and non-Latin-proficient language users. Like the management of most Latin quotations, however, the position of speakers as ingroup clerks—minimally bilingual in Latin and English—always regulates the meaning of shifts to French, even if these shifts temporarily efface the social and linguistic difference between learned and unlearned. Coueitise—with French his only acquired language—seems to situate himself within these second-language distinctions between Latin and French in his confession to Repentaunce: “I wende rif lynge were restitucioun for I lerned neuere red on boke, And I kan no frenssh, in feiþ, but of þe ferþeste ende of Northfolk.” (B.5.234–5)69

His confession of an inability to read books clearly may gesture to his lack of Latin; but this self-disclosure could def lect from casting his French into question. Not offering up his bilingualism for further scrutiny, he declares its regional shortcomings as evidence that his Anglo-French— acquired in Norfolk—as an undesirable variety demands no further

102

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

verification at all. Whatever that admission of regionalism discloses, his mere association with French as a language of affectation and greed fits within the code developed for that language by clerical discourse. Contradicting his assertion of a lack of Latin, the citation of Psalm 111:5 placed in Coueitise’s own mouth as his self-interested request for leniency during his confession (Miseretur & commodat [Acceptable is the man that showeth mercy and lendeth]) (B.5.243) further underlines his failings in monolingual simplicity that his facility in French already belies.70 In this negative exemplum of second-language desire as material gain, the mention of French itself ref lexively reinscribes the symbolic monolingualism of men described as “good” in their linguistic and spiritual simplicity. Clerical multilingualism gains its power from Latinity as well as the cultural and linguistic unlikelihood of “lewed” French. To the benefit of clerical boundaries, the proliferation of varieties of French by this period in forms of instrumental or professional bilingualism rather than the more prestigious integrative or native bilingualism of previous centuries had allowed Latin to reassert itself as a language of authority that even fewer were likely to acquire than French. With the absorption of Norman and Central French—sometimes by borrowing the same lexeme from both varieties—as well as the professional domination of Anglo-French by native Anglophones practicing common law, the prestige language Latin—even when mixed within English-language communication— would have constituted the most unassailably long-standing expression of literate authority across multilingual communities in the fourteenth century. In its construction of vernacular simplicity as symbolically monolingual, then, the interests of the speakers of clerical discourse seem at their most bald. In what has been believed was a conspicuous addition to the B version, these investments are made especially clear on their own language contact terms in the Latin of the commons in the Prologue: Thanne [comsed] al þe commune crye in vers of latyn To þe kynges counseil, construe whoso wolde, “Precepta Regis sunt nobis vincula legis!” [The king’s bidding has for us the binding force of law.] (B Prol.143–5)

A.V.C. Schmidt interprets this “vers of Latyn” as an ironic affirmation of obedience to “þe kynges counseil,” which the aside “construe whoso wolde” suggests the “lewed” cannot likely understand.71 Of course, the force of this irony at least for modern readers lies within the linguistic unlikelihood of “lewed” multilingualism, which renders monolingualism itself voiceless and asserts that whatever constituted

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

103

medieval vernacularity was—by virtue of diglossia even in the fourteenth century—a necessarily bilingual project.72 That Piers can tear Truth’s Latin pardon after the Priest makes its content known constitutes another witness to that linguistic operation by which clerical authority inevitably appropriated the monolingualism it designated blessedly “lewed.” The pardon’s incitement of Piers’ anger triggers his participation in clerical discourse, as he switches to Psalm 22:4 to authorize his decision to “cessen of [his] sowing” and “swynke noʒt so harde” (B.7.122).73 This switch to Latin by an unlikely bilingual likely suggests a “lered” construction of his spiritual autonomy as the contemplative alternative to a life of heavy labor. Indeed, still in keeping with the poem’s clerical appropriations of “lewed” experience, a construction of Piers’ being “lettred a litel” by “Abstynence þe Abesse” (B.7.138) enforces the clerical notion that spiritual work is as onerous as physical toil. Of course, the deployment of a truncated scriptural citation as “lewed” ipsa verba does not demonstrate the erasure of difference between ploughmen and those with privileged access to the language of the Bible nor the symbolic gulf between monolingual and bilingual. It seems instead that clerical discourse in the mouth of the poem’s most central “lewed” figure strikes a more elaborate professional pose. Its play to lay simplicity as metaphorical exemplum for spiritual authority allows a literate elite to critique traditional institutions by distancing itself from long-standing clerical failings. Thus, while it might espouse vernacularity, the clerical discourse of Piers Plowman could not also patently promote Anglophone monolingualism.74 The vernacularity multilingual literates idealized—a status for English that would have had them disavow their second-language privilege— would be long in coming as that exchange between Haukeyn and Patience suggests. Far from a vernacular champion, Haukeyn calls on Patience’s competence in Latin to define and explain the theological meaning of poverty in his first language, English: “What is Pouerte, pacience,” quod he, “proprely to mene?” “Paupertas,” quod Pacience, “est odibile bonum, Remocio curarum, possessio sine calumpnia, donum dei, sanit[atis] mater, absque sollicitudine semita, sapiencie temptatrix, negocium sine dampno, Incerta fortuna, absque sollictudine felicitas.” 75 [“Poverty is a detestable good—removal of cares, possession without trickery; a gift of God, the mother of health, a path without worry, mistress of wisdom, business without loss, amidst uncertain fortune happiness without worry.”] “I kan noʒt construe,” quod haukyn, “ye moste kenne me þis on englissh.”

104

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

“[Al þis] in Englissh,” quod Pacience, “it is wel hard to expounen, Ac somdeel I shall seyen it, by so þow vnderstonde.” (B.14.275–9)

Patience does define and explain the theological concept of poverty in English, through the means by which bilingual clerks should construe Latin sources. In more than forty lines (B.14.279–322), Patience meticulously breaks down the series of Latin appositions he first used to define poverty. Despite his monolingual interlocutor, however, he continues to communicate in a mixed mode, switching to phrases not found in his first definition (cura animarum) or developing his definitions with Latin sources whose meaning Haukeyn seems none the worse here for not knowing.76 Within the diegesis of the text, its most virtuous monolinguals function as interlocutors desirous and needful of the wisdom of second-language authority within its alliterative arena of contact between languages as well as monolinguals and bilinguals. A poem determined as much by the powerlessness of monolingualism as its idealization, Piers Plowman also articulates in multilingual terms its literate community as ideally masculine. While some critics have found the poem sympathetic to women, it seems clear that the linguistic boundaries of Piers Plowman could draw on clerical discourse as a specifically masculine arsenal of persuasive speech.77 In contrast to the favorable depictions of other multilingual female figures in the poem as Dame Study and Lady Church, Mede’s questionable motives fall under especially close literate scrutiny. Gendered female in a venality satire tradition in which that figure was as often male, Mede and her language-mixing serves to refine the limits of literate community as exclusively masculine and ideally unconcerned with her temporal temptations.78 In this encounter, Conscience serves as the conscience of the King within the setting of the poem and, as well, a linguistic exemplum of clerical discourse. In support of his rejection of the King’s interests in promoting his union with Mede (B.3.114–69), Conscience’s Latin allows him to fashion a masterful disavowal. By attacking Mede’s attempts to switch from English to Latin scriptural quotations, Conscience offers an idealized proscription of venial Latinity as embodied by Mede: Also wroþ as þe wynd weex Mede in a while. “I kan no latyn?” quod she, “clerkes wite þe soothe! Se what Salomon seiþ in Sapience bokes! That ʒyuen ʒiftes, [takeþ yeme], þe victorie wynneþ, And [muche] worshipe ha[þ] þerwith, as holy writ telleþ: Honorem adquiret qui dat munera, &c.” “I leue wel, lady,” quod Conscience, “þat þi latyn be trewe.

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

105

Ac þow art lik a lady þat radde a lesson ones, Was omnia probate, and þat plesed hire herte For þat lyne was no lenger at þe leues ende. Hadde she loked þat [left] half and þe leef torned She sholde haue founden fel[l]e wordes folwynge þerafter: Quod bonum est tenete; truþe þat text made. And so [mys]ferde ye, madame; ye kouþe na moore fynde Tho ye [souʒte] Sapience sittynge in youre studie. This text þat ye had told were [trewe] for lordes, Ac yow failed a konnynge clerk þat kouth þe leef han torned. And if ye seche sapience eft fynde shul ye þat folweþ, A ful teneful text to hem þat takeþ Mede: Animam autem aufert accipientium &c. (B.3.331–50)

In their exchange, Latin circumscribes a bilingual activity of reading as extending to vernacular interpretation as well. Conceding Mede’s minimal Latin in her selection of text (“þi latyn be trewe”), Conscience nevertheless centers his critique on her bilingualism by gendering the act of reading correctly as masculine.79 By more than simply citing Scripture, he undermines Mede’s literate status by constructing her reading of Latin as risible and her integration of Latin within English utterances as patently inferior. As is well known, Mede intentionally integrates only part of Proverbs 22:9 in order to support her argument for bestowing reward as she see fit.80 This partial citation—of which there are acceptably many in the clerical discourse of the poem—appears specifically here as a shift to Latin in order to veil her justification for receiving bribes. Arguing that she had not turned the page to read the entire line of Proverbs 22:9 as it appears in Scripture, Conscience grounds Mede’s lack of reading skills in gender; comparing her to an unlettered lady with only one Latin lesson, he accuses her of incompetently applying her Latin sources too broadly. In literal terms, he begins to drive home this point by partially inserting 1 Thessalonians 56:21 (omnia autem probate quod bonum est tenete) in order to state she uses Latin to “prove anything she chooses” (omnia probate). Upstaging the quotation of Proverbs 22:9 Mede had simply appended to the end of her sentence, Conscience contests her bilingualism further by deftly deploying this truncated quotation as a switch within a single clause. In that syntactic move that effectively mocks her partial quotation, he completes citing the rest of 1 Thessalonians 56:21 by line 343 (Quod bonum est tenete). Finally, he completes his dressing down of Mede at line 350 by filling in the remainder of Proverbs 22:9 that she had omitted (“And that is Animam autem aufert accipientium &c.”).81 In this series of

106

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

syntactically calculated switches, Conscience’s ingroup skill of adapting Latin sources for English speech constructs Mede’s self-serving attempts as feigned clerical competence. Within the bounds of their interaction, his masterful performance of combining languages ref lexively reveals her feminine fallibility as monolingual immodesty. The Latinity Conscience orally engages here is far from partial in competence, for it adumbrates the multilingual textuality of which the poem is itself an extended performance. In the commonplace of such communication, monolingualist sentiments could make no demands on either the medieval poet or the poem’s scribes, for the public nature of that text’s dissemination, which clearly preserved its multilingualism, reminds us that monolingual demands, were there any, need not be met. The languages of Piers Plowman conform to conventional clerical communication both expressed as speech and practiced in multilingual literacy as common to business, legal, medical, and sermon writing as it was to verse. If such practices were as public as they were widespread in multilingual culture, it is not all that curious a matter that the attribution of sedition to Piers Plowman in subsequent decades centered not on its language contact features, which immediately affront modern readers above all, but its alliteration.82 When multilingual writing itself embodied mundane practices that our modern unilingual normativity considers unusual, would the texts containing Piers Plowman also be engaging in linguistic subversion? Is it rather, then, that the name William Langland constitutes linguistic comfort for the modern disciplinary suppositions its multilingual textuality confounds and against which the tradition totalizing the language contact texts under his name seems to bear witness? If this is even remotely possible, the modern reader cannot likely be certain that William Langland and the literature attributed to him can fulfill any modern expectations of his medieval English-language sponsorship. Without recent masculinist discourses to support such formulations of medieval monolingualism, it seems more appropriate to read Piers Plowman as a challenge to our modern monolingual expectations about the history of English than as an attestation of medieval Anglophone solidarity. In contrast to the monolingualist identities that curtail secondlanguage acquisition today, medieval Anglophone monolingualism existed more as a premise than a state worth adopting among minority literates. Even in its concern with lay interests, the clerical discourse constituting Piers Plowman was not “engaged in an attempt to make their [English] language the equal of Latin.”83 The social abjection of Middle English was ripe more for discrete appropriation than for singularly essentializing and widely promulgating one identity for many. While

M U LT I L I N G U A L W R I T I N G A N D L A N G L A N D

107

textbook watersheds like the Statue of Pleading in 1362 or John Trevisa’s declaration of English superseding French as a language of instruction could appear to modern Anglophones as tantamount to medieval refusals of second-language acquisition, the means by which a text like Piers Plowman appropriates yet positions itself over English suggests monolingualism was itself still far from a wholly desirable state, a state that the rise of secularism after the medieval period did not immediately remedy.84 Indeed, with insular varieties of French less likely a marker of social distinction as its instrumental roles proliferated, the lay audiences Piers Plowman projected—stuck between an undesirable monolingualism and an inaccessible Latin—would have done well to find themselves a second language of their own. But this, of course, was what English speakers less in their hospitality or manliness than in their linguistic insecurity had already been doing for centuries by borrowing so heavily from French. Unlike centuries of medieval contact between English and French to which the modern lexicon stands witness, the multilingual writing that did little harm to Piers Plowman in its initial reception had obviously held less long term promise for commemorating William Langland.85 While on the surface it seems obvious why so much more critical attention has been paid to Chaucer’s ostensibly English-only writings over William Langland’s multilingual alliterative verse, the seemingly tireless reinventions of Chaucer witness the historical breadth the cache his gestures to vernacularity have obviously brought to literary and more recently professional identity.86 If nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism could happily house Chaucer’s English within the field of English studies that the monolingualist animus founded, critical practices embedded in monolingual assumptions and even expectations about gender have also been able to read against Chaucer’s own multilingual stances. In the next chapter, we shall see how Chaucer—like the poet of Piers Plowman in his multilingual dispositions—represented language choices in the Canterbury Tales that could claim for the poet as much solidarity with as distance from Anglophone monolingualism.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 4 CHAUCER’S “DIVERSITE”

B

y imagining vernacular simplicity, language-mixing in Piers Plowman can extend the breadth of Latin authority without irony in a culture for which monolingualism was not in every respect advantageous. Down to the level of syntax, the multilingual stylizations of Conscious reveal in detail how switching between Latin and English could so minutely maintain the language boundary that the poem could not imaginably dissolve. In pitting mixed-language clerical discourse against a personification of self-interest and feigned Latinity, that language contact wedged between Conscious and Mede serves to reaffirm their moral as well as gendered differences. In specifically those gendered dimensions of language contact in literary characterizations, the Canterbury Tales offers that one especially notable example in “The Nuns’ Priest’s Tale,” which encapsulates how such multilingual discourse could constitute indispensable “on the spot” authority. Wielding that second-language prowess emblematically within and effectively over English, Chaunticleer crows Latin for one of his many hens, Pertelote: For al so siker as In principio, Mulier est hominis confusio— Madame, the sentence of this Latyn is, “Womman is mannes joye and al his blis.” (VII 3163–6)1

A psuedo-quotation combining the beginning of either Genesis or John (In principio) and a popular proverb (mulier est hominis confusio), the integration of Latin within speech clearly falls far short of the sort Conscience can engage both in its accuracy and syntactic complexity.2 Yet, cobbled to and f latly f lagged by the textual authority of in principio, Chaunticleer’s mistranslation or even comic ignorance of the popular proverb’s framing

110

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

of woman as the downfall of man offers more than a joke on poor Latin or even dishonest glossing. Most evidently in symbolic terms, this movement between Latin and English bluntly restates categories of masculine and feminine at precisely those points of conversational and even intimate contact that those languages in juxtaposition mark; to put it in somewhat reductive if not essentialist terms, this performance of switching replicates the gendering of Latinate bilingualism as masculine and Anglophone monolingualism as feminine. That synthesis of Latin and English within even a satirical interaction between a rooster and hen nevertheless rests upon a cultural fact, that is, the medieval incontestability of second-language masculine authority at its most erroneous exactly when the complicity of female vanity and monolingual desire renders it most f lattering. Although such instances of language contact within speech occur far less frequently in the Canterbury Tales than in Piers Plowman, its fewer occurrences in the Canterbury Tales even more emphatically punctuate and organize its fiction of interactions and speaker attitudes. Designating likely targets of derision in the third fragment in particular, literary explorations of clerical abuse frame those themes specifically in terms of the language awareness of its speakers. Noting these explorations of clerical discourse do not call literate privilege itself into question, this chapter argues that the figures of the Wife of Bath, Friar, and Summoner demonstrate an awareness of how some medieval speakers attempted to invoke but never subvert linguistic authority. In the clustering of genders and languages in the third fragment, their representation variously ref lects how an ability to switch between languages—whether or not the constituents of such switches are idiomatic—predicates this ability to choose as masculine prerogative. In its centering on clerical abuse as a kind of linguistic scurrility, however, the fragment more emphatically critiques language choices inappropriate to speaker or audience as forms of overreaching self-presentation. On just such terms of gender and language awareness, Chaucer’s Pardoner offers a gauge of the linguistic appropriateness of masculinity to its speaker. Most patently a critique of clerical opportunism, the portrait of the Pardoner sets his uncertain masculinity (“geldying or a mare” I 691) against the Pardoner’s own presentation of his mastery of language-mixed clerical discourse. Described in the General Prologue as putting on appearances as “a noble ecclesiaste” (I 708) when preaching, the Pardoner equally dresses up his boastfulness in his prologue in an ostensibly self-deprecating confession of his linguistic practices. Inciting devout responses to increase his sales of pardons, indulgences, and relics, the Pardoner’s profession of “hauteyn speche” (VI 330) when he preaches

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

111

extends to his own report of his switching very self-consciously from English to Latin: And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe, To saffron with my predicacioun, And for to stire hem to devocioun. (VI 344–6)

Seemingly an inadequate linguistic characterization of the clerical vaunting it is meant to ref lect, the Pardoner’s representation of himself constitutes his own unverifiable assertion—at that moment among the pilgrims specifically—that he can speak what could pass for clerical proficiency and literate masculinity. Yet, without ever explicitly demonstrating that competence, the Pardoner’s unsubstantiated linguistic claims serve a literary aim of even more effectively painting him a hypocrite or likely liar. However, neither patently proving nor disproving his gender or Latinity for certain, this linguistic ambiguity provides us with another reading based on language attitude and access; the “saffron’d” sermons delivered to his likely predominantly monolingual lay audiences are satirically sufficient linguistic indications of his woefully compatible insincerity and authority, precisely because they mark the linguistic dependency or comic complicity of those—like Pertelote—so haplessly duped by “wordes fewe” “in Latyn.”3 Fictionalizing oral narration and self-representation, the linguistic portrait of the Pardoner patently embodies a contemporary awareness of the social meanings of choosing and combining languages. Even within the literary fiction of his own speech, the Pardoner asks the pilgrims to imagine how he interacts with and selects languages for audiences clearly absent among the pilgrims, that is, those for whom he laces his English sermons with Latin. Elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, this selfawareness of audience and second-language choice among the tale-tellers clearly exceeds Chaucer’s representing the Pardoner’s self-disclosure of his Latinity as emblematically “wordes few.”4 This medieval awareness of switching between languages within the larger scope of multilingual practices and attitudes can escape modern critical attention, because linguistic investments in appreciating Chaucer’s English can comfortably center on his formulations of its literary worth. Likely for those disciplinary as well as monolingualist habits, critical arguments about language awareness in the Canterbury Tales have traditionally rested on monolingual evidence, most famously the northern dialect forms attributed to the students in “The Reeve’s Tale.”5 Traditional accounts maintain that the occasional northernisms of Aleyn and John—distinct from the speech of the Norfolk Reeve

112

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

himself—constitute the earliest imitation of dialect as a form of regional ribbing in English literature.6 However, on closer examination, the phonological, morphological, and lexical regional peculiarities, which Chaucer might have intended to construct—however inconsistently—were with equal irregularity copied by scribes more generally.7 For historical sociolinguists this inconsistency among copyists in preserving shifts between dialects constitutes proof that the language difference, which was most intelligible to medieval scribes and audiences, was not likely based on widely shared sensitivities to regional variation. If awareness of the social difference, which second languages symbolized, were more salient than attitudes toward varieties across English itself, then, the most obvious linguistic sensitivity toward difference would center on the conceptual gulf if not practical division—as we have seen in code-switching and multilingual writing—between Latin, French, and English.8 But even more obviously without ever explicating it as such, medieval attitudes toward multilingualism for all of its attendant privileges and clerical responsibilities would distinguish it from monolingualism, however varied the registers or dialects of English itself. In the most socially evident way in the Canterbury Tales, then, the conf luence of Latin, French, and English within the fictions of speech and dialogue—especially in exchanges between speakers of varied language skills and linguistic identities—can disclose these attitudes in ways shifting between such medieval varieties of English as dialect less likely could not.9 This medieval topography of multilingualism grounded the kinds of cultural awareness and literary concerns Chaucer had for writing in his first language. On the conceptual vicissitudes of writing in English, the closing stanzas of Troilus and Criseyde offer likely Chaucer’s most famous rumination: And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that no myswrite the, Ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! (V 1793–8)

Less a tentative expression of vernacular self-esteem than a sober evaluation of the comparative shortcomings of English to the superior languages of literacy, Chaucer’s imprecation seems modestly to suggest divine intervention was necessary in order for this “litel boke” to resist corrupt transcriptions endemic to “rym in Englissh,” which he describes elsewhere as already troubled by its metrical “skarsete.”10 At first glance

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

113

when focusing exclusively on English, Chaucer’s ref lections here on vernacular “diversite” seem to compound the issue of dialect variation within Middle English. However, what was incidentally the absence of a standard English—despite the fact Chaucer engages overall the dialect at hand that would eventually become recognized as symbolizing both correctness and national identity—belies his idealizing dialect conformity within his text especially since so many variants already co-occurred within his London English. In a reading focused narrowly on “diversite” as variation within English, “Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn” would offer a glimpse into the attendant dangers of scribes switching from Chaucer’s dialect to their own in the process of copying: Adam scriveyn, if ever it thee bifalle Boece or Troylus for to wryten newe, Under thy long lokkes thou must have the scalle, But after my making thow wryte more trewe; So ofte adaye I mot thy werke renewe, It to correcte and eke to rubbe and scrape, And al is thorugh thy negligence and rape.11

That reading based on monolingual variation could further suggest that the nature of copying and dialect “diversite” predicts Chaucer’s timeconsuming correction of errors caused by the “negligence” of not attending to his own forms. Rather than variation among the English of his scribes, however, an even more literal interpretation of the conditions of the concerns condensed in this short poem could be offered. Recent research attributing the frustration aired here with error in at least fair copies to one scribe named Adam Pinkhurst suggests Chaucer’s thoughts on the variability of English clearly did not rise from frustrated respect for his London dialect. If Pinkhurst—possibly a native of Surrey and likely a member of the London Mercer’s guild—was as locally affiliated as Chaucer, “Chaucer’s Wordes” is not wholly likely to trope scribal error on the basis of a recognition of regional variation.12 Based on Linne R. Mooney’s conclusions concerning the identity of “Adam scriveyn,” it is most likely that “Chaucer’s Wordes” proves Chaucer lamented not the laxity or non-London dialect of neglectful scribes; rather, he was playfully reproving the inexperience of—rather than his dialect divergence from—that particular scribe, Adam Pinkhurst, whom he intended to train as his own “scriveyn.” Yet, not wholly frustration with his personal scribe, Chaucer’s sense of “mis-writing” (“So prey I God that no myswrite the”) also arises from the multilingual facts of medieval culture. If writing in English inspires

114

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

concerns over correctness, his sober evaluation in this short poem arises from those contradictions between oral “diversite”—in that sense of its difference from writing—and the “writing of oure tonge” itself. Conceptually larger an issue than variation across or within English, the morphologically bereft “light reules” of English pose challenges for the vernacular poet who typologically totalizes its lack of formal literate sophistication Chaucer attributes elsewhere to English with the nonnative adjective “insufficient.”13 It is this difference or “diversite” when rendering his English as writing that most especially distinguished the language conceptually from Latin; even more apparently than those variants characterizing English, this “diversite” above all demanded Chaucer’s control over the scribal process itself because English simply was not Latin. In the diglossic multilingualism of Chaucer’s culture, then, this is not solely a monolingual tension between speaking English and writing English. Even late in a period in which Latin always symbolically encoded fixity and French could continue to mark more than one prestigious variety ranging from the tongue of the courtier to the language of common law, these minority languages contrastively marked the conceptual vicissitudes of writing in English.14 More than any other tongue even by the late fourteenth century, the English language still bore the mark upon daily speech—not wholly unlike the inescapable blemish Biblical Adam brings upon mankind—of cultural imperfection and linguistic “diversite” itself.15 With its written-ness foreign even to itself in contrast to Latin, the textual shortcomings of English predicted its inaccurate transmission among Chaucer’s scribes precisely because all vernacular writing was prey to the “diversite” of English speech, that is, of the gap between speaking and writing in English that the impropriety of English for formal written expression in contrast to especially Latin and often French pronounced as still evidently wide rather than promisingly narrowing. Throughout the medieval period, then, when “vernacular texts as lexical constructs would not by nature elicit from readers the expectation of correctness or incorrectness,” the most Chaucer could logistically manage for his vernacular writing was a scribe over whom Mooney has concluded he would prove to have considerable control.16 In the broadest cultural sense, it would seem “diversite” in English writing did not frustrate the representation of Chaucer’s London spoken English; the practical and conceptual written unruliness of English—what in “The Summoner’s Tale” this chapter will later argue is an immeasurable noise from an artless monolingual “ars”— posed a metrical conundrum and literate challenge for Chaucer’s obvious self-awareness in English writing most generally. Defining those weaknesses as exclusive to English, “diversite” marked its comparatively low literate status, which had already culturally predicted

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

115

Chaucer’s acquisition of Latin, French, and Italian. A formulation most evident to literates like Chaucer, medieval Anglophone “diversite” was itself a concept shaped within and by multilingual practices and attitudes. In that variation not within English but across languages, vernacular “diversite” would constitute a site of difference itself. It is this site of “diversite” in multilingual culture that Chaucer’s sense of “tongues difference” in Troilus and Criseyde just as tellingly develops when the narrator positions himself and his work in reference to his foreign language sources in the lines preceding Canticus Troili: And of his song naught only the sentence, As writ myn auctour called Lollius, But pleinly, save oure tonges difference, I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus As I shal seyn; and whoso list it here, Loo, next this vers he may it fynden here. (I 393–9)

For H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “tonges difference” most evidently constitutes the deconstructive project Chaucer undertakes in re-presenting texts as his own. Thus, in Leicester’s Derridean formulation of différance as principally textual, the narrator’s mention of Lollius, “apparently a fiction, a composite of at least five actual sources in three languages,” serves to defer the more immediate and slavishly transposed source of Troilus’ song, Petrarch.17 At the heart of staging this translatio as well, of course, is not only difference in texts but in the status of English against both Latin and Italian and their highly distinct literary and linguistic histories from English. In a literary gesture of not referring to Petrarch’s Canzoniere at that moment when he undertakes its translation in part, Chaucer effaces the linguistic as well as the textual differences between Canticus Troili and Petrarch’s Sonnet 88, “S’amore non è.” Yet, as this chapter will argue, just as the Wife of Bath figures as a necessary admonition of the difference between Chaucer’s first language and Latin or French, the patently fictive Lollius constitutes a modest admission of and even apology for rendering Latin and Italian traditions so infelicitously in the English language.18 On such medieval conceptions of “diversite” or difference as multilinguistic as well as textual, the narrator of Troilus and Criseyde declaims further when invoking the muse of history and heroic verse, Clio: To ryme wel this book til I have do; Me nedeth here noon other art to use. Forwhi to every lovere I me excuse,

116

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

That of no sentement I this endite, But out of Latyn in my tonge it write. (II 10–4)

Again, “our tonges difference” stresses the vernacular transposition Chaucer modestly undertakes (“out of Latyn in my tongue it write”) whose English-language product both Latin and Italian texts collectively supersede as literary and linguistic traditions of both ancient and contemporary international reputation. Unlike the Latin legacy of Italian, the status of Chaucer’s English cannot effectively draw on so illustrious a past. Indeed, of the patrimony of the earliest English tongue—the subordinate monolingualism of Engisti lingua—Chaucer cannot effectively claim inheritance for the ends of legitimizing a literary project like the Canterbury Tales as free from the textual support of Latin or literary provenance of Romance languages. Rather, it is in stating his relation to foreign language traditions—in effect, also extending his acquired language prerogative—that his crosslinguistic appropriations can further authorize as well as demand that his multilingual authority naturally can and culturally should “rubbe and scrape” English itself. This chapter will continue to explore how such “diversite” set constraints on the Canterbury Tales not only as a vernacular undertaking inf luenced by non-English sources and analogues. Setting out as well issues far less literary than matters of poetic inf luence and translation, the remaining pages consider themes of “diversite” in the representation of attitudes toward the insertion of Latin and French in English speech in the poem. Noting its links to clerical discourse in Piers Plowman, the brief discussion of Chaunticleer in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” opening this chapter introduced the argument that juxtapositions of language-mixing and gender represent medieval language awareness with respect especially to literate authority. However, this nexus of difference across languages and genders figures even more broadly in fictional procedures of dialogue elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, that is, in the ways even momentary choices of second-language words and phrases—rarely appropriate to both speaker and imagined listener—inform and even organize themes about linguistic difference in Fragment III. In that fragment, neither French nor Latin escape scrutiny; their appearance together within the fiction of dialogue constitutes the ways in which speakers both construct and critique authority. Yet, not despite his self-reproving “diversite” but because of the multilingualist culture of late medieval England, Chaucer’s focus on such depictions of language attitude in the third fragment naturalize Latinity especially as a feature of literate masculinist community, to ends that, I contend, do not differ

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

117

significantly from the authority language-mixing ref lects through the composition and subsequent transmission of Piers Plowman. As much as Piers Plowman explores anticlericalism in antipathy toward glossing, the multilingual practices under which glossing was either likely subsumed or symbolically realized suggest the poem’s interrogation—like Chaucer’s—was far from entirely circumspect precisely because of the multilingual given-ness of literate authority. Thus, just as the verse of Piers Plowman uses an anti-fraternal tradition as a mirror for clerical selfscrutiny, so do friars and their linguistic practices figure as the primary target of Fragment III. The sexual and linguistic opportunism the figure of the friar stereotypically embodies receives its ultimate challenge not from the secular alternatives the Wife’s “joly body” and “litel Latyn” can only temporarily authorize when provisionally paired but rather the intellectual conundrum offered by churlish f latulence aired through the professional second-language postures of the Summoner. That a fart by the end of the third fragment more effectively trumps her comparatively inadequate secular-sexual authority suggests that the figure of the Wife safely critiques fraternal power without encroaching on literate masculinism itself. In the context of multilingualism as power, most plainly her vernacular representation—or perhaps more accurately her characterization as English-language monolingualism—gathers its force within anti-fraternal and antifeminist traditions and not from second guessing second-language privilege. And, the responses of the Friar and Summoner, which are thematically calibrated against the Wife’s sexualized “litel Latyn,” an alliterative metonym for “little learning,” constitute the interactional and procedural concerns of the entire fragment. The pairing of clerical self-interest and boastful assertions of “wordes fewe” “in Latyn” evidently serves to thematize second-language characterizations by bringing into the exchange in Fragment III, if only brief ly, the Pardoner, that self-conscious practitioner of clerical language-mixing. With clerical privilege symbolically inextricable from his performance of multilingualism, the Pardoner’s cameo in the third fragment naturally unites his practice of creating “opportunities to victimize sinners,” with this fragment’s other “Church-sanctioned scoundrels,” the Summoner and Friar, whose second-language “wordes fewe” similarly constitute a critique of their opportunism.19 Despite the critique of clerical abuse Fragment III offers, it cannot subvert or even appropriate second-language privilege in ways that have seemed possible in literary critical interpretations. In demonstration of this absence of linguistic resistance, the following pages reread feminist as well as traditional critical approaches to Chaucer’s exploration of literate authority to explore how conformity rather than conf lict most commonly

118

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

characterized language contact practices throughout the fragment. More specifically, this realignment of monolingual to multilingual approaches refines the ways in which the figures of Wife, Friar, and Summoner work out vernacularity through the linguistic interrelationships specific to medieval multilingualism. In effect, this chapter explores yet another way in which Chaucer does not father modern English; that is, it reiterates the multilingual dimensions by which his writing was neither nationalist nor “proto-feminist” in its attention to vernacular suffrage.20 Thus, attentive to traditionally monolingualist interpretations of the third fragment, a multilingual rereading of Chaucer’s English-language literary project contends the Wife’s mounting his charge for vernacular emancipation is as anachronistic as critical assertions of Chaucer’s feminism or even traditional readings of the Wife’s desires as heteronormative. My focus first on the Wife of Bath takes its cue from Karma Lochrie’s revamping of the feminist critical tradition on the Wife of Bath through her queer analysis of the Wife’s speech as lingua queynte.21 In addition to the theme of clerical privilege the Wife’s tongue and body fill out, the social and linguistic positioning between “lered” and “lewed” in the third fragment sets the Wife of Bath as its English-language smoke screen for exploring “gentilesse” as well as literate power. In a focus especially on the linguistic characterization of her social-sexual position, then, the Wife not ironically serves to naturalize masculinist multilingualism. In its literate conception a product of writing in English, her linguistically if not sexually frustrated character—were we fight fans—only constitutes the shadow boxer for that uncontested champ, second-language prowess.22 A close focus on the nonnative “wordes fewe” of her performance of glossing exposes how they thematize the fragment her prologue introduces even more decisively in a culture where multilingualism constituted power.23 Speaking through the professional clerical discourse from which she alone among narrators in this fragment is excluded, her linguistic characterization contrastively underscores its multilingual postures of literate privilege. The figure of the Wife—gendered an inevitable outsider to language-mixing strategies that we have already seen subordinate Lady Mede—effectively sets the terms of clerical “quyting” for the entire fragment precisely because of her monolingual status. In the narratives of the Summoner and Friar as responses in kind to her prologue especially, their sensitivity to non-English “wordes fewe” characterize exclusionary clerical posturing. Thus, considering these “unholy twins” within the fragment overall reveals the linguistic symbolism with which shifting to minority languages was socially imagined more broadly in late fourteenth-century England.24 Due to the lack of fit between speaker and language, the clerical postures of the Wife of Bath effectively introduce rather than challenge the

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

119

matter of “wordes fewe” for the fragment overall. Less resistance to masculinist literate privilege, what Lee Patterson calls the Wife’s “feminine rhetoric” works instead to reiterate popular anticlericalism.25 Never a means to challenge masculine membership, her portrait ref lects assumptions about female speech that write the linguistic exclusion of women from literate community. And, her prologue—not a sermon, but like unto a sermon—grants clerical pilgrims the right to interrupt its delivery, whose kerygmatic length is likely more mistakable for female loquaciousness than sober sermonizing. Depictions of hedging constructions in her speech, Lisa Kiser has implied, also suggest the Wife’s extended prologue constitutes a performance of testamentary or confessional self-awareness, which I would argue can be as convincingly read as self-dismissive deference to both Summoner and Friar.26 But the exclusionary features of clerical discourse on which Lochrie argues the Wife performs “linguistic terrorism” invite further attention to those displays of multilingualism that equally characterized masculinist reformations of clerical community we examined in Piers Plowman and for which Mede functioned as a similarly disparaging portrait of the “little Latin” of sexualized female figures.27 Yet, to be read and written, the character of the Wife must adopt strategies likely beyond her monolingual reach in her switches to the Latin adverb quoniam once (608) and to the French phrase bele chose twice (447; 510).28 Rather than subversive appropriations, even these modest switches mark the Wife’s second-language shortcomings as she “saffrons” in the presence of pilgrims with far greater linguistic skill than those monolinguals whom the Pardoner claims to inf lame. This intersection of the Wife’s vernacular grasping and her seemingly vulgar non-English vocabulary has invited more than one close reading of her speech. Most relevant for the present discussion are those critical readings that register their discomfort with the Wife’s putative promiscuity by focusing on her French and Latin “wordes fewe.” In these readings, critical assertions of at best in their estimation the Wife’s serial monogamy seemingly function to soothe modern monolingual anxiousness about the literary propriety of Chaucer’s English itself. For example, Chauncey Wood has suggested the Wife’s switch to French among other sexual puns euphemistically circumvents “the kind of blunt talk that we might expect from a woman who knew ‘muchel of wandrynge on the weye’ ” and engages the decorous speech specific to women—and the French language itself—in the Roman de la Rose.29 However, in examining Chaucer’s likely aim of using the Wife to redefine second-language privilege by marking her exclusion from it, I contend that all of her switches exclusively serve as highly sexualized second-language synonyms rather wholly modest euphemisms. In that

120

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

depiction of her attempts at masculinist “wordes fewe,” the Wife’s switch to quoniam, which performs her engagement in formal discourse further marked by her Latinate mention of “membres . . . of generacioun” (116) for “purgacioun / Of uryne” (120–1) and “instrument”(132)— distinguishing the latter between men and women by terming the male instrument “sely”—does not preclude her far less euphemistic use of such native language colloquialisms as “swich harneys” (136) and “pisse” (729) as well as the figurative “pith” (475) and “bren” (478). To similar ends of depicting literacy far from within the Wife’s reach, her Latin adverb quoniam (“since”)—used unblushingly as a noun—seems as semantically as grammatically far from what for the monolingual Wife would constitute its homophonic synonym in Old Norse “cunt,” the noun queynte. However, the monolingual failure of invoking quoniam nevertheless marks both her inability to euphemize or employ Latin except on its accidental resemblances in sound to the most vulgar word she already knows. If Latin cannot curtail her immodesty, neither is her French euphemistic. The denotation of French chose for primary female sexual characteristics centers on an even more anatomically precise definition than The Riverside Chaucer elliptically offers in “elegant thing.”30 Rather than her selecting French because it is “that most delicate of languages,” the Wife might be depicted as choosing a variety of French of more deeply practical than literary purpose.31 In a ref lection of nonliterary Frenches, the Wife’s French—traditionally seen as the product of her literary analogues in the Roman de la Rose—could just as well take its second-language prestige from late medieval medical writing. In contemporary uses of chose, the Middle English Dictionary witnesses its collocation with prive in two sources, both medical texts: John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomew de Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum and an anonymous translation of Guy de Chauliac’s Grand Chirurgie. As Lochrie argues for the semantic subtlety of this word in distinguishing “thynges small” between women and men, the French term constitutes even greater precision since chose refers exclusively to “thynges” female and not male.32 Given the likelihood of its source and the prestige even Anglo-French could enjoy in nonliterary domains in late medieval England, her switch to chose and its specifically medical-anatomical reference participates in a specialized register potentially divested of literary and linguistic allusion to the Roman de la Rose. In returning to the Wife’s function for Chaucer’s English-language writing, it is likely that her technical proprietas ultimately stands in for Chaucer’s. Thus, if her spoken English is his written text, her technical excursus gathers its play at sufficiency from second languages as both a residua of literary translation and performance of clerical competence in technical

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

121

texts. However, if “Chaucer bows to courtly sensibilities” by rendering the Wife’s language as “a display of conventional euphemisms,” her switches to French and Latin nevertheless suggest his vernacularity and her vulgarity can be stretched no farther.33 Yet in turning to literary analogues to explicate the portrait of the Wife, the interpretations critics have felt compelled to offer in order to minimize her sexualized vocabulary hedge further yet. When one recalls how Lady Reason in the Roman de la Rose argues for avoiding euphemism for the sake of precise instruction, it seems unnecessary to attribute immodesty to the Wife’s lingua queynte. Reason herself rejects the euphemisms of self-identified ladies who speak of male genitalia and prefers rather “a parler proprement,” that is, to call testicles, testicles.34 While the Wife of Bath uses the English equivalent of many of the euphemisms Reason herself outlines as preferred among self-conscious French ladies, the technical languages Chaucer depicts the Wife as seeming to adopt suggests she speaks at times just as Lady Reason argues one ought when aiming to instruct. The switches to second languages constitute just such a performance of learned instruction and they tellingly realign their second-language precision from penis to clitoris, the propria materia of visible sexual difference and sovereign control on which the Wife has set out to instruct. Despite arguing for vernacular experience as equal to literate knowledge, however, her first switch to bele chose—authoritative terminology inaccessible to her in its second-language totality—simply reproduces the social, physical, and likely linguistic differences between women and men: Oon of us two most bowen, douteless. And sith a man is moore resonable Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable. What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone? Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone? Wy, taak it al! Lo, have it every deel! Peter! I shrewe you, but ye love it weel; For if I wolde selle my bele chose, I koude walke as fresshe as is a rose; But I wol kepe it for youre owene tooth. Ye be to blame, by God! I sey yow sooth. (III 440–50)

The Wife’s switches to second languages of instruction and authority drive home her intimate complicity with masculinist multilingualism,

122

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

poetically telling in the ways the rhyme linking glose and bele chose displays a monolingual lack of dominance: But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay, And therwithal so wel koude he me glose, Whan that he wolde han my bele chose; That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon, He koude wynne agayn my love anon. (III 508–12)

This extension of glose from clerical to sexually complicit status presents the switch itself at that gendered difference of monolingual and multilingual. Thus, her metaphorization of masculinist glossing as sexual activity—from which she shows herself not repelled even after being “bet on every bon”—is a multilingual technique for which her monolingual embodied-ness offers both a likely focus and appropriate target. When these multilingual dimensions have not been taken into account, feminist approaches to the Wife’s language have fallen arguably short of their aims. In the earliest and most thorough feminist analysis offered by Carolyn Dinshaw, the Wife has the power to disrupt what is precisely a normative male activity.35 Similarly, for Lisa Kiser, the Wife’s imitation of institutionally approved discourse proves she can play “the game of ‘glosyng up an down’ as well any exegete.”36 Yet, the focus Dinshaw and Kiser share on the Wife’s switches as glossing rather than as also a language-mixing procedure undermines those feminist approaches that have not also distinguished between negative attitudes toward glossing as misinterpretation and such multilingualism as itself masculine power. Thus, in a similarly monolingualist reading of what constitutes medieval textuality, Catherine S. Cox minimizes the authoritative textuality of second languages in ways that overreport the success of the monolingual Wife’s appropriations of masculinist glossing.37 In order to supplement these feminist readings with a multilingual perspective, I would argue that, although the Wife may be reacting against glossing within a topos of privileged misinterpretation among male clerks, her very modest multilingualism cannot successfully emulate their “we” form of literate communication. However much her minority language switches might constitute the representation of an attempt of appropriation, in the end, her French and Latin symbolically reproduce her exclusion from textual authority to which she “most bowen, douteless.” That limited linguistic access both her deafness and exclusive dependence on the aural reception of textual knowledge further underline in her characterization. The depiction of the Wife’s vernacular—but clearly not monolingualist—approach to multilingualism demonstrates the masculine constraints

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

123

of literate privilege with which Chaucer inevitably aligned himself culturally in his English makings. Although Chaucer enlists stereotypical anticlericalism with an equally obvious sexualized critique of the abusive linguistic practices of clerks, his misogynistic framing of their excoriation in the figure of the Wife ultimately constitutes a critique of literate fraternity far too stereotypical to question its masculinism. As we noted above within the satire of courtly convention in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Chaunticleer’s brief ly enlisted clerical discourse reminds us again of linguistic negotiations between literate privilege and Chaucer’s contemplations on an equally masculinist “gentilesse.” As shaped by Latinate articulations of formal authority as the Wife of Bath, Pertelote’s stereotypically feminine vanity also linguistically marks and culturally reifies an authority she cannot conceivably question. Less a comedy of the conventional roles men and women must play most obviously in heterosexual marriage, as Jill Mann argues, the linguistic determinism of Pertelote’s response—as equally as the Wife’s linguistic characterization—compels us to interpret multilingual speech not as arbitrary but absolute, wherever the figuring of vernacular acquiescence in the face of literate privilege is feminine, whether hen or wife.38 Less a critique of gender roles, the switch to In principio, / Mulier est hominis confusio within the larger narrative context of the tale of the Nun’s Priest offers even further evidence otherwise. It seems significant that the rooster—surrounded by a community of hens who service him—is the only masculine authority—human or animal—in the barnyard, for the widow and her daughters manage the farm alone. The puffed up incontestable authority of the rooster also ref lects the desires and clerical pretensions of the narrator of the tale, the “Nonnes Preest” himself, similarly surrounded almost exclusively by women, whom he might also consider his “hennes alle” (VII 3173). Like the speech of the Wife of Bath who sexually appropriates but naturally cannot wholly procure the masculine advantages of clerical discourse, multilingual maneovering in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” pairs sexual access and literate authority when Chaunticleer then “fethered Pertelote twenty tyme/And trad hire eke as ofte, er it was pryme” (VII 3177–8). The representation of Chaunticleer’s inaccurate gloss as an incontrovertible if cobbled Latin switch attests to the invulnerability of multilingualist literacy; however, at the same time the inaccuracy of his gloss playfully reproves abuse of this privilege, it does not ref lect on multilingual masculinism, but reproduces its attendant literate prerogatives in even an inaccurate interpretation for an English-language monolingual. These literary juxtapositions of clerical discourse and complicit or at least compliant females draw our attention to the symbolic authority

124

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

this linguistic portrait represents by its lack of fit between language and speaker that the unlikely and even frustrated coupling of Anglophone monolingualism and sexual autonomy thematically underscores in the figure of the Wife. Unlike the “Latyn corrupt” of cross-cultural communication, which the Clerk comfortably assigns to chaste Custance in “The Man of Law’s Tale,” the little Latin in the Wife’s rapacious maw frames as anomalous the pairing of “formal” and “English” in medieval culture.39 Yet, her monolingualism and mangled multilingualism constitutes the project’s culturally necessary admission of linguistic imperfection. From this vernacular happenstance, then, however much the Wife can satirically “glosen up and down” as well as any clerk can, the language-mixed means by which she aims to emulate such practices might constitute their exposure to the wider scrutiny of Chaucer’s vernacular audiences. As it is, of course, the Wife cannot personally access texts, quote passages or cite sources that she could subsequently gloss and interpret to her own ends. That failure is the shortcoming her linguistic portrait must produce. Understanding herself as someone for whom second-language improficiency is a liability, she can only twin her “litel Latyn” and her “joly body” in a performance solely the Pardoner—equally desirous of the power “wordes fewe” circumscribe—seems to applaud (III 163–168). To the Wife’s play on twinning her “body” and their “wordes fewe,” her clerical interlocutors in Fragment III, the Friar and the Pardoner’s “compeer,” the Summoner, seem at least outwardly unresponsive. However, in the function of her introducing the theme of clerical discourse in multilingualist, and, therefore, necessarily masculine terms, the Wife serves as touch point for that entire fragment. The representation of her Latin and French terms, of course, is not a sociolinguistic observation. The juxtaposition of her gender and technical second languages makes these only momentary intersections precisely the point of this linguistic fiction. Her “wordes fewe” in French and Latin register not feminine resistance to masculine privilege nor critiques of contemporary French language acquisition among such women as the Prioress; more precisely, the Wife herself constitutes an unlikely multilingual character, and, therefore, appropriate figure for satirizing clerical abuse who cannot also critique multilingual privilege or explore the social restrictions medieval language acquisition imposes more generally. Equally in the fiction of English-language interaction among pilgrims, the multilingual topography of medieval culture organizes the ways in which the Friar and Summoner can both imagine speech and deliver their tales. Within those cultural constraints, the depiction of tale-tellers also includes their linguistic attitudes toward the characters they f lesh out in their own tales. As I have already argued, the saffron of

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

125

Latin that the Pardoner typifies as characteristic of his “hauteyn speche” seems further delineated by its occlusion from any real verification of his Latinity; the lack of such representation against the Pardoner’s selfformulation through “wordes fewe” test his credibility and further thematize his likely hypocrisy and gender ambiguity. By contrast, the Wife’s assertion of “litel Latyn” proves true in its “playe” to avoid clerical censure.40 Yet, her modest meddling with Latinity—a metonym for learning generally—as we have seen, engages in multilingual maneuvers whose playful shortcomings further provide for its escape from censure by also centering the fragment on that most popular of contemporary clerical targets, the friar. Even for the inadequacies of her “litel Latyn,” then, the Wife’s modestly proficient “wordes fewe” seem enough to curtail similar linguistic “quyting” from the Friar: But, dame, heere as we ryde by the weye, Us nedeth nat to speken but of game, And lete auctoritees, on Goddes name, To prechyng and to scoles of clergye. (III 1274–7)

With the boundaries of the tale-telling contest redrawn to masculine and clerical competition, the Friar turns his enmity instead against the Summoner. Yet, the Wife’s characterization of clerical discourse in her own highly limited multilingual performance seems at the very least to prevent Friar Huberd from designing his speech in his prologue in ways “The General Prologue” as well as “The Summoner’s Tale” suggests a friar typically can. Clearly, the Friar’s speech in his own prologue— decidedly free of shifts to Latin—belies the stereotype, which the narrator offers as his typical language behavior in “The General Prologue”: For thogh a wydwe hadde noght a sho, So plesaunt was his “In principio,” Yet wolde he have a ferthyng, er he wente. (I 253–5)

As his linguistic means of extracting money from even the poorest widow, a switch in the narrative codes his rapaciousness. Here, the Latin phrase in principio metonymically marks the recitation of Genesis 1 or John 1 in devotions that just as clearly signal the second-language foreplay that the Friar’s scriptural citations (and Chaunticleer’s as well) verbally initiate and textually authorize as sexual inceptives. The Friar’s pecunious desires

126

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

as sexualized dominance also condition the ways in which the narrator describes his affected use of English: Somwhat he lipsed, for his wantownesse, To make his Englissh sweet upon his tonge. (I 264–5)

If Friar Huberd is as linguistically self-styled—here attempting to make his English as f lattering as his Latin—as the popular assumptions encapsulated in “The General Prologue” would have it, that construction suggests he just as consciously avoids what “wordes fewe” can convey in the monolingual ways he depicts himself in the conspicuous absence of those multilingual strategies in his own prologue. By contrast in “The General Prologue,” the narrator casts the Summoner as someone who generously pours himself large doses of multilingual discourse, linking his “noe word but Latyn” to his other oral fixations: Wel loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes, And for to drynken strong wyn, reed as blood; Thanne wolde he speke and crie as he were wood. And whan that he wel drunken hadde the wyn, Thanne wolde he speke noe word but Latyn. (I 634–8)

Like the penitential assurances of forgiveness the Friar’s in principio ingenuously offers, so does the drunken Summoner’s contextually meaningless “fewe termes” as “Questio quid iuris” invoke privilege as scurrilous as the Pardoner’s “wordes fewe” “in Latyn”: A fewe termes hadde he, two or thre, That he had lerned out of some decree— No wonder is, he herde it al the day; And eek ye knowne wel how that a jay Kan clepen “Watte” as wel as kan the pope. But whose koude in oother thyng hym grope, Thanne hadde he spent al his philosophie; Ay “Questio quid iuris” wolde he crie. (I 639–46)

Even if the Summoner simply parrots what he hears like the jay of medieval proverb, he seems to possess pragmatic sensitivity to the boastfulness of second-language authority in that abuse his Latin writ of Signavit

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

127

symbolically suggests (I 652). Indeed, more than the stereotypical vaunting of the boastful drunkard, the Summoner’s characterization of the speech of a friar in his tale even more tellingly suggests he understands the power and nature of the “few termes” and “wordes few” of Latin in English speech. The isolation of the second language switches to the friar in “The Summoners’ Tale” constitutes the Summoner’s linguistic revenge. These multilingual effusions ought not to be taken for more of the Summoner’s drunkenness or even markers of his own proficiency. Like the ways in which switching to Latin and French were not literally glosses of scripture in the Wife of Bath’s emulation of clerical discourse, so too, as the narrator already hints in “The General Prologue,” are the discursive functions of any friar’s likely Latinity. In “The Summoner’s Tale,” the friar’s stereotypically “wordes fewe” abound. Their emblematic function greater than their semantic meaning alone, these switches—variously liturgical or scriptural commonplaces, nonce phrases for equally invoking God in Latin, and a nod to scholastic debate—point to primarily symbolic meanings by their very range: qui cum patre (1734) begins a formula marking the end of a prayer or sermon; Deus hic (1770) constitutes a nonce phrase; Te deum (1866) stands in as title for a hymn from the liturgy; Placebo (2075), is a lexicalized title for Psalm 114:9, which despite its links to performing the office of the dead proverbially suggested f lattery; and finally, as the friar addresses the lord rather than Thomas, a rhetorical stance of disputation, per consequens (2192).41 The constituents of these switches do not necessarily ref lect the proficiency of a friar, which is far more likely to be both different from as well as exceed the Latinity of at least Chaucer’s Summoner. For the most part, these switches are formulaic and as easily reproduced as the switches constructed for the speech of the Wife. Totaling more in their typological whole than the semantic content of their discrete parts, however, these switches in themselves fulfill the commonplace criticism of the f lattery and effusiveness of friars. Moreover, from a linguistic standpoint, these switches mark the lay appreciation of literate power and potential clerical deceit most symbolically at the level of the syntax of language contact. As mannered as such language-mixing seems to be, this is precisely the Summoner’s point in his depiction: to focus attention on clerical discourse through its most stereotypically opportunistic practitioner, the friar, as his language appeared to lay men, monolingual or multilingual. The semantic transparency of his few Latin words less an issue than their symbolic function as switches, however, gives way in the friar’s partial citation of Psalm 45:2 as “cor meum eructavit.” Given the formulaic nature of Latin switches enlisted overall for the friar’s multilingual depiction, the

128

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

insertion of this sentence length quotation and its context foregrounds the tale’s stereotypical points about friars through a representation of selfinterested glossing in a switch from English: Hir preyere is of ful greet reverence, Whan they for soules seye the psalm of Davit: Lo, “buf,” they seye, “cor meum eructavit!” Who folweth Cristes gospel and his foore, But we that humble been, and chaast, and poore, Werkeris of Goddes word, nat auditours? (III 1932–7)

This was not likely a psalm quickly remembered because of the English etymological relationship of “eructation” to Latin; the loan word “eructation” from Latin is not recorded in English until the fifteenth century.42 More compellingly, the line as a whole works as the literate positioning of the narration of the tale within the lay perspectives of the Summoner and against the pretensions of the friar. This switch speaks less to the linguistic verisimilitude of the Summoner’s second-language proficiency—his portrait in the prologue restricts his Latin to parroting legal formula—than to a multilingual discourse toward which the Summoner clearly exhibits pragmatic sensitivity. Even in his linguistic “quyting” of Friar Huberd in his tale, the Summoner’s multilingual construction of the friar is more proper to the semantics of his own profession and lay knowledge of liturgy; yet, it is also stereotypically appropriate to the “wordes fewe” of the friar of his tale, who syntactically selfaggrandizes by code-switching to Latin in the presence of Anglophone monolinguals and, as several instances will show shortly, to French among those monolinguals as well. Unlike the literary analogue of the Roman de la Rose likely inspiring Chaucer’s construction of the Wife’s alternating vulgarisms, euphemisms, and appropriately technical second-language terminology, the analogues for “The Summoner’s Tale” are not engaged in similar discussions on word choices to fit topic and likely also to accommodate audience.43 Focused instead on often the ill-fit of language to one’s listeners, the characterization of the Summoner when paired with the Wife effectively serves as a gauge of secular attitudes toward the exclusionary practices and potential abuses of clerical privilege. In “The Summoner’s Tale,” the procedure of selecting French in the presence of clearly English monolinguals exceeds the speech of f lattery stereotypically characterizing friars; the tale fictionalizes interactions in which switches from English to French distance as much as they accommodate his listeners. The restriction of the

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

129

friar’s French to variations on “ je vous dy” might underscore the friar’s limitations, yet they nevertheless mark his pretensions that are potentially effective only among monolinguals.44 The insertion of French triggered by the friar’s strategic address of Thomas serves to construct this churl as lord in the friar’s aim of effectively preaching the dangers of the sin of ire among the powerful: “O Thomas, je vous dy, Thomas! Thomas! This maketh the feend; this moste ben amended. Ire is a thyng that hye God defended, And therof wol I speke a word or two.” (III 1832–5)

By rendering churl as lord in his selection of exempla, the friar can both f latter and f latten Thomas’ sense of his authority; he plays up Thomas’ power as the head of his own household and can then ultimately undermine that authority as only the limited dominion of the lay man. The friar switches to French again in the presence of Thomas’ wife. A risible performance of non-English authority, his switch again underscores its lack of fit to his churlish listener with his address to her as “dame”: “Now, maister,” quod the wyf, “er that I go, What wol ye dyne? I wol go theraboute.” “Now, dame,” quod he, “now je vous dy sanz doute, Have I nat of a capon but the lyvere, And of youre softe breed nat but a shyvere, And after that a rosted pigges head— But that I nolde no beest for me were deed— Thanne hadde I with yow hoomly suffisaunce. (III 1836–43)

Clearly, French here marks the friar’s f lattery rather than his sense of communication appropriate to the language and lodgings of his hostess. A matter of linguistic vanity as well as veniality, his French underscores the fact such fare is likely beyond the churl’s “hoomly suffisaunce.” The rankerous fart finally makes clear the friar’s inability to understand his situation and reveals his sermon against ire as unwelcome and ill-fit as his linguistic vaunting. The secular frustration that Thomas’ ailing body lets f ly echoes the Wife’s sense of lived experience embodied by a “joly body,” which her tale ultimately discloses as equally failing in the sagging inevitabilities of female senescence. In “The Summoner’s Tale,” however, such secular assertions from even a sickly churl’s body find support in ways radically

130

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

different from an assertion of somatic authority inversely valuable in an aging female body. The lord from whom the friar seeks justice, playfully condemns the churl urging the friar to let him off (III 2216–42). It is the lord’s squire, Jankyn, who continues in Thomas’ plan to show up the friar. Laid low by churl and then squire, the friar finally has his complaint addressed by a collection of his lessers with the support of the highest secular authorities, fantastically reversing but not necessarily subverting the vernacular complicity clerical discourse demands: The lord, the lady, and ech man, save the frere, Seyde that Jankyn spak, in this matere, As wel as Euclid [dide] or Ptholomee. Touchynge the cherl, they seyde, subtiltee And heigh wit made hym speken as he spak; He nys no fool, ne no demonyak. (III 2287–92)

The churl “with bely stif and toght” can dispense his anger in an ineffable but palpable resonance of popular ire against friars—but not organized threats against the clergy—from which not curiously the clear winner is the “gentil” man Squire Jankyn in his “newe gowne” (III 2293). The power of the churl’s body in finding secular support to reprove fraternal abuses counters the powers the Wife argues her body offers in her prologue. This corrective shift in the fragment from female physical authority to the power of an ailing churl’s fart finds alignment even across the domestic spheres of “The Summoner’s Tale” in the households of churl and lord. Just as powerless as the Wife’s body, then, is the language she argues it speaks. Rendered nonauthoritative, the Wife functions as a feminized portrait of the potential of vernacular embarrassment in which even her nominal status as “gentil” is not resistant to the brutish physicality encoded in f latulent churls for more effectively reproving clerical authority and escaping their censure as well. Her modest multilingualism marks the failed attempt of a monolingual to upgrade to Latin or French in the happenstance of the medieval absence of any prestigious dialect of English. Although the Wife embodies a social desire for “gentilesse,” her linguistic depiction is as proper to her estate as the Summoner’s churl whose f latulence—an inverse reproduction of authority—is equally appropriate to his. In respect to the status of English, Thomas’ fart constitutes the safest grounds for clerical critique precisely because of its noxious ineffability. If this fart “can be seen as a noise organizing peasant experience and expressing their revolutionary sentiments in a lower yet extremely powerful linguistic register,” this sound nevertheless embodies

C H A U C E R’ S “ D I V E R S I T E ”

131

a vernacular response to institutional constraints whose conceptually unshakeable power the performance of Latinity if not always also all forms of French socially guarantees.45 Framing a multitude of narrative voices contesting their social positions through rather than over the vernacular, an awareness of difference across languages rather than variation within English drives Chaucer’s least casual depictions of linguistic want and conformity. In his fiction of interaction between lay and literate as well as monolingual and multilingual, the third fragment offers up the Wife as its dismissible instigator whose protestations can only be complicit reproductions of the multilingual status quo.46 If the Wife of Bath’s “Londonese” is the default rather than normative dialect of the text, her speech does not represent a self-correction of her regionalism to conform to a prestigious urban standard. With her speech far from failing to conform to a national dialect standard that does not exist, the overt prestige most specific at that time to only acquired languages pronounces the Wife’s gaping monolingual lack. An ungrudging admission of the shortcomings of English, her figure can embody for Chaucer his awareness of that “diversite” which only a multilingual poet could appoint himself to broach.47

This page intentionally left blank

AFTERWORD: POSTCOLONIALISM AND CHAUCER’S ENGLISH

I

f the study of the history of English resembles other historically based discourses that “establish the Middle Ages [. . .] as a vastness of time ripe for colonial exploitation,” it seems obvious this vastness has also enabled modern Anglophones to adopt that temporal space as their linguistic place of birth, in effect, to colonize and claim a language that most accurately belonged to those who spoke it.1 It is not without irony that the traditional account of English in its earliest guises has depended on language contact with French for its boundaries as either “old” or “middle,” despite the fact that Norse, Welsh, and Latin continued to characterize the multilingual terrain of medieval England.2 Seemingly in monolingual reaction above all to that linguistic inconvenience, modern accounts of medieval contact have most overtly constituted the traditions of the history of the English language as well as studies in Middle English itself. Not casually in the modern formulation of a medieval origin for English, the most recuperative accounts of that contact has grown—even if for the most part unstated—from nationalist and anti-French discourses that had first conjoined monolingualism and masculinity. The recognition of that modern formulation of medieval contact as a foundational feature of Middle English has already been implicitly offered in critiques of its categorization. For Roger Lass, “Middle” has uniquely offered “a special stage” for marking English as a language in progress, which upon ref lection would appear at first sight somewhat chauvinistic, a linguacentric prejudice deriving from our position at the end of a long evolution. Of course, nowadays we are all sophisticated enough, apparently, to avoid this, but at least in our unref lecting moments it permeates our characteristic historical thinking.3

If an evolution of English is the “characteristic historical thinking” of the genealogy of more than one discipline centered on Middle English,

134

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

clearly, their interpretive practices likely ref lect that “linguacentrism” even more notably in a language that has so successfully justified and relied on monolingualism for its national enforcement and international dissemination. If it is often this status of English that we write recursively onto Middle English, is the project of reading and translating the cultures of earlier Englishes simply a reproductive rather than interpretive practice as well, one that masks rather than “unmask[s] its own critical identity”?4 With English already culturally and institutionally ratified as an object worthy of our exclusive attention, traditional periodization may very well mark the comfort of belonging we have in collectively privileging monolingualism whenever we read Middle English. Produced by these disciplinary practices, can our linguistic colonization of the terrain designated “Middle” still find aid in postcolonial approaches to the history of English, especially in supporting disciplinary interests more likely to center on the monolingual care traditionally allotted to Chaucer than to recall Hengist as the mark of medieval Anglophone subordination?5 In her book Weird English, Evelyn Nien-ming Chi’en has outlined the problems of recovering histories of colonization by working back through their lingual afterlives. She specifically targets the linguistic insufficiencies of postcolonial studies by arguing its theorists “are writing backward toward the era of colonialism without experiencing it, and thus inevitably and predictably sounding unintelligible.”6 Refocusing postcolonial readings on the legacy of especially colonial rather than postcolonial Englishes today to problematize American Anglophone identity, Chi’en rereads unintelligibility even more pointedly as the monolingualist biases denigrating multilingual experience. Rather than simply questioning the worthy attempts of English-writing theorists to represent the ineffability of marginality and the voicelessness of subalternity, she conducts a multilingual intervention to suggest English-language scholarship—by virtue of the obvious historical success of English as a colonizing and global language—effaces the postcolonial experiences it purports to study. Turning from the past to the present and likely also from diachronic to synchronic, Chi’en focuses on retrievable linguistic experience to look at Spanglish and Chinglish in the United States in ways that challenge monolingualist conceptions both popular and scholarly of what it means to be a speaker of English. Similarly interrogating the traditional treatment of such contact languages as Creoles as nonnational languages in linguistics, Edgar W. Schneider has offered new models for describing postcolonial languages that would de-privilege the nationalist narratives of American English by placing it also within a history of “Postcolonial English.” 7 Focusing on the development of group identity and linguistic community

P O S T C O L O N I A L I S M A N D C H A U C E R’ S E N G L I S H

135

in relation to migration, Schneider’s new classification treats the shared histories of many varieties of English albeit at the expense of typological studies that have traditionally treated and even cordoned off from national expression those English contact languages termed Creoles. His disciplinary shake-up aside, Schneider’s monograph lays bare traditions of categorization for which the nationalist construction of a language supposedly free from contact has been a determining criterion. A similarly sustained challenge to the nationalist and monolingualist study of language that postcolonial theory invites can seem far from characterizing its applications to describe Middle English. Clearly, Middle English scholars have already supplemented their traditional philology and affirmed their disciplinary vibrancy among postmedieval colleagues by considering the colonial subjectivity of medieval vernacular experience. Yet, in such gestures to the relevance of critical and cultural theory, the commiserative solidarity among modern Anglophones for their earlier English-language selves seems too conveniently to displace the more recent colonial oppression of non-English speakers, in which English studies has always had a stake. Unfortunately, this colonialist current of Anglophone monolingualism seems almost impossible to swim against. Indeed, in however collegial and culturally sensitive ways, English literary studies have already broadened to include world literatures in such monolingual and normative ways that they produce what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes as the “sanctioned ignorance” of nonEnglish languages.8 Embedded in the discipline of English, the study of world literature creates a marketplace for language translation and discourages second-language acquisition in the same bottom-line of that monolingualist economy studies in world literature seemed initially to set out to challenge. Even a field invested in examining the oppressive effects of contact with the English language Neil Lazarus similarly describes as itself colonizing: postcolonial studies is structured in such a way that it is much more likely to register the presence of writing in English, and to a lesser degree, French or Spanish, than writing in such other languages as Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, Zulu, Amharic, Malay, Urdu, Telugu, Bengali, Sinhala, Tagalog, or even in the metropolitan and formerly colonial languages of Dutch and Portuguese.9

This “Englishing” Marc Shell equally attributes to “monolingual methodological tendencies” in American studies and also Comparative Literature, which he argues equally reveal Anglophones find it “easier to

136

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

talk about other peoples’ cultures in English than to learn other people’s talk.”10 Even among medievalists who can attest to their hard-won training in the colonial or imperial language Latin, it seems timely if not long overdue that their critical eagerness to interpret Middle English through postcolonial theory should equally extend to accounts of how the fields of medieval language and literature have always been invested in replicating constructions of English that are foundationally resistant to the global reality of language contact and the cultural benefits of multilingualism. Sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine describes this conceptualization of “the linguistic system as an autonomous language” as “ultimately a sociopolitical matter” and argues further that discourses of monolingual normativity have developed within “nationalistic movements to establish independent states;” she specifically points to modern Englishspeaking nations in order to indicate that “[i]t is a cultural fact that no anglophone nation anywhere has explicitly exhibited enthusiasm for any kind of bilingualism other than transitional.”11 Reinterpreting evidence that over 90 percent of Americans self-identify as monolingual, Doris Sommer argues monolingual normativity and English-language hegemony make multilingualism itself go underground such that bilingual Americans underreport their proficiency in their non-English first language. As Sommer succinctly states, “[m]onolingualism, paradoxically, is a symptom that too many people speak two languages.”12 Thus, wherever “national linguistic be-longing [sic] is identity,” Anglophone culture negates the experiences of modern multilinguals and often frustrates the status of their native languages by culturally and politically bracketing them off from national discourse.13 In the absence of English as a fetish of national belonging or tongue of globalization, a late medieval writer like Chaucer did not view his Continental counterparts as linguistically inferior but as models for emulation and appropriation. Decades ago, Elizabeth Salter persuasively described Chaucer’s choice of English as “the triumph of internationalism.”14 It is clear that this medieval English internationalism is not our colonial English in history of the language textbooks, which views the mother tongue as liberating past English speakers and enriching the capital of its newest learners in the global marketplace.15 More specifically from only one variety of English in medieval culture, Chaucer imagined an international status rather than nationalist respect for his “Londonese,” if in fact he conceived of his dialect specifically in terms of such linguistic essentialism at all.16 If “there is no English poet less interested in England as a nation,” the absence of a nationally standardized English goes some way to explaining why Chaucer’s variety of Middle English—or that of any other medieval writer composing in his

P O S T C O L O N I A L I S M A N D C H A U C E R’ S E N G L I S H

137

dialect or even a mixture of dialects—could not exclusively empower monolingual Anglophones.17 In looking offshore rather than inland to understand itself in terms of its literate potential, whatever constituted medieval vernacular community could more profitably claim an inheritance from Latin and Continental literary histories, precisely because that tradition could designate at least multilingual readers and writers in England both their natural heirs and rightful translators. To push this point again in light of postcolonial terminology, how accurate is it to suggest medieval multilinguals writing in English were as subaltern to prestige languages as the monolingual majority? Further yet, a historian of the English language might ask, how resistant are even postcolonial readings of late medieval English to conceptualizing their native tongue in that monolingualist habit produced and sustained by modern English-language colonialisms? What nationalist leveling between an abject monolingual majority and multilingual elite in the medieval period makes it possible to contend that Chaucer “transformed a subaltern language into a readable one”?18 Invested in what the introduction of this book cited as “vernacular nostalgia,” the acts of heroism and resistance ascribed to Chaucer here are more likely an effect of “Chaucer,” that is, that author-function that his later community of readers subsequently produced by diachronically designating him a language pioneer beyond any synchronic desires for a literary or national standard his earliest audience could not possibly have culturally imagined or desired. Perhaps, most uncomfortably in this literary critical scenario, does even the casting of medieval English in postcolonial terms unref lectively render modern English the imperial successor of Latin itself? Among writers the field traditionally juxtaposes in response to the colonizing presence of English, does this fashion Chaucer less akin to Ng ũg ĩ Wa Thiong’o, who rejects the colonizing language as his literary language, than to Chinua Achebe, who embraces the dialogic possibilities of engaging both the colonized and colonizing languages?19 If the diglossia of late medieval culture made rejecting colonizing languages unlikely for any literary project, the extent to which Chaucer renders English readable is really a matter of asking how socially aligned he was with English as his first but not only tongue. The degree to which Latin and French infused his lexicon, inf luences, and literary postures would offer the answer “not much,” precisely because exclusive first language allegiance (and, thus, the necessity of willingly adopting subtractive bilingualism as immigrants are often expected to today) was not the most desired of linguistic identities or imagined communities in late medieval period.

138

M E D I E VA L I S M , M U LT I L I N G U A L I S M , C H A U C E R

Even imagining English in its medieval status as once a subaltern or “developing” language reimposes a nationalist and monolingualist narrative of progress and destiny onto English itself. This apologetic countermove also renders the “third world” and medieval culture as equally underdeveloped in ways that doubly privilege modern English, first, as a “first world” language and, secondly, as that language, which has paid its dues in the national narrative of its triumphal emergence from the Middle Ages. For non-English languages in this narrative of linguistic nationalism, then, that their time of native language self-sufficiency is “not yet” casts their cultures as “medieval” in the most negative popular sense.20 Nevertheless, at their most convincing for describing our modern desires for language history, postcolonial approaches can illustrate how the linguistic medievalism first popularized by Walter Scott supports Anglophone superiority in the ways we ground modern English privilege and linguistic succession in medieval origins. The kind of linguistic self-inspection this study has attempted modestly offers to contribute to similar interdisciplinary projects, which aim to dislodge our critical practices from the disciplinary medievalism and colonialist investments that first quickened them. Indeed, with such historical and linguistic circumspection, a postcolonial portrait of the subalternity of late medieval English—as accurate as it might be in describing the experience of most medieval monolinguals—seems complicit with monolingualist conceptions of Middle English as well as modern interpretations of the medieval author as both literary genius and self-conscious linguistic agent. Of course, monolingual pride did not characterize Chaucer’s English any more than medieval formulations of Hengist’s tongue; but with what kind of linguacentrism might we assert that Middle English was as subaltern as the languages that modern English effectively silences today by either legislation or cultural endangerment? If conceptualizing Chaucer’s English in those monolingualist terms inevitably reproduces his role as its progenitor, it could equally be suggested that the resiliency of Chaucer as an author of English selfesteem could originate and persist at least partially due to Anglophone discourses that have supported the encroachment of English on languages and cultures currently under threat. In imagining Chaucer’s English as ours, a greater postcolonial preoccupation with his arrest of the oppression of that tongue in the medieval past could inure those in potentially colonizing positions—Anglophone monolinguals, the historical record will likely show—to both local and international power imbalances, which English in its modern guises of cooperation and fairness effectively produces wherever it has designated itself the gatekeeper.21

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Herbert Schendl, “ ‘To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes’: Code-switching and Medieval English Macaronic Poems,” Vienna English Working PaperS (ViewS) 6.1 (1997): 64 [52–66]. 2. Sarah Stanbury, “Vernacular Nostalgia and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 92–107. David Wallace, ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 3. Stanbury, pp. 96–7. For studies on medieval dissent, see Rita Copeland, ed. Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In that collection, Ralph Hannah III cautions “[h]owever much we are stirred by the claims of the vernacular—which are also the claims of modern secularism and, in Lollard terms, implicitly those of a classless and gender-blind society as well—one may overestimate the effectiveness with which translators fulfilled these claims.” “ ‘Vae octuplex,’ Lollard Socio-textual Ideology, and Richardian—Lancastrian Prose Translation,” Criticism and Medieval in the Middle Ages, p. 258 [244–63]. 4. I borrow this play on the multiple meanings of “discipline” from David R. Shumway and Craig Dionne, eds. Disciplining English. Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 5. For an examination of the triumphalism implicit in many discussions of English as a global language today, see Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). See his review of David Crystal’s English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) in Applied Linguistics 20 (1999): 265–76. Read Crystal’s rejoinder to Phillipson in the introduction to the second edition of his English as a Global English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. Anthony P. Esposito, “Bilingualism, Philology, and the Cultural Nation: The Medieval Monolingual Imaginary,” Catalan Review 9.2 (1995): 125–39. 7. “Self-consciousness” and “anxiety” characterize the descriptions of early modern English (1500–1800) offered by C.M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996). On the

140

NOTES

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

ambivalence with which some early modern English-speakers regarded their language, see Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language. A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), pp. 68–141. For an attempt to disentangle the discourses of civic republicanism from anti-immigration racism within the English-only movement, see Deborah J. Schildkraut, Press one for English. Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). For alternate views on the cultural and financial cost of multilingualism presented by the organization US English, visit www.us-english.org. Walter D. Mignolo, “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)nationalism,” Modern Language Quarterly 57.2 (1996): 4 [181–96]. Tony Crowley, Language in History. Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 33. On the pitfalls of utilizing such Bakhtinian terms as “monologic” for studies in the changing status of English, consult Chapter Two, “For and Against Bakhtin,” pp. 30–53. Doris Sommer contends “[b]ilingual arts—in everyday code switching as well as in literary classics—make a display of risk, of artifice, and of the simultaneity of options even when choices must be made [. . .]. To refuse that taste is to court monologism (Bakhtin’s metonymy for totalitarianism) in one form or another. And the danger should urge political theory to consider monolingual policies and their consequences.” Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 56. For similar critiques of monolingual approaches in linguistics, see also Penelope Gardner-Chloros, “Code-Switching in Community, Regional and National Repertoires: The Myth of the Discreteness of Linguistic Systems,” in One Speaker, Two Languages. Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching, ed. Leslie Milroy and Pieter Muysken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 68–89. On the urgency of exposing scholars and students to multilingualism as a cultural as much as literary and linguistic matter, see Sylvia Molloy’s 2001 MLA Presidential Address, “Crossings,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 117.3 (2002): 407–13. Alistair Pennycook, “Performativity and Language Studies,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal 1.1 (2004): 1–20. Suzanne Romaine situates this widespread reluctance to address languages in contact within monolingual political policies: “[t]he recognition of a linguistic system as an autonomous language is ultimately a sociopolitical matter.” Bilingualism. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 323. Pennycook, “Performativity and Language Studies,” p. 7. For another critique of the Cartesian tradition privileging competence over performance in linguistics, see Hayley G. Davis and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. Rethinking Linguistics (New York: Routledge, 2003). Mignolo develops his sense of

NOTES

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

141

performance as the critical and cultural practice of “languaging” which he describes as “a way from moving away from the idea that language is a fact (e.g., a system of syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules) toward the idea that speaking and writing are moves that orient and manipulate social domains of interaction.” Mignolo, “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes,” p. 4. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999), p. 81. Airing in the United States in 2005, the Public Broadcasting Station series “Do You Speak American?” institutionalized normative monolingualism. “Do You Speak American?,” narr. Robert MacNeil, writ. William Cran and Robert MacNeil, dir. William Cran, Public Broadcasting Service, January 5, 2005. In that same monolingualist spirit of their series, Robert MacNeil and William Cran’s text, Do You Speak American?, also offered an uncritical account of the popular prejudice against some minority languages in the United States by not designating Spanglish an English, but nevertheless arguing that Cajun French is a means of “speaking American.” Robert MacNeil and William Cran, Do You Speak American? (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005), pp. 79–80. For a discussion of the media’s role in “institutionalizing language ideology,” see Rosina LippiGreen, Chapter Seven: “The Information Industry: Selling America to Americans,” English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 133–51. Marc Shell, “Babel in America; Or, the Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 127 [103–27]. Spanish persistently constitutes the stateside domestic target of linguistic alterity. Even in ostensible gestures to accommodating Spanish, strategies which racialize the language instead appear in the day-to-day speech of likely the most politically circumspect Anglophones. Even covertly in popular expressions Jane H. Hill terms “Junk Spanish,” Anglophones enlist Spanish as expressions of English language solidarity. Hill notes that as harmless as such popular expressions as “el cheapo” and “no problemo” seem such pseudo code-switches serve to racialize Spanish speakers living within the United States as not “white” and not American. Hill concludes that these potentially racist linguistic habits are most likely to persist among those with postsecondary education. “Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the Leaky Boundary between Public and Private Spheres.” Pragmatics: Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association 5:2 (1995): 197–212. William Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 56 [45–67]. Schendl views code-switching itself as a “widespread specific mode of discourse over much of the attested history of English.” “To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes,” p. 64. If only unusual cases of proficiency received this kind of attention, then, for the most part “[i]n this multilingual society people switched languages

142

21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

NOTES

often probably without comment.” Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 331. Jocelin Brakeland, Cronica Jocelini de Brakelonda de rebus gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi, ed. and trans. H.E. Butler (Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1949), p. 40. On this work as “the only masterpiece” of historical writing at Bury St. Edmunds, see Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England I c. 550–1307 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 380–5. For an analysis of language choice and second language identity in hagiographical writing, see Roger Dahood, “Hugh de Morville, William of Canterbury, and Anecdotal Evidence for English Language History,” Speculum 69.1 (1994): 40–56. For an overview of multilingualism and preaching, see Luís IglesiasRábade, “The Multi-Lingual Pulpit in England (1100–1500),” Neophilologus 80 (1996): 479–92. John Edwards, Multilingualism (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 85. Begoña Crespo García distinguishes this diglossia or “unbalanced functional distribution (territorial multilingualism)” from the contact of English with foreign languages after the medieval period, which she more strictly terms “multilingualism.” “Historical Background of Multilingualism and its Impact on English,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 35 [23–35]. On the changing nature of French in medieval diglossia only brief ly outlined here, see Kathleen E. Kennedy, “Changes in Society and Language Acquisition: The French Language in England 1215–1480,” English Language Notes 35.3 (1998): 1–19. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Princeton: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1987), p. 194. It might not be surprising that in a culture in which second language acquisition was privileged even modest displays of Latin or French knowledge could have been metaphorically even if only temporarily empowering. But describing such language choices as acts of subversion would be problematic both due to the nature of medieval diglossia and the culturally specific practices of dissent itself. In assuming language informs societies in recognizable ways, historical sociolinguists have already argued “linguistic forces which operate today and are observable around us are not unlike those which have operated in the past.” Romaine posits this “uniformitarian principle.” Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) p. 122. Although this “uniformitarian principle” has guided sociolinguists in interpreting historically remote instances of language choice as socially motivated, the nature of medieval multilingualism—and the constraints it places on the status of languages as well as multilinguals and monolinguals themselves—problematizes the transhistorical promise of this methodology. Such was the pervasive nature of medieval multilingualism that it generally escaped comment in the historical record precisely because speakers and writers then as now habitually employ language

NOTES

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

143

in ways which are naturally intelligible to them within their cultural setting. John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 107.5 (1992): 1170 [1168–80]. Rptd. in The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), pp. 16–35. Fisher argues that the variety of this written form of English called “Chancery English” was the source for Present-day written English: “Chancery English and the Emergence of Standard Written English,” Speculum 52 (1977): 870–89. Rptd. in The Emergence of Standard English, pp. 36–64. Nicholas Watson, “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in The Idea of the Vernacular An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 333 [331–52]. Laura Wright stresses that the multilingual writing in her London business writing corpus outnumbers those monolingual texts on which Fisher bases his origins for standard written English. Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. Although Clanchy connects the growth of literacy with bureaucracy, he also asserts that literacy is a ground-up phenomenon: “innovation often originates at the peripheries and makes its way to the centre, where it is monopolized and directed.” From Memory to Written Record, p. 16. Conversely, sociolinguist Suzanne Romaine locates innovation among an “originating group [who] is neither the lowest nor the highest in the social hierarchy. Change originates from within the system rather than on the periphery.” Sociohistorical Linguistics, p. 263. Without specifying precisely what “peripheral” is, at the very least, these sociolinguistic insights do not exclusively attribute language change to the “official” language planning strategies offered by Fisher. On the demographic developments attending to the prolonged emergence of a standard English well past the medieval period, see Derek Keene, “Metropolitan Values: Migration, Mobility, and Cultural Norms, London 1100–1700,” in The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts, ed. Laura Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 93–114. On the gradual yet discernible process of the emergence of standards generally, see Robert McColl Millar, Language, Nation, and Power. An Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 59–72. In the centering of the language on the king, “[i]t was in this sense an expression of the nation, if by that we mean—as overwhelmingly became the case in the era of nationalism—the people.” Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 57. W.M. Ormrod, “The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture,” Speculum 73 (2003): 786 [750–87]. For an anthology of medieval attitudes toward English, which determined how English-language writing was authorized or defended in

144

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

NOTES

the absence of a status now termed “national” or “official,” see Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” p. 57. See Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-definition in Anglo-Norman England,” Anglo-Norman Studies XVIII (1995): 153–75. Tim William Machan, Chapter Two, “The Baron’s War and Henry’s Letters,” English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 21–69. On the awareness of differences between Anglo-Norman and Continental French which had Normans sending their children to the Continent for “French French” by the twelfth century, see Ian Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England,” Romance Philology 32.4 (1980): 472 [467–79]. On limited bilingualism in the period, see Short (1980) and Luís IglesiasRábade, “Norman England: A Historical Sociolinguistic Approach,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 15 (1987): 101–12. On the adoption of French names among the English, which could skew an interpretation of bilingualism as widespread among the English in the twelfth century, see Cecily Clark, “People and Languages in Post-Conquest Canterbury,” Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976): 1–34. On evidence of French acquisition among specifically native-English speaking scribes, again see Clark, “The Myth of the Anglo-Norman Scribe,” in History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Matti Rissanen et al. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 117–29. R.W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, eds., A Book of London English 1384–1425 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 16; and Machan, English in the Middle Ages, pp. 163–4. On Latin promulgations against vernacular theology, see Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitution of 1409,” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64. Michael Hertzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy (New York: Berg, 1992), p. 114. Feminist scholars argue this restrictive sense of national identity is not unusual; the emergence of nationalist self-consciousness typically involves marginalizing the interests of women and constructing foreign “others” as effeminate at the same time the newly formed nation exclusively privileges masculinity through citizenship. For an overview, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 352–68. See also Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1991). For an exploration of modern desires for medieval nation, see Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). For recent discussions of medieval nationalism, see Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation

NOTES

145

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); from a more historical than literary perspective, see Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, eds., Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds Texts and Monographs. New Series 14 (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995).

1

MEDIEVALISM AND MONOLINGUALISM

1. Joseph Mersand, Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary 2nd ed. (Brooklyn: The Comet Press, Inc. 1939). In Mersand’s account of Chaucer’s ability to borrow from French lexis, Chaucer was “a Merlin of language” and “the word-wizard of the fourteenth century.” p. 2. See Mersand’s formulation of this tradition, Chapter One, “The Controversy,” pp. 1–20 and Simon Horobin’s reformulation of the question, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 1–2. 2. Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a positive appraisal of Mersand’s word studies if not his conclusions, see Cannon, pp. 55–64. For a critique of the adoption of MED citations for the third edition of the OED, see William Rothwell, “OED, MED, AND: The Making of a New Dictionary of English.” Anglia 119.4 (2001): 527–53. For a contrast of multilingual writings as sources for attribution in the second and forthcoming third edition of the OED, see Edmund Weiner, “Medieval Multilingualism and the Revision of the OED,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 169–74. 3. Cited in J.R. Hall, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century American AngloSaxonism. The Question of Language,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), p. 144 [133–56]. 4. Cited in David Simpson, “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 190 [177–96]. 5. Alistair Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 143. “Apart from clearly supporting a simple argument about the superiority of English, this view of the richness of English puts into play several other images of English that are extremely important: the notion of English as some pure, Anglo-Saxon language, the idea that English and English-speakers have always been open, f lexible and integrationist, and the belief that because of their vast vocabulary, speakers of English are the ablest thinkers.” Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, p. 140. 6. C.M. Millward, A Biography of the English Language, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 195. For an overview of recent popular writing which includes triumphalist images of English as a borrowing language, see Pennycook, English and the Discourses of Colonialism, pp. 133–47.

146

NOTES

7. Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, 5th ed. A History of the English Language (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002), p. 168 [my emphasis]. Avoiding such transhistorical designations of Anglophone solidarity, Barbara M. Strang offers a history of English in reverse chronological order. A History of English (New York: Routledge, 1994). 8. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order. The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). 9. Chandler, A Dream of Order, p. 10. 10. Ann K. Mellor, “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism. The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley,” in The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990), p. 274 [274–87]. 11. On Thomas Jefferson’s Anglo-Saxonism, see Frantzen, Desire for Origins. New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 15–19, 203–7 and Stanley L. Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 98.5 (1983): 879–98. 12. Clare A. Simmons, “ ‘Iron-worded Proof ’: Victorian Identity and the Old English Language,” Studies in Medievalism IV (1992): 204 [202–14]. 13. Simmons, “Iron-worded Proof,” p. 212. 14. Simmons, “Iron-worded Proof,” p. 208. On the linguistic differences among Scandinavian peoples which the poem itself minimizes in forging its links to that past, see Roberta Frank, “Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf,” in The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 129 [123–39]. 15. David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 16. See Kumar, Chapter Seven, “The Moment of Englishness,” The Making of English National Identity. 17. John M. Ganim, “The Myth of Medieval Romance,” in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1996), p. 152 [148–66]. Velma Bourgeois Richmond argues that, with Ivanhoe, “the historical novel as a modern genre begins with Anglo-Saxonism” rather than a new fashioning of postconquest English. “Historical Novels to Teach Anglo-Saxonism,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), p. 174 [173–201]. 18. For antiquarians as well as Scott, “the absence of a well-defined linguistic or cultural entity allowed bold appropriations of the culture to be made.” Matthews, The Making of Middle English,” p. 68. Indeed, “Middle English” is not constituted as such until the 1870s (xxii). On the narrow circles in which Middle English texts were read in contrast to Chaucer, see Matthews, pp. 165–75. 19. See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny. The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) pp. 41, 64.

NOTES

147

20. Walter Scott, Ivanhoe. The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverly Novels. Volume Eight, ed. Graham Tulloch (1819; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), p. 17. Subsequent parenthetical references to page numbers in Tulloch’s edition. 21. Commenting on Magna Carta, the narrator of Ivanhoe states that “[i]t is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity” (p. 192). 22. Such societies as the Laudable Association of Anti-Gallicans formed in the mid-eighteenth century organized London tradesmen as much under fear of linguistic as commercial and military invasion. See Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 1701–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 88–95. For this society, “[a]llowing Frenchisms to infiltrate the English language, importing French manufactured goods, polishing themselves ‘into a refined insincerity’ merely because it was fashionable were nothing less than cultural treason, a vicious squandering of true identity.” Colley, Britons, p. 90. 23. Chandler, A Dream of Order, p. 12. 24. Chandler, A Dream of Order, p. 15. 25. Anthony O.J. Cockshut, The Achievement of Walter Scott (New York: New York University Press, 1969), p. 90. 26. In Scott’s preface to Ivanhoe, “the Wardour Manuscript” plays on its antiquity by appearing in Gothic typeface. In the novel itself, the narrator states “the Wardour Manuscript” is Saxon (78) rather than Anglo-Norman as Scott asserts in his preface. He refers to it elsewhere as his historical authority (89, 179). 27. For a discussion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia as parody of historical writing, see Valerie Flint, “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion,” Speculum 54 (1979): 447–68. Chapter two returns to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history and his construction of Saxon speech as a medieval history of English. 28. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity. National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. (London: Routledge, 1996). For an overview of the gendered discourses distinguishing English from Continental languages in the eighteenth century, see Tony Crowley, Language in History. Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 67–73. See Philip Carter for a discussion of how codes of politeness for men focused increasingly on language behavior by the nineteenth century. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 29. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, pp. 26–41. 30. These negative attitudes toward period language include Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement that in his designs to archaize Spenser “writ no language” as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s pejorative term “tushery.” See Graham Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott. A Study of his Scottish and Period Language (London: Andrè Deutsch, 1980), p. 92. On the

148

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

NOTES

limited inf luence of Spenser and Chaucer on Scott’s period language, see Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 34, 42. On Scott’s “conveyings” see Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 51. Scott’s Anglo-Saxon terms are restricted to social structures, ranks, oaths (“tusheries”) and drinking toasts. Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, pp. 52–3. Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 133. Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 58. In actively promoting Sir Tristrem as northern in provenance against linguistic and codicological evidence, Scott built as resistant a linguistic and cultural myth as Ivanhoe would prove to be. Matthews notes that Scott’s fictional poet, Thomas the Rhymer, still receives erroneous attribution in poetry anthologies including Sir Tristrem. Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 7. Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 18 [15–41]. Matthews, The Making of Middle English, p. 67. “[Meanwhile the witch] picks out her prophet, prying into the inmost parts cold in death, till she finds the substance of the stiffened lungs unwounded and still firm, and seeking the power of utterance in a corpse.” Lucan, Pharsalia Liber VI, ed. and trans. J.D. Duff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), ll. 629–31, p. 351. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, pp. 98–9. J.G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Volume 4 (Edinburgh, 1837–38), p. 343 [Cited in Ivanhoe, p. 454 n. 9]. Although Dutch rather than English, “mynheer” seems Teutonic enough for Scott’s purposes. See Tulloch’s discussion, Ivanhoe, p. 512. For the standard interpretation of Scott’s anachronisms, see Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, p. 181, n. 25. David Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 185. David H. Richter, “From Medievalism to Historicism: Representations of History in the Gothic Novel and Historical Romance,” Studies in Medievalism IV. Medievalism in England (1992): 98 [79–104]. On anachronisms in this passage, see Tulloch, Ivanhoe, p. 496. Subscribing to a sense of linguistic Englishness not unlike Scott’s, historian R.H.C. Davis more recently writes “[t]he paradox of the Normans is that though it was in England that they reached their acme and fulfilled themselves as Normans, yet in the long run the conquest of England turned them into Englishmen.” The Normans and their Myth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 122. “A Frenchman at Abbotsford said that Scott spoke ‘le Francais du bon sire de Joinville’ [. . .], but if Scott was very much at home with medieval French he naturally felt his novels to be no place to air his knowledge.” Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 78.

NOTES

149

47. Scott also enlists the early modern distinctions between “thou” and “you” to distinguish Saxon and Norman power. Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott, p. 137. 48. Observations here on the adjective “manly” are wholly indebted to the research of Carol Percy on “manly” and its collocations. See her “Liberty, Sincerity, (In)accuracy: Prescriptions for Manly English in 18th-century Reviews and the ‘Republic of Letters,’ ” in Perspectives on Prescriptivism, ed. Joan C. Beal, Carmela Nocera, and Massimo Sturiale (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 113–45. 49. Michèle Cohen, “Manliness, Effeminacy, and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth Century England,” in English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), p. 57 [44–61]. 50. Tulloch, Ivanhoe 49, n. 9. Scott is also likely referring to his own Sir Tristrem. 51. For similar observations on the social dimensions of this multilingual exchange, see Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 80. 52. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 59. 53. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 59. 54. Charpentier had anglicized her name earlier to Carpenter and was baptized in the Church of England. John Sutherland argues both her dark skin and foreign accent would prove too much for Scott’s Presbyterian parents who neither attended the wedding nor subsequently seemed to form close ties to Mrs. Scott. The Life of Walter Scott, pp. 61–3. 55. In the same years that ended with Scott’s marriage to the French Charpentier, he was engaged in translating and emulating German poetry and drama. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 64. 56. “If Britain’s primary identity was to be an imperial one, then the English were put firmly and forever in their place, reduced to a component part of a much greater whole, exactly like the Scots, and no longer the people who ran virtually the whole show. A British imperium, in other words, enabled the Scots to feel themselves peers of the English in a way still denied them in an island kingdom.” Colley, Britons, p. 130. 57. David Hewitt, ed., Scott on Himself: A Selection of Autobiographical Writings of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981), p. 2. 58. Hewitt, Scott on Himself, p. 2. 59. Jane Millgate argues the separation of the author’s identity from himself, which Scott publicly maintained, also allowed him to dissociate his earnings in the literary trade from his self-fashioning as a landed gentleman. Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), pp. 85–6. This pretence ended after Scott’s financial collapse in 1826. 60. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, pp. 98–9. 61. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 101. On the sociolinguistics of English language speech among women in this period, see Lynda Mugglestone,

150

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68.

NOTES

‘Talking Proper.’ The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 135–72. Despite his leniency with Scott’s anachronisms elsewhere, John Sutherland describes “electrified” as an unforgivable anachronism “of the De Mille ‘wrist watch on the arm of the centurion kind’.” Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 228. Andrew Sanders, “ ‘Utter Indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the Nineteenth Century Novel,” in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 159 [157–73]. The explanatory notes in the Waverly edition gloss these words as French but does not account for Scott’s linguistic strategies; despardieux is “a corruption of the French phrase de par dieu, meaning ‘in God’s name’ or ‘by God’ and par amour, “French by way of (sexual) love; ie. as a lover rather than as a husband” Ivanhoe, p. 545. Tulloch, Language of Walter Scott, p. 96. Michael Ragussis, “Writing Nationalist History: England, the Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe,” English Literary History 60.1 (1993): 181–215. Among early responses to Scott’s Ivanhoe was Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena (1851), in which Ivanhoe tires of marriage with Rowena and reunites with Rebecca. The earliest sound motion picture treatment of Ivanhoe by screenwriter Aeneas Mackenzie also rewrote the ending of Ivanhoe to unite the hero and Rebecca. This adaptation did not survive subsequent revisions and does not appear in the 1952 Metro-Goldwyn Mayer production. See John H. Lenihan, “English Classics for Cold War America: MGM’s Kim (1950), Ivanhoe (1952), and Julius Caesar (1953),” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20.3 (1992): 42–51. Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 229. Positioning himself against Sutherland’s focus on race in Ivanhoe, Sanders argues “the inf luence of Scott’s Ivanhoe [. . .] ought in fact to be seen less in terms of race and racial conf lict than in terms of a new emphasis on national identity.” Sanders, “Utter Indifference,” p. 161. “Scott did more than any other writer to bring the idea of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon past into popular consciousness. In the South some emphasized a kinship with the aristocratic Normans, particularly in the years immediately prior to the Civil War, but Scott’s impact generally was to bind Americans firmly to their English roots and to reinforce in them the idea that America, a country which was in reality increasingly consisting of a blending of races, was the beginning of an old and successful English people.” Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, p. 161. Mark Twain had named the wrecked riverboat in Huckleberry Finn “The Walter Scott,” “not surprisingly, since for Twain, Scott’s romances also foundered and southern emulation of their chivalric idealism was a principal cause of the war.” Velma Bourgeois Richmond, “Historical Novels to Teach AngloSaxonism,” p. 178. For a discussion of the arguments which suggest

NOTES

69. 70.

71.

72.

151

Twain believed Scott was responsible for the Civil War, see Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 229. In his Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain rather more simply writes that Scott “made every gentleman in the South a major, or a colonel, or a general, or a judge, before the war.” Cited in Sanders, “Utter Indifference,” n. 4. Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 90–116. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, p. 76. Scott’s immediate inf luence in France stimulated Augustin Thierry to represent Beckett and Henry II as Saxon and Norman in his Histoire de la conquěte de l’Angleterre (1825). See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, p. 41. On English reactions to Thierry’s saxonization of Beckett, see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, pp. 113–39. In that tradition of Anglophone resistance to linguistic others, adaptations of Ivanhoe for one opera as well as numerous treatments in film, television, and comic books continue to preserve this construction of the medieval origins of linguistic Englishness from Scott’s day to the present. Likely composed at Queen Victoria’s suggestion, Sir Arthur Sullivan’s grand opera Ivanhoe was staged in 1891. See Sanders, “ ‘Utter Indifference,’ ” p. 158. Film adaptations of the novel spanning the previous century include: Ivanhoe, dir. Herbert Brenon, United States 1913; Rebecca the Jewess, dir. Leedham Bantock, Great Britain, 1913; Ivanhoe, dir. Richard Thorpe, MGM, 1952; La Rivincita di Ivanhoe, dir. Amerigo Anton, Italy, 1965; La Spada Normanna, dir. Roberto Mauri, Spain, 1972; and Ivanhoe, dir. Paul Ruven, Holland, 1983. For Scott’s inf luence on American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, see James Chandler, “The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood. Scott, Griffith, and Film Epic Today,” in The Romantics and Us. Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990), pp. 237–73. For a discussion of the 1952 production under the inf luence of Joseph McCarthy as “America’s own Prince John,” see Lenihan, “English Classics for Cold War America,” pp. 42–51. From 1958–9 BBC produced the television series Ivanhoe starring Roger Moore. Other television treatments include the mini-series “Ivanhoe,” dir. Stuart Owen, BBC, 1997 and “Ivanhoe,” dir. David Maloney, UK, 1970 as well as the made-for-television movies Ivanhoe, dir. Douglas Camfield, 1982 and Young Ivanhoe, dir. Ralph L. Thomas, 1995. For comments on the proliferation of Ivanhoe in comic books in the past century, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 48. Chapter three returns to linguistic and historical approaches to studies in medieval multilingualism with an overview of its beginnings several decades ago.

2

HENGIST’S TONGUE: A MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF ENGLISH

1. The titles of these works appear in Latin on the grave monument Gower likely designed himself. On Gower’s multilingual style, see Tim William

152

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Machan, “Medieval Multilingualism and Gower’s Literary Practice,” Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006): 1–25. R.F. Yeager, “Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years’ War: The Case of John Gower” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 127–57. G.C. MacCauly, ed. The Complete works of John Gower. Volume 2. The Confessio Amantis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902), p. 2. Subsequent parenthetical references to this edition. On textual approaches to language contact in the poem, see: Siân Echard, “With Carmen’s help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” Studies in Philology 95.1 (1998): 1–40; and Robert F. Yeager, “English, Latin, and the Text as ‘Other’: the Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower,” TEXT (Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship) 3 (1987): 251 [251–67]. Siân Echard and Clare Fanger, trans., The Latin Verses in the “Confessio Amantis”: An Annotated Translation (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991), pp. 2–3. Julia Marvin, ed. and trans., The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle. An Edition and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), p. 134–5. Marvin argues the Anglo-Norman Brut anticipated a non-Latinate readership, likely the baronial class. The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle, p. 47. On classical traditions in Gower’s Latin, see A.G. Rigg and Edward S. Moore, “The Latin Works: Politics, Lament, and Praise” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer: 2004), pp. 153–64. On Gower’s “middel weie” as an expression of poetic range, see R.F. Yeager, “ ‘Oure englisshe’ and Everyone’s Latin: The Fascilicus Morum and Gower’s Confessio Amantis,” South Atlantic Monthly 46.4 (1981): 41–53. On Gower’s presentation of Latin as textuality, Derek Pearsall argues “Latin is the means by which Gower’s poem is turned into a Book.” “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis,” in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A.J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989) p. 23 [13–25]. Medievalists have already examined how medieval communities similarly constitute themselves in terms of narrations of the past. For studies in medieval constructions of origin, consult: Nicholas Howe, Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History. Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982). For a discussion of unsuccessful attempts to prove Welsh texts were the likely inspiration for this source, see Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). On Geoffrey’s adaptations, see Neil Wright, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas,” Arthurian Literature 2

NOTES

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

153

(1982): 1–33; and “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede,” Arthurian Literature 6 (1986): 27–59. James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), p. 222. A sense of frustrated nationalism seems clear in Campbell’s assertion that “Historia Regum Britanniae poisoned most educated Englishmen’s view of their own past.” Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, p. 221. On this history as parody, see Valerie Flint, “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion.” Speculum 54 (1979): 447–68. R. William Leckie Jr. contends in his study that Geoffrey deploys Saxon history in ways which extend the dominion of British kings centuries past the arrival of the Saxons. The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). For a discussion of Latin as the “serious” language of historical writing in this period, see Chris Given-Wilson, Chronicles. The Writing of History in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), especially Chapter Seven, “Language, Form, and Identity,” pp. 137–52. For a list of the likely two hundred and fifteen manuscripts containing the Historia in whole or part, see Julia C. Crick, Historia Regum Britannie III. A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989). Psuedo-Nennius does not depict the interaction between Rowena and Vortigern in the foreign language of toasting which Geoffrey introduces. British History and the Welsh Annals, ed. and trans. John Morris (London: Phillimore, 1980), §37. See the Latin Historian Brittonum in Morris’ edition, pp. 50–84. A phrase which had gained currency by the nineteenth century in specific reference to Hengist’s treachery in 472, “Night of the Long Knives” subsequently became the phrase for Hitler’s actions again Ernst Roehm in late June of 1934. The OED refers to “Night of the Long Knives” in its current meaning as an allusion to “any similarly decisive or ruthless action.” Oxford English Dictionary, “Night of the Long Knives,” on-line 1989 edition. Antonia Gransden argues that “Geoffrey was a romance writer masquerading as a historian. No historian today would object to him if he had avowedly written a historical novel (like Sir Walter Scott) or a romance-epic (like Malory).” Historical Writing in England c. 550–1307 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 202. Robert Hanning and Nancy Partner have offered approaches to twelfth-century historiography as neither fabulist nor fact-finding. See Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain from Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Partner, Serious Entertainments. The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). On cultural and literary critical approaches to historical writing, see also Nancy Partner, ed., Writing Medieval History (New York: Hodder Arnold, 2005).

154

NOTES

15. In addressing attitudes concerning language contact after the Norman Conquest, Tim William Machan argues that: [w]hen Norman and Angevin chroniclers employed discursive practices that depicted language contact as the aberrant consequence of encounters with monsters, marvels, and angels, they incorporated French and English within a discursive practice that transformed the Conquest’s sociolinguistic reality and political implications. If language contact was represented as unnatural, in other words, it could not exist in the presumptively natural social situation occasioned by the Norman presence in England; and if it did not exist, neither did one of the clearest markers of any disjunct between the native English and immigrant Normans.” English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 81. 16. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britannie, ed. Neil Wright (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 91–2 (translation mine). Existing in eight witnesses, the First Variant Version of the Historia might have been a revision completed within Geoffrey’s lifetime. The firm date for the completion of Wace’s Brut—for which the Variant constituted a primary source—places the Variant not later than 1155, in perhaps the same year as Geoffrey’s death. Neil Wright, ed., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol. 2. The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p. lxii. On arguments for the Welsh affiliations of the First Variant Version which Wright rejects, see Michelle Warren, History on the Edge. Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 60–70. 17. Warren remarks that Geoffrey “signals the Saxons’ impending colonization [. . .] in Saxon speech.” History on the Edge, p. 49. Rather than discussing the diglossia colonization produces, Margaret Bridges focuses on thematic links between women and medieval cultural contact in Beowulf as well as Brut treatments of the Hengist episode which this chapter discusses. See Margaret Bridges, “The King, the Foreigner, and the Lady with the Mead Cup: Variations on a Theme of Cross-Cultural Contact,” Multilingua 18.2–3 (1999): 185–207. Geoffrey writes Hengist’s second language command twice where Psuedo-Nennius records it only once: Et Hengistus omni familiae suae jussit ut unusquisque artavum suum sub pede in medio ficionis sui poneret: ‘Et quando clamavero ad vos et dixero Eu, nimet saxas!, cultellos vestros ex ficionibus vestris educite, et in illos irruite, et fortiter contra illos resiste. Et regem illorum nolite occidere, sed eum, pro causa filiae meae, quam dedi illi in conjugium, tenete, quia melius est nobis ut ex minibus nostris redimatur.’ Et conventum adduxerunt, et in unum convenerunt, et Saxones, amicialiter locuti, in mente interim vulpicino more agebant, et vir juxta virum socialiter sederunt. Hengistus, sicut dixerat, vociferatus est, et omnes seniors trecenti Guorthigirni regis jugulate sunt, et ipse solus caputs,

NOTES

155

et catenatus est, et regions plurmas pro redemptione animae suae illis tribuit, id est Est Saxum, Sutsaxum, Middelseaxan cum reliquis regionibus quas ipsi eligentes nominaverunt. [But Hengist told all his followers to hide their daggers under their feet in their shoes, saying “When I call out to you and say ‘English, draw your knives,’ take your daggers from your shoes and fall upon them, and stand firm against them. But do not kill the king; keep him alive, for my daughter’s sake, whom I wedded to him, for it is better for us that he be ransomed from us.” So the conference assembled, and the English, friendly in their words, but wolfish in heart and deed, sat down, like allies, man beside man. Hengist cried out as he had said, and all the three hundred Seniors of king Vortigern were murdered, and the king alone was taken and held prisoner. To save his life, he ceded several districts, namely Essex and Sussex, together with Middlesex and other districts that they chose and designated. Morris, The British Annals, p. 32] (§ 46). 18. See note 17 for the full citation of this portion in the Psuedo-Nennian Historia Brittonum in Morris’ edition. 19. The Saxon sympathies of the Bern manuscript seem clear too, Wright argues, in the finality it ascribes to Arthur’s death by recording “unequivocally that the national hero was dead” rather than simply recovering from his wounds in Avalon (§ 179). Wright, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. 1. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, M.S. 568 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), p. lix. On continental traditions similar to the Night of the Long Knives, see Helmut Nickel, “About Saxon Rebellion and the Massacre at Amesbury,” Arthuriana 16.1 (2006): 65–70. 20. The earliest verse redactions of the vulgate version mention rather than depict the signal. Gaimar’s L’Estoire des Engleis occludes “The Knight of the Long Knives” and restricts the single code-switch in this history to Latin, corpus domini. Anglo-Norman Text Society 14–16, ed. Alexander Bell (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), l. 6330. The Latin verse Gesta Regum Britannie includes switches to English for the toast (V 287–8) but refers only to the Saxon signal as “dat signum prodicionis” [sign of treason] (§103, line 397) and equally evaluates their concealed knives: “Uenit illuc/ Sediciosa cohors cultros sub crure recondens” [The treacherous band had come there with knives hidden by their thighs]. Neil Wright, ed. and trans., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. V. Gesta Regum Britannie (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), ll. 393–4. 21. The resistance from the Britons described here is a notable addition to their lack of resistance in Historia Brittonum. For this and Geoffrey’s other changes to Psuedo-Nennius, see Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain, pp. 151–3. 22. Marvin, The Oldest Anglo-Saxon Brut, pp. 138–9. 23. Elizabeth Closs Traugott observes that the juxtaposition of language varieties in modern fiction constitutes a sociopolitical strategy and that

156

24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

NOTES

“in some sense diglossic relation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ varieties in real life . . . is being minimized through writing.” “The Voice of Varied Linguistic and Cultural Groups in Fiction: Some Criteria for the Use of Language Varieties in Writing,” in Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Volume I: Variation in Writing, ed. Marcia Farr Whiteman (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1981), p. 118 [111–36]. In the vulgate version in the Bern manuscript, the narrator views Saxon subterfuge as conducted “muliebriter” [womanishly] (§101). Henry of Huntingdon’s Latin Historia Anglorum does not dramatize the “adventus Saxonum in Angliam,” referred to as De Adventu Anglorum in the incipit of the second book, as a matter of language contact. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum. The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenaway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), ii.3, p. 85. Wace, Roman de Brut. A History of the British, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), ll. 6959–60. Translations adopted from Weiss. Wace, Roman de Brut, ll. 7227–58. Wide variation across manuscript witnesses in the spellings of the Saxon speech itself at lines 7237 and 7245 suggests scribal confusion over these putatively English words. Weiss, Roman de Brut, p. 183 n. 2. E.G. Stanley, “Laʒamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments,” Medium Aevum 38 (1969): 23–37. On Caligula Laʒamon’s poetic language and meter as a revival of “the character of classical alliterative verse,” see Derek Pearsall, Old and Middle English Poetry. Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 80. In a recent refinement of the argument, Marshal S. Grant and Douglas Moffat argue Caligula exploited specific prefixes whose omission by the Otho scribe speak to their archaic and perhaps also poetic qualities. “Laʒamon’s Archaistic Use of Verbal Prefix To-,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 15–28. Laʒamon, Brut or Hystoria Britonum, eds. and trans. W.R.J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow: Longman Group, 1995), ll. 16–21. Otho from Laʒamon. Brut, Volume 1. Early English Text Society, ed. G.L. Brook and R.F. Leslie (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). Caligula and Otho distinguished in my citations by (C) and (O). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7139–42 (C) (translation adopted from Barron and Weinberg). Though formally different, Otho revises little in content: Rowenne sat a cnouwe . and seide to þan kinge. þus erest ʒeo spac in Englene lond. Louerd king wassail . For þine come me beoþ hail. Þe king hit ihorde . and nuste wat ʒeo saide. þe king Vortigerne . haxede his cnihtes. wat were þe speche . þat þe maide speke.

NOTES

157

þo answerede; Keþereh . cniht mid þe wisest. he was þe beste latimer . þat euere wone[de] her. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7139–44 (O). Laʒamon, Brut, l. 7159 (C). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7145–57 (C). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7158–60 (C). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7158–60 (O). On Laʒamon developing the Saxon treachery at Amesbury as a leitmotif in at least six other occurrences in the poem, see James Noble, “Laʒamon’s ‘Ambivalence’ Reconsidered,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 1994), pp. 173–4 [171–82]. Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7590–2 (C). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7590–2 (O). Laʒamon, Brut, ll. 7605–19 (C). What force this superlative had when swike was Laʒamon’s favorite word of disparagement is uncertain. Françoise H.M. Le Saux accounts for over one hundred appearances of swike and its derivations “an average of once every 136 lines.” “Paradigms of Evil: Gender and Crime in Laʒamon’s Brut,” in The Text and Tradition of Laʒamon’s Brut, p. 196 [193–206]. Carole Weinberg, “Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut, p. 115 [103–20]. On Laʒamon’s Norse affiliations, see Scott Kleinman, “The Æðelen of Engle: Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities in Laʒamon’s Brut,” Exemplaria 16.1 (2004): 95–130. For the earliest argument supporting Laʒamon’s distinction between Saxons before and after the donation of Gormund (ll. 14668–83 (C)), see J.J. Kirby, “Angles and Saxons in Laʒamon’s Brut,” Studia Neophilologica 36 (1964): 51–62; for recent support for this argument, see Noble, “Laʒamon’s ‘Ambivalence’ Reconsidered,” pp. 181–2; and Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 86. Neil Wright, “Angles and Saxons in Laʒamon’s Brut: A Reassessment,” in The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut,” p. 162 [161–70]. On this nationalist bias among Laʒamon scholars, see Michael Donoghue, “Laʒamon’s Ambivalence,” Speculum 65.3. (1990): 555–8 [537–63]. Derek Pearsall had situated Laʒamon’s language within a progressivist narrative of linguistic historical self-consciousness when he suggests “[p]aradoxically, [Wace’s] modernizing, his rejection of the archaic, shows him less advanced than Laʒamon.” “The Archaic and the Modern in Laʒamon’s Brut,” in From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English. Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 205 [188–205]. For Christopher Cannon, Otho’s elimination of sixty-three of Caligula’s poetic compounds and revision of more than one hundred and thirty mark

158

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

NOTES

“Otho’s antipathy to the whole sheen of nostalgia for Old English poetry that colours the Brut.” “The Style and Authorship of the Otho revision of Laʒamon’s ‘Brut,’ ” Medium Aevum 62.2 (1993): 196 [187–209]. Cannon, “The Style and Authorship of the Otho Revision,” pp. 201–4. In addressing the field of Chaucer studies through a history of Chaucer reception, Stephanie Trigg has shown how his centuries-long invocation has constituted the construction and appropriation of Chaucer’s literary authority among both scholars and writers often in gestures of homosocial affinity. Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls. Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). Foundational for these fields is Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On vernacularity, see Jocelyn Wogan-Brown, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Wendy Scase, “Tolkien, Philology, and ‘The Reeves’ Tale’: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 333 [325–34]. Likely connected with the priory at Bridlington, Pierre de Langtoft, whose writing survives exclusively in French, engaged the Brut tradition extending its narration to the reign of Edward II to which at least twenty manuscripts stand witness. On Langtoft’s omissions from Geoffrey’s Historia, see Robert Stepsis, “Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle: An Essay in Medieval Historiography,” Medievalia et Humanistica 3 (1972): 59 [51–73]. Pierre de Langtoft, Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, Vol. 1. ed. and trans. Thomas Wright (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866–68), pp. 102–5. Page numbers refer to the French text and facing page English translation in Wright’s edition. On English songs in Langtoft’s chronicle as “discourse of abuse,” see Thea Summerfield, The Matter of Kings’ Lives. The Design of Past and Present in the Early Fourteenth-Century Verse Chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), p. 35. Pierre de Langtoft, The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, pp. 106–9. Turville-Petre, England the Nation, pp. 82–5. Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle, ed. William Aldis Wright, Roll Series 86 Vol. 1 (London: Spottiswoode, 1887), ll. 2652–9. The punctuation of that edition has been adopted here. The marginalia provided in Wright’s edition mark this episode as “ fraus Hengist.” Hengist’s command is represented in the traditional direct discourse as “Nimeþ 3oure sexes” at l. 2666. Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle, ll. 7537–47. In his edition, Wright includes marginalia to this section as “lingua gallica.” Machan, English in the Middle Ages, pp. 83–4. Derek Pearsall asserts Robert of Gloucester constitutes “evidence of only fragmentary, sporadic, regional

NOTES

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

159

responses to particular circumstances, not a wave of English nationalism sweeping the country.” “Before-Chaucer Evidences of an English Literary Vernacular,” in The Beginnings of Standardization. Language and Culture in Fourteenth Century England ed. Ursula Schaefer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), p. 29 [27–41]. On the nature of second language acquisition among common law lawyers, see Paul Brand, “The Languages of Law in Later Medieval England,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 63–76. For the nature of multilingual writing recording pleading in common law, see Mary Catherine Davidson, “Discourse Features of Code-Switching in Legal Reports in Late Medieval England,” in Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past. Pragmatics and & Beyond New Series 134, ed. Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wårvik ( John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam: 2005), pp. 343–51. For a recent reappraisal of the Prioress’ French as a legitimate local variety rather than a sadly wanting version of non-Continental French, see William Rothwell, “Stratford atte Bowe Re-visited.” The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 184–207. On distinguishing attitude from usage, Douglas A. Kibbee argues that the Statue of Pleading, for example, was not an effort to promote pleading in English at the specific expense of French but an effort to curtail legal chicanery which developed due to the specialized discourses of Law French. See For to Speke French Trewely. The French Language in England, 1000–1600. Its Status, Description and Instruction (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991), pp. 63–5. On Robert of Gloucester’s legal and linguistic Anglo-Saxonism, see Sarah Mitchell, “Kings, Constitution and Crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon Remedy,” in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 39–56. Summerfield emphatically states Mannyng’s chronicle was not “an attempt to educate the working-class to enable them to free themselves from servitude [. . .]. Nor is it an early manifestation of nationalism.” The Matter of Kings Lives, p. 205. Linking language and race, Douglas Moffat argues “Mannyng speaks to those who have inherited through blood the servitude imposed generations earlier. The emphasis falls less on the tangible loss of land in 1066 than on the perpetual loss of freedom experienced anew by everyone who is “English.” “Sin, Conquest, Servitude: English Self-Image in the Chronicles of the Early Fourteenth Century,” in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery and Labor in Medieval England, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat (Glasgow: Cruthure Press, 1994), p. 149 [146–68]. Robert Mannyng of Brunne, The Chronicle, ed. Idelle Sullens, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 153 (Binghamton: State University of New York, 1996), ll. 7739–78. The lexical anachronisms for which the

160

63.

64.

65. 66.

67.

68. 69.

70.

NOTES

historical writing of Walter Scott has been commonly charged can equally be leveled against one scribal tradition in Mannyng’s chronicle. The modernization from “nimeþ” to “takeþ”—a Norse loan word which had superceded niman by the end of the Middle English period—constitutes this scribal choice of a verb not yet in the Saxon lexicon of Hengist. The totalizing of English past and present as his tongue seems very likely on this basis for the Lincolnshire dialect of the scribes of Petyt MS 511, Vol 7 (Inner Temple Library, London), who likely copied his chronicle within several decades of Robert Mannyng’s own stated date of completion at the end of Part II (1338). The scribe of Lambeth MS 131 (Lambeth Palace Library London)—likely copied in the mid-fifteenth century—restores the command to the original and historically as well as linguistically accurate “nymeþ.” On the lack of popularity of Mannyng’s chronicle due to its northern dialect and the increased preference for prose versions of the Brut, see Sullens, The Chronicle, pp. 70–1. Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in NineteenthCentury British Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). A.G. Rigg, ed. A Book of British Kings 1200–1399 AD. Edited from British Library MSS Harley 3860, Cotton Claudius D.vii, and Harley 1808 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 2000), p. 4. Rigg’s edition includes the Harley Epitome and Metrical History, as well as their marginal commentaries; both Latin works were likely composed at or near York in the early fourteenth century. Rigg, A Book of British Kings, pp. 44–5. The command in the verse form is “Nimmes our saxes” and the prose form “Nimeth houris saxis.” Moffat argues that at precisely that moment English is appropriated by bilingual writers, the monolingual peasant would have found “his own language, a distinctive marker of his racial identity, could be turned by this adoption, by the ‘triumph of English,’ into a tool of oppression. In an ironic twist, the triumph of English marks the end of the ‘English’.” “Sin, Conquest, Servitude: English Self-Image in the Chronicles of the Early Fourteenth Century,” pp. 157–8. Absent, of course, is any interest in the runic beginnings of English writing itself through which some modern histories of the English language now extend the origins of English from medieval to ancient. Diane Watt, Amoral Gower. Language, Sex, and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 25. Echard, “With Carmen’s help: Latin Authorities in the Confessio Amantis,” p. 26. On themes the Confessio Amantis develops on the inability of either language to signify adequately, see Echard, “With Carmen’s help,” p. 9. This negative relationship between Hengist and the origins of English does not seem reversed until the Lexicon Tetraglotton (1660) written by polyglot Welshman James Howell (1594?–1666). In what seems to be an obvious attempt to at least equal if not surpass the prestige the Romance

NOTES

161

languages share as Latinate languages, Howell attributes masculine traits to English: France, Italy, and Spain, ye sisters three Whose Toungs are branches of the Latin tree, To perfect your odd Number, be not shy To take a Fourth to your society, That high Teutonick Dialect which bold Hengestus with his Saxons brought of old, Among the Britains when by knife and sword, He first of English did create the word; Nor is’t a small advantage to admit, So male a speech to mix with you, and knitt, Who by her Consonants and tougher strains Will bring more Arteries ‘mong your soft veins [. . .]. Cited in Elizabeth Sklar, “So Male a Speech: Linguistic Adequacy in Eighteenth-Century England. American Speech 64.4 (1989): 372 [372–9]. Sklar explains that in the seventeenth century “[i]n the comparative hierarchy of linguistic merit, while the Romance languages, French and Italian in particular, were highly valued (even, albeit grudgingly, in England), German and the other northern European languages—whence English derived—were considered ‘but little removed from [their] ancient barbarity’.” Sklar, “So Male a Speech,” p. 374. On constructions of the manliness of Germanic languages in early modern Europe, see Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 28.

3 MULTILINGUAL WRITING AND WILLIAM LANGLAND 1. Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Notion of Vernacular Theory,” in The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory. 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrowne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 329 [314–30]. 2. Tim William Machan explains “barring very peculiar circumstances, speakers consciously use natural language neither to advance diachronic change nor to enact a synchronic linguistic repertoire. They speak and write because they want to accomplish some immediate sociolinguistic objective, and they choose their language and style accordingly.” “Medieval Multilingualism and Gower’s Literary Practice,” Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006): 23 [1–25]. In terms of the language choices and uses available to medieval writers, Wendy Scase questions the linguistic assumptions of the collection of essays in The Idea of the Vernacular by arguing that studies in

162

NOTES

vernacularity do “not attempt to illustrate the relations between practice and theory [nor] show how writers’ knowledge about the uses and meanings of their language shaped their practice.” “Tolkien, Philology, and The Reeves’ Tale: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 328 [325–34]. Thus, Evans, like many others in the field including my study of medieval multilingualism cannot often not resist totalizing the English language itself by considering late medieval English proleptically witness to its status today: “The Middle Ages is not a point of origin here, but a historical moment in which structures of imperialism and resistance to those structures have marked forever the role of English in the international world today.” “Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism: Cultural Difference and the Vernacular,” The Idea of the Vernacular, p. 370 [366–70]. 3. Rita Copeland had plainly argued that “the vernacular appropriation of a certain cultural privilege is not necessarily a dismantling of that privilege.” In terms of translatio, she states that “when translation is theorized strictly as access to a textual legacy, it is not theorized as appropriation.” Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 224–5. Referring specifically to Lollard writing, Nicholas Watson has explained that “their use of a Latinate language different from anything most people would have spoken [. . .] suggests that the classless reading community they project remained an ideal more than a reality.” “The Politics of Middle English Writing,” in The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, p. 342 [331–52]. On clerical assertions of “vernacular alliance” in the fourteenth century, Fiona Somerset concludes “discussions of that vernacular within the dominant group are often more inward looking than they may first appear: they may have much more to do with how education confers power within the group than with any of those left outside.” “Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston’s Determinacio, Arundel’s Constitutiones,” The Vulgar Tongue. Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 154 [145–57]. 4. For further discussion on the predicating of modern scholarly identity upon medieval texts, see Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “Profiting Pedants: Symbolic Capital, Text Editing, and Cultural Reproduction,” in Disciplining English. Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives, ed. David R. Shumway and Craig Dionne (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 159–78. 5. In exposing this critical habit, Laura Wright asserts “[i]t seems perverse to designate [. . .] the comparatively small amount of monolingual material as the norm” for “we have been straitjacketed by our own monolingual perspective, and our social and political desire to find linguistic and hence cultural purity.” Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 7.

NOTES

163

6. On theories of literacy and Piers Plowman specifically, see Wendy Scase, “Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 9 (1995): 121–31. For an overview of the oral-written continuum in medieval culture, see Walter J. Ong, “Orality, Literacy and Medieval Textualization,” New Literary History 16.1 (1984): 1–11. 7. Elizabeth Archibald discusses the origin and history of the term “macaronic” as specifically a verse tradition in “Tradition and Innovation in the Macaronic Poetry of Dunbar and Skelton,” Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 126–9 [126–49]. In other anachronistic applications of that literary term to consider multilingualism in hymns and poetry, see: William O. Wehrle, The Macaronic Hymn Tradition in Medieval English Literature (Washington: The Catholic University of America, 1933); David L. Jeffrey, “Early English Carols and the Macaronic Hymn,” Florilegium 4 (1982): 210–27; and, finally, Carol J. Harvey, “Intertextuality in the Anglo-Norman Lyric,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 10 (1989): 17–28 as well as her “Macaronic Technique in Anglo-Norman Verse,” L’Esprit créateur 18 (1978): 70–81. 8. For her earliest work on London record keeping, see Laura Wright, “A Hypothesis on the Structure of Macaronic Business Writing,” in Medieval Dialectology, ed. Jacek Fisiak (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 309–21; “Macaronic Writing in a London Archive, 1380–1480,” in History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), pp. 762–70. For recent views on multilingual sermons which begin to work beyond the literary constraints of the term “macaronic,” see: Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); Alan J. Fletcher, “ ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’: A Thirteenth-Century Sermon for Advent and the Macaronic Style in England,” Mediaeval Studies 56 (1994): 217–45. For an integrated linguistic and literary analysis of language contact in drama, see Hans-Jürgen Diller, “Code-Switching in Medieval English Drama,” Comparative Drama 31 (1997/8): 506–37. On late medieval poetry, Herbert Schendl’s studies of especially the syntax of language contact has been extensive: “To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes,” pp. 52–66; “Text types and Code-switching in Medieval and Early Modern English,” Vienna English Working PaperS (ViewS) 5.1 (1996): 50–62; “Syntactic Constraints on Code-switching in Medieval Texts,” in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), pp. 76–86; and, most recently, “Code-switching in Medieval Poetry,” in Language Contact in the History of English, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2001), pp. 305–25. On the conf luence of languages in sea trade, see David Trotter, “Oceano Vox: You never know where a ship comes from. On Multilingualism and Language-mixing in Medieval Britain” in Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language

164

NOTES

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

History, ed. Kurt Braunmüller and Gisella Ferraresi (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), pp. 15–33. For an analysis on code-switching in the history of English from the field of corpus linguistics, see Päivi Pahta and Arja Nurmi, “Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: a thousand years of multilingual practices,” in Medieval English and its Heritage. Structure, Meaning and the Mechanisms of Change, ed. Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, and Dieter Kastovsky (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 203–20. M.D. Legge’s explanation of language-mixing as a matter of style typifies literary treatments of this multilingual phenomenon: “[w]ith three languages in one country to play with it is not surprising that the rhetorically inclined took to macaronic verse.” Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 349. Michael W. Herren similarly seems to suggest this phenomenon is exclusive to literature when he observes that “linguistic mixture is a literary feature throughout the Middle Ages, predominanting in the Celtic and Germanic literatures.” “Latin and the Vernacular Languages,” Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1996), p. 126 [122–9]. This burgeoning interest did not seem sparked by Michael Richter’s research on multilingualism in the medieval period even a decade earlier in his “Monolingualism and Multilingualism in the Fourteenth Century,” Historiographica Linguistica 7 (1980): 211–20. Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 181. Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 5. William Rothwell, “Arrivals and Departures: The Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English.” English Studies 2 (1998): 165 [144–65]. For his analysis of the formal features of language-mixing within sentences in administrative documents, see “Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactic Mixing in the Languages of Medieval England,” Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 213–32. Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “What’s the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England.” Speculum 71 (1996): 823 [813–26]. Tony Hunt, “Code-switching in Medical Texts,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, p. 131 [131–47]. Alan J. Fletcher, “ ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini.’ Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England, p. 127. See also Luís Iglesias-Rábade, “The Multi-Lingual Pulpit in England (1110–1500),” Neophilologus 80 (1996): 479–92. Tim William Machan, “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 69 (1994): 359–85. David Trotter, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. At the time this book went to press, collections edited by the University of Bristol’s Medieval Multilingualism project were forthcoming.

NOTES

165

19. Trotter, Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, p. 1. 20. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor, eds., The Tongue of the Fathers. Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 10. On Latin acquisition and medieval boyhood, see also Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 112–5. On the gendering of English, see Nicholas Watson, “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124. 21. On the deprecation of Spanish by American Anglophones through code-switching from English to psuedo-Spanish phrases, which is often deemed comedic in intention, see Introduction, n. 17. 22. Anon., “Mankind,” The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perserverance, Wisdom, and Mankind, ed. Mark Eccles, Early English Text Society o.s. 262 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 155. Subsequent references to line numbers in this edition. 23. In Myscheff ’s quotation, English nouns decline as Latin plural datives governed by the Latin verb seruit. 24. Anon., Mankind, ll. 398–9 (“yt ys in spadibus,” “in your hedybus”). Just as elsewhere in the play when Nought similarly appropriates Latin morphology, the representation of these integrations of separate languages within single sentences calls the multilingual postures of these speakers into question and not the multilingualism of the utterances themselves. 25. Wright, “Macaronic Writing in a London Archive, 1380–1480,” p. 769. 26. Schendl, “To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes,” p. 64. 27. On Myscheff ’s Latin, Diller concludes the “majority of forms are the kind of foreign phrases that weakly bilingual speakers would introduce into their native speech either as in-jokes or to impress people with less formal education.” Code-switching in Late Medieval Drama,” p. 533. Diller also examines the contrastive speech styles of the Vices and Mercy. Diller observes that, while mixed English and Latin collectively characterizes the speech of the Vices, Mercy typically speaks in aureate diction. 28. Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Princeton: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1987), p. 194 (VI 344–6). 29. William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, Do-Best, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p. 378. Subsequent parenthetical references to this edition. 30. For a discussion of the socially expressive use of the psalm title Dixit Insipiens here, see Anne Wenley Quick, “The Sources of Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Diss. (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1982), pp. 197–8. Throughout this chapter, the primary source for identifying quotations is John A. Alford, Piers Plowman. A Guide to the Quotations (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992). Translations of quotations adapted from A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. William Langland. The Vision of Piers Plowman (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987). 31. Anon., N-Town 13.90–93. Cited in Diller, “Code-Switching in Late Medieval Drama,” p. 525.

166

NOTES

32. Diller, “Code-Switching in Late Medieval Drama,” p. 525. 33. John A. Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 52 (1977): 80–99. For a summary of the long tradition of linking the poem with sermons and sermon manuals, see Siegfried Wenzel, “Medieval Sermons,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 155–72. In countering this tradition, Wendy Scase f latly states “the textual cultures of Piers and the sermon-text are not the same.” “Plowing Parallel Furrows? The Textual Cultures of Piers and Preaching, Response to ‘The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland,’ ” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 88 [85–88]. The composition of Piers Plowman easily exceeds the evaluative criteria Christina von Nolcken provides for assessing sermon creativity generally in “Some Alphabetical Compendia and How Preachers Used Them in Fourteenth-Century England.” Viator 12 (1981): 271–88. 34. Machan adds that “the works that perhaps most closely resemble Piers Plowman in this regard are not literary at all but documentary, such as guild records and court rolls.” “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” p. 359. The immediate intelligibility of such poems as dialogues suggests they are depictions of interactions however one-sided they appear or unlikely their interlocutors seem. As Urs Dürmüller argues, “[i]rrespective of whether characters populating medieval text worlds are allegorical figures or images of real people, they do all speak the language of real people. Of course there are aesthetic and ethical differences between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age, but we can nevertheless assume that there are certain universal speech conventions to which hearers react in similar ways, whichever age or period. If this assumption were wrong, we could hardly understand anything of medieval literature today; we could not qualify as readers of medieval texts.” “Sociostylistics and the Study of Medieval English,” Linguistic and Stylistic Studies in Medieval English, ed. A. Crepin (Paris: Publications de l’Association des Médievistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur, 1984), pp. 12–3 [5–24]. 35. C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 71. Similarly suggesting the fictions of interaction in the poem reside in its changes in language, John A. Alford interprets the rubrication of Latin among other scribal cues as “the visual equivalent of a suprasegmental phoneme (for example, pitch or intonation).” Alford, Piers Plowman. A Guide to the Quotations, p. 13. 36. Benson, Public Piers Plowman, p. 116. 37. A.G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, eds. William Langland. Piers Plowman: The Z Version (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1983). For an appraisal of this edition and arguments for the Z version pre- dating the A-text, see Hoyt N. Duggan, “The Authenticity of the Z-text of Piers Plowman: Further Notes on Metrical Evidence,” Medium Aevum 56.1 (1987): 25–45. While noting the linguistic simplicity of the A-version, Jill Mann argues it postdates and was adapted from

NOTES

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

167

the B version for specifically nonclerical audiences. “The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relations between the A and B Version of Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994): 21–49. George Kane, “The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies,” Chambers Memorial Lecture (London: H.K. Lewis, 1965). Reprinted in Chaucer and Langland. Historical and Textual Approaches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 1–14. Kane does argue at length for that authorship of William Langland in a monograph of that same year, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for the Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965). For a discussion of the tentative language of Kane’s assertions, see Benson, Public Piers Plowman, pp. 31–2. Anne Middleton, “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530. ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 19 [15–82]. “The only major life-events one can trace are the appearances of the versions of that work.” Ralph Hanna III, William Langland. English Writers of the Middle Ages (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), p. 10. “His release into the world of at least three or four versions of the poem may implicitly acknowledge that provisionality was not only acceptable, but ethically mandatory, and would have been regarded so by his contemporaries, including some of his copyists.” Alan J. Fletcher, “The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland: Textual Revision as Ethical Process in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 63 [61–84]. Rather than the “bourgouise or ‘upwardly mobile’ audience for romance, courtly lyrics and unadventurous piety [. . .], Langland’s audience seems to have been made up of a diverse group of disenfranchised or underemployed clerks, progressive or satirically inclined clergy, legal scribes, civil servants, and unknown knightly or ‘genteel’ readers. However, he seems not to have been uniformly pleased with each of these as readers.” Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego,” in Written Work. Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 122 [67–143]. “[N]ot only did Langland aspire to write in a documentary mode, but [he] [was] caught up in a larger movement in which the vernacular literary subject increasingly found its public voice in the legal document and in which official discourse was appropriated to serve vernacular concerns.” Emily Steiner, “Medieval Documentary Poetics and Langland’s Authorial Identity,” in Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3, ed. Sally McKee (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), p. 103 [79–105]. Benson, Public Piers Plowman, p. 106. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton explains that changes from the A to B versions include “a new audacity in his political allusions, alongside a new urgency

168

46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52.

NOTES

in denunciations of ecclesiastical abuse” and “the power—latent in A—of bilingual textuality.” “Piers Plowman,” The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 521 [513–38]. Helen Barr attributes links between bilingualism and theme to the B version. “The Use of Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman with Special Reference to Passus XVIII of the ‘B’ Text,” Notes and Queries 33.4 (1986): 440–8. Gillian Rudd, Managing Language in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), p. 224. James Simpson, “Desire and the Scriptural Text: Will as Reader in Piers Plowman,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 216 [215–43]. Schendl, “To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes,” p. 64. Middleton explains that it is in resistance to such practices that Langland cryptomatically imposes his “kynde name” on the texts: “the pervasive practice of complex literary signature in this period is not an illustration of this cultural phenomenon but an important grammatical operator in bringing about a broader cultural transformation; as such, it is a rearguard action, a gesture fraught with ambivalence and nostalgia not a sense of discovery or progress. As a means of deobjectifying the written artifact and restoring it to the authenticating presence that has been drained from it by the documentary and administrative culture whose gestures it borrows, it uses the letter to discredit the consequences of a culture of letters [. . .].” “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name,’ ” p. 25. Fletcher explores “clerical discourse” as “a sociolinguistics of writing” in “ ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’: A Thirteenth-Century Sermon for Advent and the Macaronic Style in England.” Fletcher accounts further for such writing as originating in language-mixed speech (p. 240). Fiona Somerset explains such is the strategic nature of this literate positioning that it makes the writer “extraclergial,” that is, allied with yet positioned against the laity. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 12–3. Guided by Somerset’s conclusions, I have argued that the authority language-mixing declares also situates writers like William Langland in distinctly gendered multilingual discourse. “Codeswitching and Authority in Late Medieval England,” Neophilologus 87.3 (2003): 473–86. Machan, “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” p. 380. Linguistic approaches to the poem commonly distinguish between the insertion of Latin words within English sentences (intrasentential switches) and the switch to Latin quotations at clause and sentence boundaries (intersentential switches). For example, Helen Halmari and Robert Adams focus on the conventionality of intrasentential switches in the B version (a total of 221) to prove that “Langland is enforcing, and re-enforcing, his own clerical and scholarly identity.” “On the Grammar and Rhetoric of Language-Mixing in Piers Plowman,” Neuphilologische

NOTES

53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

169

Mitteilungen 103.1 (2002): 48 [33–50]. The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive currently refers to this contact phenomenon in the poem as “language shifts.” http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/seenet/piers (in progress online). In the literature on code-switching in linguistics, language shifts constitute non-situational code-switches, that is, language choice based on changes in topics rather new situations or speakers. Instances below in this chapter suggest that switching to Latin for both topic and audience may occur in some language shifts, and, in fact, the use of Latin can strategically include lay readers at the same time it distances them. On the discourse features of code-switching more generally, see relevant chapters in John Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Suzanne Romaine, Bilingualism. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). For a sociolinguistic analysis of this passage which does not consider language contact as conversational or situational, see Machan, “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” p. 364. Matti Peikola explains that “the phrase god men could also be used in late M[iddle] E[nglish] socio-religious writing as a general collective label epitomizing the archetypal morally and religiously upright common people of society.” Congregation of the Elect: Patterns of Self-Fashioning in English Lollard Writing. Anglicana Turkuensia 21 (Turku, Finland: University of Turku Press, 2000), p. 252. On the lack of ‘lewed’ access to this passage, see Scase, “Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy,” p. 128. Alford suggests that the second part of this quotation beginning with “brutorum animalium” probably originates in a commentary. A Guide to the Quotations, p. 95. Even if English language choice for the poem overall appears to modern readers to efface linguistic difference and social distance between multilingual clerks and monolingual laity, the language shifts such as those examined here nevertheless linguistically enforce that ingroup communication which reproduces a symbolic division between monolingual and bilingual. If language shifts in the poem specifically target clerks, however, such multilingual communication demonstrates how they articulate their status in passages which constitute ingroup reminders of clerical responsibility rather than outgroup critiques of literate privilege. Although the text of Piers Plowman likely enjoyed audiences of diverse language skills, the clerical discourse of the poem nevertheless projects and appropriates those ‘lewed’ interests in which literate lay audiences could as equally participate as “good men.” Because of the normative multilingualism of the clerical language of the poem, overall, lay audiences would look favorably on themselves as modest monolinguals rather than question Latinity itself. J.A. Burrow’s traditional account of the poem’s intended and actual audiences establishes their status by identifying the owners of its manuscripts and by pointing to the simplification of traditional alliterative techniques across manuscripts as indication of

170

58.

59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

NOTES

changing addressees. On the basis of these assessments, Burrow argues “[w]e must think, then, of Piers Plowman reaching two kinds of reader— the old audience of clerks, and the new one of the prosperous, literate laymen.” “The Audience of Piers Plowman,” Essays on Medieval Literature ([reprint] Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 107 [102–16] [First published Anglia 75 (1957): 373–84]. More recently, Anne Middleton similarly distinguishes between the poem’s readership as “audience” and “public” within definitions of literariness. “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,” in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 1982), pp. 101–54. David Burnley contends that Piers Plowman is a “thou-text” designed for an audience of social equals rather than social superiors. “Langland’s Clergial Lunatic,” in Langland, The Mystics and the Medieval and English Religious Tradition, ed. Helen Philips (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 35 [31–8]. I argue that, although the poem may be a thou-text in content, its multilingual discourse typifies clerical ingroup communication ref lexively formulated in part against outgroup laity. Sola contricio [delet peccatum] [Contrition alone (can blot out sin).] was “[a] common saying in the long controversy concerning the importance of oral confession in the sacrament of penance.” Alford, A Guide to the Quotations, p. 72. Part of John 3:5 stands in for the entire verse: “Amen, amen, dico tibi, (nisi quis renatus fuerit) ex aqua et Spiritu sancto, non potest introire in regnum Dei.” [Amen, amen, I say to you (unless a man be born again) of water and the Holy Ghost, he can not enter into the kingdom of God.] Augustine, Confessions 8.8. Matthew 20:4. Alford outlines the penitential tradition in which this maxim appears from Innocent III (De Contemptu Mundi iii 15) to a thirteenth-century vernacular lyric “Worldes Blis.” A Guide to the Quotations, p. 42. Middleton has cautioned against positions in which Langland’s “techniques of composition, or his processes of thought, are often said to mirror various discontents with, or breakdowns of, medieval didactic authority and the discursive modes characteristically used to promote it: chaotic times or discredited languages seem to require the semblance of chaos in their representation.” “William Langland’s “Kynde Name,’ ” p. 76. On the lack of French in Piers Plowman as an indication that French was becoming a “dead language” in fourteenth century England, see Machan, “Language Contact,” n. 72. These two proverbs are: [B]ele virtue est sufferance; male dire est pet[ite] vengeance. / Bien dire et bien suffrir fait lui suffr[able] a bien venire. [Patience is a fair virtue, say-evil a poor vengeance. / Say-well and suffer-well dispose a man to come through well.] (B.11.385–6); and “For quant oportet vient en place il nyad que pati” (B.10.445). This second proverb could gloss 2 Corinthians 5:10 (Omnes enim nos manifestari oportet ante tribunal Christi). On its source, see James Woodrow Hassell, Jr., Middle French Proverbs,

NOTES

66.

67.

68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

171

Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982), p. 183. The phrasings occur in a likely traditional song, (And dryueþ forþ þe longe day wiþ “Dieu saue Dame Emme (B.Pr.225)), an imprecation, pur charite, typically collocating with “pray” (B.6.253, 8.11, 13.30), and an honorific, “Beau fit3,” (B.7.168). Alford suggests that “their upstart behavior is indicated less by the literal meaning of their words than by their imitation of upper class speech.” A Guide to the Quotations, p. 12. Alford argues that “to say that Dives lived ‘in douce vie’ . . . is to convey more than the idea that he led a soft life. Here the French . . . defines such soft living in terms of French modes of behavior, cuisine, fashion—best epitomizing, for a moralist like Langland, the sin of luxury.” A Guide to the Quotations, p. 12. This only instance of the word “Frenche” as a noun in the B version matches its single appearance in C.13.202 for a French quotation which appears in the B version at 11.385. Ps 111:5: “Iucundus homo qui miseretur et commodat, disponet sermones suos iudicio.” [Acceptable is the man that showeth mercy and lendeth. . . .] A.V.C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art. Piers Plowman Studies 4 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987), p. 81–2. For Fiona Somerset, the commune’s words as “vernacular Latin voice” account for the commonality of diverse registers Latin and English shared. “ ‘Al þe comonys with o voys at onys: Multilingual Latin and Vernacular Voice in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2005): 107–36. The next chapter will argue that difference across rather than within languages most radically distinguished and distanced Anglophone monolinguals from medieval multilinguals. “Si ambulero in medio umbrae mortis/Non timebo mala quoniam tu mecum es.” [For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils for thou art with me]. In entertaining the wisdom of this simple man, “[t]he basic premises are not challenged—knowledge and wisdom are still desired and, once achieved, bestow strength in the form of power and a place in the privileged society.” Rudd, Managing Language in Piers Plowman, pp. 215–6. Below I argue further that, as linguistic difference in their exchange makes clear, Piers’ vernacular simplicity could only figuratively rather than practically protect him from multilingualist clerical culture. Through his blessedly simple but never potent language status, the monolingualism of this proverbially ‘lewed’ man constituted his easy literary appropriation as well as his monolingual subservience to multilingualism, even were his clerical practitioners aware of their own minority language privilege. This definition of poverty is quoted widely in medieval works attributed to Seneca. Quick, “The Sources of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” pp. 311–2. See also The Canterbury Tales III 1195–1200.

172

NOTES

76. For a non-situational analysis of the exchange between Patience and Haukeyn, see Machan, “Language Contact in Piers Plowman,” p. 362. 77. For an overview, see Elizabeth Robertson, “Measurement and the ‘Feminine’ in Piers Plowman: A Response to Recent Studies of Langland and Gender,” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman. A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 167–92. 78. Clare A. Lees, “Gender and Exchange in Piers Plowman,” in Class and Gender in Early English Literature. Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 117 [112–30]. 79. Barr comments that Mede’s misquotation “is a striking and dramatic example of Langland’s awareness of how scriptural authority may be abused for the purposes of winning an argument.” “The Use of Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman,” p. 441. At the level of multilingual performance, however, Conscious strategically reduces Mede’s choice to use quotations unfairly to an inability to cite quotations correctly. 80. Proverbs 22:9: Victoriam et (honorem adquiret qui dat munera,) animam autem aufert accipentium. [He that gives gifts shall receive victory and honour; but he carries off the souls of his recipients]. 81. Quick notes similar abbreviations of this verse “as a scriptural authority for the virtue of liberality in kings” in Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (l. 4663). “The Sources of the Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman,” p. 164. 82. John M. Bowers, “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes toward a History of Wycliffite Langland,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 27 [1–50]. 83. See note 1 in this chapter. 84. On the statements of John Trevisa and others that English had become a medium of instruction by the middle of the fourteenth century, Luís Iglesias-Rábade observes “it is difficult to assess whether these scholars used English as the medium of teaching for the purpose of being strongholds of vernacular culture or for feeling much more comfortable speaking their native English tongue.” “The Multi-Lingual Pulpit in England (1110–1500), p. 188. 85. For a contrast of the postmedieval reception and changing constructions of William Langland and Chaucer as specifically authors rather than “makers,” see John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition, Chapter Three, “Naming Names” (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 54–102. 86. For a critical overview of the historical breadth of traditions centered on Chaucer’s name, which most recently includes professionally identifying as “Chaucerian,” see Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls. Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).

4

CHAUCER’S “DIVERSITE”

1. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Princeton: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1987), p. 257. Subsequent parenthetical references to fragments and line numbers in this edition.

NOTES

173

2. For the sources of this proverb, see The Riverside Chaucer, p. 939, note 3164. Constituted by non-situational switching from English to Latin, this joke works most evidently at the expense of monolingualism. 3. But this lack of demonstration of second-language skills, which the Pardoner boasts he possesses, can work out the theme of language and appearance even further yet by engaging both Chaucer’s pilgrims and his audiences as equally happily mislead, precisely because the text offers no more linguistic evidence of the Pardoner’s interpretive integrity than the explication of 1 Timothy 6.1 (Radix malorum est Cupiditas), which his tale constitutes. William Kamowski has argued the Pardoner’s tale rather than curb sin serves to incite sins from which he profits in his sale of pardons and indulgences. “The Sinner Against the Scoundrels: The Ills of Doctrine and “Shrift” in the Wife of Bath’s, Friar’s and Summoner’s Narratives,” Religion and Literature 25.1 (1993): 5 [1–18]. 4. For Christopher Cannon, “the pilgrims embody Chaucer’s argument for the capacities of his own language, and their interactions simply play out language difference on a social stage. In this sense, every description of an individual pilgrim’s language matters.” The Making of Chaucer’s English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 149. On speaker attitudes and French in this period, see John David Burnley, “French and Frenches in fourteenth-century London,” in Language Contact in the History of English, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2001), pp. 24–7 [17–34]. In elaborating on speaker attitude and language choice, this chapter argues that the narrative frame of tale-telling itself makes it possible for pilgrims to evaluate each other’s speech in tales that often “quyte” another pilgrim on the basis of attitudes toward second languages uttered within English speech. 5. The notes to those instances of dialect in The Riverside Chaucer explain that “Chaucer clearly wished the language of the two clerks to sound Northern,” although “he does not consistently represent the speech of the Reeve in his own person.” See The Riverside Chaucer, Explanatory Notes to “The Reeve’s Prologue,” p. 848, n. 3864, and his tale, p. 850, n. 4022. 6. On features of the Reeve’s dialect that differ from the students, see S.C.P. Horobin, “Chaucer’s Norfolk Reeve,” Neophilologus 86 (2002): 609–12. 7. S.C.P. Horobin argues some scribes increased the dialect “f lavour” Chaucer might have intended. “J.J.R. Tolkien as Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies 82 (2001): 97–105. On Chaucer’s otherwise random northernisms elsewhere in his writing, see David Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), p. 116–8. Arguing that overall Chaucer did not intend to render his socially and regionally diverse narrators linguistically distinct, Tim William Machan concludes that Chaucer “consistently writes in what modern linguists would call

174

NOTES

one dialect” and “only sporadically” does Chaucer “acknowledge and depict variation.” English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 112–4. Wendy Scase points out that although Tolkien concluded in his 1934 article that Chaucer likely did not aim to represent dialect in “The Reeve’s Tale” as a means of regional characterization, a tradition of Chaucer’s sociolinguistic sensitivity had begun. “Tolkien, Philology, and ‘The Reeves’ Tale’: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 325–34. For the beginning of that tradition, see J.R.R. Tolkien, “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” Transactions of the Philological Society (1934): 1–70. For other instances of dialect-awareness within the Tolkien tradition Scase identifies, see Cecily Clark, “Another Late-Fourteenth Century Case of Dialect-Awareness,” English Studies. A Journal of English Language and Literature 62 (1981): 504–5. If Chaucer did not consistently use varieties of English to individualize the speech of pilgrims, according to Wendy Scase, he nevertheless “attributes to certain characters an awareness of the pragmatics of the language, an understanding of and an attempt to exploit its social and situational meanings.” “Tolkien, Philology, and The Reeves’ Tale,” p. 332. 8. For Jeremy Smith, “[s]ocial class does not seem to have been distinguished by dialect or accent in the generations preceding Chaucer; rather, English-speakers who wished to mark their social distinctiveness during the fourteenth century seem to have adopted the expedient of studding their language with French-derived vocabulary.” “Chaucer and the Invention of English,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 341–2 [335–46]. As Machan similarly explains in his discussion of language and social difference in the third fit of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, “distinct languages—Latin and French—served the socially individualizing and discriminatory function typically served by sociolects.” English in the Middle Ages, pp. 138–9. 9. Robert F. Yeager argues: [I]t is not difficult to imagine Chaucer switching in the course of an average day from one to another, according to need and audience [. . .]. Often a kind of “macaronic speech,” or creole, must have taken place between members of the literate classes, under certain conditions especially. While some linguists might quibble with Yeager’s choice of the word creole to describe late medieval speech that included borrowings as well as one-off switches to Latin or French, his invitation to imagine Chaucer changing languages “according to need and audience” nevertheless demands an appreciation that attitudes toward such practices would appear in the speech of his pilgrims. R.F. Yeager, “Learning to Speak in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture.” English Literary Studies, ELS Monograph Series 51 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1991) p. 117 [115–29]. For distinguishing Middle English from Creoles, see Manfred Görlach, “Middle English—A Creole?,” in Linguistics across

NOTES

10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

175

Historical and Geographical Boundaries in Honor of Jacek Fisiak, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Alexsander Szwedak (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 329–44. Chaucer, “Complaint of Venus,” l. 80. The frequency with which Chaucer himself exploited dialect variation to aid rhyme, Ralph W.V. Elliott argues, was very “exceptional.” Chaucer’s English (London: Andre Deutsch, 1940), p. 32. For an extended discussion of such exceptions, see Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language, pp. 119–32. Riverside Chaucer, p. 650. Linne R. Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe,” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 97–138. If Pinkhurst was as careful as Chaucer had hoped, it is likely some exemplars ref lect Chaucer’s own spelling. For a recent approach to the manuscript evidence based on this assumption, see Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003). “[L]ight reules” occurs in Treatise on the Astrolabe (l. 26). Appearing twice in the Canterbury Tales as an adjective, “insufficient” is uttered by the Squire to describe the weaknesses of English for rhetorical discourse (V 37). In its second occurrence in “The Summoner’s Tale,” Friar John chooses this adjective to persuade Thomas of his need for the friar’s prayers alone (III 1960). As a noun in “The Complaint of Venus,” Chaucer’s “litel suffisaunce” ref lects the challenges of “endyting” an English scarce in rhyme (ll. 75–77) in comparison to French. The Orthographica Gallica instructed medieval English pupils in French writing by pedagogically providing a further contrast between the prestige languages Latin and French in terms of their written difference: “et sachez qe Fraunceis ne serra pas escript si courtement come latyn, qar Fraunceis demaunde paroules entiers.” Orthographia Gallica (ANTS Plain Text 5), ed. R.C. Johnston (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1987), p. 38. On variation in the writing of Anglo-French, see Andres M. Kristol, “L’intellectual <> face à la pluralité des langues: le témoignage implicite du MS Oxford, Magdalen Lat. 188,” in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter (Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 37–52. John H. Fisher persuasively speculates that modern language scholars might find Law French “terrible French, but the psycholinguistic process that produced it is identical with that which produced the language of the Canterbury Tales, which any purist in 1400 would have deplored as terrible English. But there were no purists in 1400. The bilingualism of the society made it so easy to merge languages [. . .].” The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 108. Tim William Machan, “Editing, Orality, and Late Middle English Texts,” in Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.P. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 243 [229–45]. On the complexities of studying the emergence of standard English given morphological variation within even single texts themselves, see Laura Wright, “About the Evolution of Standard

176

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

NOTES

English,” in Studies in English Language and Literature. ‘Doubt wisely’: Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley, ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 99–115. H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. “Oure Tonges Différance: Textuality and Deconstruction in Chaucer,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schictman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 16 [15–26]. In A Treatise on the Astrolabe, Chaucer similarly uses “dyverse” to describe difference across rather than within languages (l. 34). Doris Sommer has suggested “elite monolingualism” characterizes the basis of theories of deconstruction that fail to address bilingualism itself as a more obvious and broadly more culturally and historically relevant form of difference. Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 43. On the misappropriation of theories of deconstruction among medievalists, see David Aers, “Medievalists and Deconstruction: An Exemplum,” in From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simons (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 24–40; Andrew Taylor, “Chaucer our Derridean Contemporary?,” Exemplaria 5.2 (1993): 471–86. On the literalness of what could constitute medieval projects of deconstruction, see Robert Stein, “Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 16–33. Kamowski, “The Sinner Against the Scoundrels,” p. 5. For an interpretation of the Wife of Bath as “proto-feminist,” see Marion Wynne-Davies, “ ‘The Elf-Queen and Hir Joly Compaignye’: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale,” in Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the Sword, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 14–35. For Elaine Treharne, “[t]he lack of explicitness in the creation of the Wife has led inevitably to the problematising of what she meant to stand for, and what Chaucer intended through her depiction.” Treharne concludes “this is not a woman speaking here giving voice to the concerns of female experience; it is a male author enacting the role of woman.” Thus, the “Wife has been labeled as the worst of women, as a proto-feminist, appropriated by scholars to meet their own requirements. The same, of course, is true of Chaucer.” “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath,” in Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature. Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), p. 114 [93–115]. Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncracies. Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t, Chapter Four, “Before the Tribade: Medieval Anatomies of Female Masculinity and Pleasure” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 71–102. In this sense of Chaucer’s linguistic construction of the Wife, Sheila Delany invites “the reader to regard the verbal strategies composing the text not as the monologue of a garrulous female weaver but rather as the production of an accomplished male courtier-poet voicing certain

NOTES

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

177

values of the culture inscribed in him.” Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 112. Lawrence Besserman notes that when “the Pardoner, the Friar, or the Summoner and their ilk distort and misappropriate Scripture, there is generally no mistaking it, but how Chaucer expected us to judge the Wife of Bath’s uses of biblical allusion is another matter.” Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), p. 106. Besserman notes this nexus of clerical concerns in Fragment III through the ways in which its speakers are self-interested biblical exegetes. See Chapter Four, “Partial or Oblique Quotations and Allusions,” pp. 101–137. Mary Carruthers argues that Chaucer’s poetic aim of exploring glossing receives its “most expanded treatment in the D-Fragment [III]; of twelve uses of the words “gloss” and “glossing” in The Canterbury Tales, six occur here.” “Letter and Gloss on the Friar’s and Summoner’s Tales,” Journal of Narrative Technique 2.3 (1972): 208 [208–214]. Carruthers pairs the Summoner and Friar as “unholy twins” in “Letter and Gloss,” p. 209. Proposing the figure of the Wife enables Chaucer to cast his texts as potentially only so much female garrulousness, Lee Patterson concludes that the Wife encapsulates Chaucer’s own concerns with writing and authority. “ ‘For the Wyves love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58.3 (1983): 656–95. Lisa Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), pp. 138–9. The phrase “linguistic terrorism”—likely borrowed by Lochrie from modern multilingual Gloria Anzaldúa—cannot as effectively describe the Wife of Bath’s unsuccessful monolingual appropriations of medieval language-mixed discourse. On Anzaldúa’s code-switching as subversion and its social differences from medieval language contact, see the Introduction, “Monolingualism and Middle English,” pp. 5–6. While many modern editions including The Riverside Chaucer interpret these lexemes as non-English by setting them in italics, these “foreign” items—unlike extended Latin quotations in Piers Plowman—are not typically marked for difference in the manuscripts. For the analysis of the Wife of Bath’s switching in this chapter, the cluster of etymologically non-English words centering exclusively on genitalia engages both an expression of gender and the performance of second-language proficiency. Chauncey Wood, “The Wife of Bath and ‘Speche Daungerous,’ ” in Chaucer and Language. Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele, ed. Robert Myles and David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 34 [33–43]. On links between the linguistic and sexual construction of the Wife of Bath, see also in that same collection, Beverly Kennedy, “ ‘Withouten oother compaignye in youthe’: Verbal and Moral

178

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

NOTES

Ambiguity in the General Prologue Portrait of the Wife of Bath,” in Chaucer and Language, pp. 11–32. Arguing for a technical definition more specific than The Riverside Chaucer’s “elegant, pleasing thing” and “sexual favors,” Lochrie demonstrates that queynte as a pun on “cunt,” a loan word from Old Norse, specifically applies to the external female genitals including the clitoris, a distinction the Wife’s use of chose in the singular further clarifies. Heterosyncracies, p. 95. MED attests widely to queynte as an adjective. Chaucer uses it nineteen times: in seventeen instances as an adjective; twice as a substantive. Its two instances as a substantive occur in the speech of the Wife and the Miller. Given the availability of its Norse-derived synonym, Burnley argues Chaucer’s choice of queynte must be a euphemism. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language, pp. 194–5. Closer to Lochrie, Elliott interprets queynte not as a euphemism but a “straightforward vulgarism”; however, he views quoniam and bele chose as euphemisms. Chaucer’s English, pp. 222–3. On the delicateness of French, see Woods, “The Wife of Bath and ‘Speche Daungerous,’ ” p. 39. This modern effeminization of late medieval French also seems to characterize negative critical appraisals of the Prioress’s French. From an astute linguistics approach, William Rothwell describes how the variety of French the Prioress speaks was not stigmatized simply because it was not Continental in origin. By historicizing the “Frenssh she spake ful faire and fetisly” in her religious community in east London (I 124), Rothwell rehabilitates the Anglo-French that traditional literary approaches stigmatize. “Stratford atte Bowe Re-visited,” The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 184–207. Lochrie, Heterosyncracies, p. 95. Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language, p. 194. Wood, “The Wife of Bath and ‘Speche Daungerous,’ ” pp. 36–8. Carolyn Dinshaw, “ ‘Glose/Bele Chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators,” Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G.K. Hall and Company, 1998), pp. 112–32. Kiser, Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry, p. 139. See Catherine S. Cox, Chapter One: “Promiscuous Glossing and Virgin Words,” Gender and Language in Chaucer (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997), pp. 18–38. In another monolingual approach leveling linguistic difference in multilingual late medieval England, Elaine Tuttle Hansen argues the “Orwellian mystification of the power behind language” stymies the Wife, where I would argue “language” might be more profitably explored for feminist ends as the masculinist privilege of bilingualism and Latinity. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 30. Jill Mann argues that “[t]he true butt of the joke is neither the cock nor the hen, but the male stereotyping that fails to confront its own contradictory attitudes, preferring to keep them both in play for use as convenient.” Feminizing Chaucer. 2nd ed. (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 148–9.

NOTES

179

39. In similar plays on linguistic difference and gender, “The Man of Law’s Tale” witnesses the international superiority of Latin. Custance long adrift and finally awash on Northumbria’s shores sputters for aid through Latin seemingly as broken as her sea-swept body: The constable of the castel doun is fare To see this wrak, and al the ship he soghte, And foond this wery womman ful of care; He foond also the tresor that she broghte. In hir langage mercy she bisoghte, The lyf out of hir body for to twynne, Hire to delivere of wo that she was inne. A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche, But algates therby was she understonde. (II 512–20)

40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

Against the textual authority Chaunticleer’s linguistic vaunting invokes even in its inaccuracy, Custance’s oral “corrupt Latyn,” by which nonetheless “was she understonde,” offers another kind of linguistic authority. “[H]ir body” and “hir speche”—both modestly compromised—make instead in their identically feminized states blessedly felicitous crosscultural communication, whose potential inaccuracies do not demand the willfully blind complicity of its male and female interlocutors. Turning to the forms of Latin that most broadly characterized medieval Latinity, William Rothwell describes Custance’s “maner Latyn” as Chaucer’s representation of Latin as an international lingua franca. William Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 54 [45–67]. Fiona Somerset has described late fourteenth-century dialogues in which even for “the Knight to speak about the clergy, even worse to argue like a cleric, is in itself to meddle with matters reserved to the clergy.” “ ‘As just as is a squyre’: The Politics of ‘Lewed Translacioun’ in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 199 [187–207]. Compare the lexicalization of Placebo in “The Parson’s Tale:” Flatereres been the develes chappelleyns, that syngen evere Placebo. I rekene f laterie in the vices of Ire, for ofte tyme if o man be wroth with another, thann wole he f latere som wight to sustene hym in his querele (X 617–8). MED eructacioun n. [L] Belching, eructation?1425. The sources for “The Summoner’s Tale” are a thirteenth-century fabliaux, “Li Dis le vescie á prestre,” and selections from Seneca’s De Ira. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), pp. 275–87. Tom Shippey argues that the depiction of the friar’s French in “The Summoner’s Tale” would strike Chaucer’s elite French-speaking lay audiences as especially comedic. “Bilingualism and Betrayal in Chaucer’s ‘Summoner’s Tale,’ ” in Speaking in the Medieval World, ed. Jean E. Godsall-Myers (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 141 [125–44]. In terms of cultural

180

NOTES

appropriation and the progressivist construction of the English attrition of French, Bowers asserts “[since] the literary tastes of these insular aristocrats remained predominantly French, it would fall to an English writer below the rank of nobility to assert these cultural differences, while staging other social antagonisms as well, and to make these literary advances in the English language.” “Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature,” in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise Baker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 93 [91–125] [my italics]. 45. Peter W. Travis, “Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,” Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 14 [1–19]. 46. As both vernacular writing and monolingual readership, the Wife can also embody the sentiments of Chaucer’s Retraction when Melissa Furrow writes: Chaucer clearly perceived that the reader was involved in the construction of meaning, that the author could not determine how his work was going to be read. But to say that Chaucer was not happy to let the reader play that role is to understate what appear to be his growing fears about our interpretive skills, our reception, and our moral application, of what he wrote. Those fears arose because he took the practices of his culture more seriously than we can: we can no longer feel the danger of secular writing or of writing for an unlearned readership, and few of us belong to cultural systems with like pressures to repent, confess, and make right things we have done wrong. “The Author and Damnation: Chaucer, Writing, and Penitence,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33.3 (1997): 254 [245–57]. 47. For John M. Bowers, Chaucer writes in the linguistic experience of his pilgrims through each “narrator’s unstated duties” to express their tales in “ ‘Londonese’.” “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 61 [53–66].

AFTERWORD 1. John Dagenais and Margaret R. Greer, “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 431 [431–48]. 2. “[T]he Norman Conquest [made] no real difference in terms of the linguistic complexity; it merely change[d] the languages involved.” Matthew Townsend, “Contacts and Conf licts: Latin, Norse, and French,” in The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 63 [61–85]. 3. Roger Lass, “Language Periodization and the Concept ‘Middle,’ ” in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000), p. 10 [7–41].

NOTES

181

4. Allan J. Frantzen, “Prologue: Documents and Monuments: Difference and Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Medieval Culture,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allan J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 7 [1–33]. 5. For a succinct overview of postcolonial theory and its utility for studies of nationalism in Anglo-Saxon England, see Kathleen Davis, “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998): 613–37. For later medieval England, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., The Postcolonial Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). On shared methodologies in medieval studies and postcolonial studies see Bruce W. Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002): 1195–227. On the welcome challenge postcolonial theory can offer traditional periodization, see Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, “Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History,” Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 1–9. For the most recent collection of postcolonial approaches to medieval culture, see Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. “Should we jettison the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ and listen to the current colonized populations?” Evelyn Nien-ming Chi’en, Weird English (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 247. [her emphasis] 7. Edgar W. Schneider, Post-colonial English: Varieties around the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 8. “Our own mania for ‘third world literature’ anthologies, when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and when therefore the student cannot sense this as a loss), participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translationas-freedom-in-troping. What is at play there is a phenomenon that can be called ‘sanctioned ignorance,’ now sanctioned more than ever by an invocation of “globality”—a word serving to hide the financialization of the globe, or “hybridity”—a word serving to obliterate the irreducible hybridity of all language.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 164. On the Western construction of “Third World Literatures,” see Aijaz Ahmad, “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature,” in Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991), pp. 206–63. 9. Neil Lazarus, “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism,” in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette

182

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

NOTES

Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 428 [423–38]. Marc Shell, “Babel in America; Or, the Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 119 [103–27]. Suzanne Romaine, Bilingualism. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 323. Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 20. Another feature of non-English native language underreporting in present-day Anglophone nations is the likelihood that “true” proficiency is culturally and institutionally measured by written proficiency, thus obliterating regard for first language oral f luency. For a discussion of these issues, see Tracey TokuhamaEspinosa, ed. The Multilingual Mind. Issues Discussed by, for, and about People Living with Many Languages (London: Praeger, 2003). Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics, p. 21. Elizabeth Salter, “Chaucer and Internationalism,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 79 [71–9]. More recently, sociologist Krishan Kumar has argued “Chaucer saw himself as a Europeanist.” The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 57. For alternate perspectives on English as both an “international gatekeeper” and author of “linguistic genocide,” see Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 13–19. John M. Bowers, “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author,” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, p. 61 [53–66]. Derek Pearsall, “Chaucer and Englishness,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 99 [77–99]. Rptd. in Kathryn L. Lynch, ed. Chaucer’s Cultural Geography (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 281–301. Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Postcolonialism,” in Chaucer. An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 450 [448–62]. On the fifteenth-century literary vogue for Chaucer’s English working against standardization, see Simon Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 144–5. For a discussion, see Tony Crowley, Language in History. Theories and Texts (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 49–50. This definition of “colonial” English is adapted from the diachronic divisions of English discussed by Dick Leith, “English—Colonial to Postcolonial,” in English. History, Diversity, and Change, ed. David Graddol, Dick Leith and Joan Swann (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 180–221. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that historicism “came to non-European peoples in the nineteenth century as somebody else’s way of saying ‘not yet’ to somebody else.” Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 8. Cited in Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, “Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History,” in Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 3 [1–15].

NOTES

183

21. Brown explains: “[c]olonial and postcolonial theory does indeed help us see important things about the Middle Ages and about the practice of medieval studies. But I don’t want to appropriate or apply it. For one thing, the knowledge/power activities of the two disciplines in the world of the living are incommensurable in ethically crucially ways: medievalism will never affect the lives of medieval people as Orientalism has affected and continues to affect the lives of living people.” Catherine Brown, “In the Middle,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 550 [547–74]. For an example of reading Middle English through postcolonial experience as commensurate mutatis mutandis, see Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, “The Notion of Vernacular Theory,” in The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory. 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 330 [314–30]. For an examination of recent links between orientialism and medievalism, see John M. Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

This page intentionally left blank

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aarslef, Hans. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Aers, David. “Medievalists and Deconstruction: An Exemplum.” In From Medieval to Medievalism, ed. John Simmons, 24–40. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992. Ahmad, Aijaz. “Disciplinary English: Third-Worldism and Literature.” In Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, ed. Svati Joshi, 206–63. New Delhi: Trianka, 1991. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “Orientation and Nation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” In Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch, 102–34. New York: Routledge, 2002. Alford, John A. Piers Plowman: A Glossary of Legal Diction. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988. ———. Piers Plowman: A Guide to the Quotations. Binghamton: State University of New York at Binghamton, 1992. ———. “Literature and Law in Medieval England.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 92 (1977): 941–51. ———. “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman.” Speculum 52 (1977): 80–99. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Archibald, Elizabeth. “Tradition and Innovation in the Macaronic Poetry of Dunbar and Skelton.” Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 126–49. Arnovick, Leslie. Diachronic Pragmatics. Seven Case Studies in English Illocutionary Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. Barr, Helen. Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ———. “The Use of Latin Quotations in Piers Plowman with Special Reference to Passus XVIII of the ‘B’ Text.” Notes and Queries 33.4 (1986): 440–8. Barron, W.R.J. and S.C. Weinberg, eds. and trans. Layamon. Brut or Hystoria Britonum. Harlow: Longman Group, 1995. Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English Language. 5th ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002. Bell, Alexander, ed. Geffrey Gaimar. L’estoire des Engleis. Anglo-Norman Text Society 14–16. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960.

186

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Benson, David C. Public Piers Plowman. Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Benson, Larry D. ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Princeton: Houghton Miff lin Co., 1987. Besserman, Lawrence. Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K., ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Biddick, Kathleen. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Bischoff, Bernard. “The Study of Foreign Languages in the Middle Ages.” Speculum 36 (1961): 209–24. Blake, Norman. The Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume II 1066– 1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bloch, R. Howard and Stephen G. Nicols, eds. Medievalism and the Modernist Temper. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Bonaventure, Br. “The Teaching of Latin in later Medieval England.” Medieval Studies 23 (1960): 1–20 Bourcier, Richard J. “Scott and Historical Fiction: The Case of Ivanhoe.” Selected Papers on Medievalism 1–2 II (1986–1987): 150–9. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Oxford: Polity Press, 1991. Bourgeois Richmond, Velma. “Historical Novels to Teach Anglo-Saxonism.” In Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, 173–210. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Bowers, John M. “Chaucer after Retters: The Wartime Origins of English Literature.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise Baker, 91–125. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. ———. “Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author.” In The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 53–66. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001. ———. Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. ———. “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—Politically Corrected.” In Rewriting Chaucer. Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, 13–44. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. ———. “Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Toward a History of Wycliffite Langland.” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 1–50. Brand, Paul. “The Languages of Law in Later Medieval England.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 63–76. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. Bridges, Margaret. “The King, the Foreigner, and the Lady with the Mead Cup: Variations on a Theme of Cross-Cultural Contact.” Multilingua 18.2–3 (1999): 185–207. Brook, G.L. and R.F. Leslie, eds. Layamon. Brut. Volume 1. Early English Text Society o.s. 250. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

187

Brown, Catherine. “In the Middle.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 547–74. Brown, David. Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination. London: Routledge, 1978. Bryan, W.F. and Germaine Dempster, eds. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. New York: Humanities Press, 1958. Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Burger, Glenn and Stephen Kruger, eds. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Burke, Peter. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Burnley, David. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. ———. “Langland’s Clergial Lunatic.” In Langland, The Mystics, and The Medieval English Religious Traditions, ed. Helen Philips, 31–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Burnley, John David. “French and Frenches in Fourteenth-century London.” In Language Contact in the History of English, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger, 17–34. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2001. Burrow, John A. “The Audience of Piers Plowman.” Anglia 75 (1957): 373–84. Rpt. In Essays on Medieval Literature, ed. John A. Burrow, 102–16. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ———. “A Maner Latyn Corrupt.” Medium Ævum 30.1 (1961): 33–7. Butler, H.E., ed. and trans. Cronica Jocelini de Brakelonda de rebus gestis Samsonis Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi. Toronto: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1949. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. Campbell, James. Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. Hambledon Press: London, 1986. Cannon, Christopher. The Making of Chaucer’s English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “The Style and Authorship of the Otho revision of Laʒamon’s ‘Brut.’ ” Medium Aevum 62.2 (1993): 187–209. Carruthers, Mary. “Letter and Gloss on the Friar’s and Summoner’s Tales.” Journal of Narrative Technique 2.3 (1972): 208–14. Carter, Philip. Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800. Harlow: Longman, 2001. Chambers, R.W. and Marjorie Daunt, eds. A Book of London English 1384–1425. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Chandler, Alice. A Dream of Order. The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Chandler, James. “The Historical Novel Goes to Hollywood. Scott, Griffith, and Film Epic Today.” In The Romantics and Us. Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff, 237–73. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990. Chi’en, Evelyn Nien-ming. Weird English. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

188

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Clanchy, Michael T. England and its Rulers 1066–1272. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. ———. From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307. 2nd ed. Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. Clark, Cecily. “Another Late-Fourteenth Century Case of Dialect-Awareness.” English Studies. A Journal of English Language and Literature 62 (1981): 504–5. ———. “The Myth of the ‘Anglo-Norman Scribe.’ ” In History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen, 117–29. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. ———. “People and Languages in Post-Conquest Canterbury.” Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976): 1–34. Closs Traugott, Elizabeth. “The Voice of Varied Linguistic and Cultural Groups in Fiction: Some Criteria for the Use of Language Varieties in Writing.” In Writing: The Nature, Development, and Teaching of Written Communication. Volume I: Variation in Writing, ed. Marcia Farr Whiteman, 111–36. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1981. Cockshut, Anthony O.J. The Achievement of Walter Scott. New York: New York University Press, 1969. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Postcolonialism.” In Chaucer. An Oxford Guide, ed. Steve Ellis, 448–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———, ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Cohen, Michèle. Fashioning Masculinity. National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1996. ———. “Manliness, Effeminacy, and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth Century England.” In English Masculinities 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, 44–61. London: Longman, 1999. Cole, Andrew. “Chaucer’s English Lesson.” Speculum 77 (2002): 1128–67. Coleman, Janet. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Colley, Linda. Britons. Forging the Nation 1701–1837. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Copeland, Rita, ed. Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Cox, Catherine S. Gender and Language in Chaucer. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Crane, Susan. “Social Aspects of Bilingualism in the Thirteenth Century.” In Thirteenth-Century England, ed. Michael Prestwich, R.H. Britnell and Robin Frame, 103–15. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989. Crespo García, Begoña. “Historical Background of Multilingualism and its Impact on English.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 23–35. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

189

Crick, Julia C. Historia Regum Britannie III. A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. Crowley, Tony. Language in History. Theories and Texts. London: Routledge, 1996. Crystal, David. English as a Global Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Dagenais, John and Margaret R. Greer. “Decolonizing the Middle Ages: Introduction.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30.3 (2000): 431–48. Dahood, Roger. “Hugh de Morville, William of Canterbury, and Anecdotal Evidence for English Language History.” Speculum 69.1 (1994): 40–56. Davidson, Mary Catherine. “Code-Switching and Authority in Late Medieval England.” Neophilologus 87.3 (2003): 473–86. ———. “Discourse Features of Code-Switching in Legal Reports in Late Medieval England.” In Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past, ed. Janne Skaffari, Matti Peikola, Ruth Carroll, Risto Hiltunen, and Brita Wårvik, 343–51. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam: 2005. ———. “Remembering our Saxon Forefathers: Linguistic Nationalism in Ivanhoe.” Studies in Medievalism XV (2006): 41–54. ———. “Speaking of Nostalgia in Beowulf.” Modern Philology 103.2 (2005): 143–55. Davis, Hayley G. and Talbot J. Taylor, eds. Rethinking Linguistics. New York: Routledge, 2003. Davis, Kathleen. “National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking about the Nation.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.3 (1998): 613–37. Davis, R.H.C. The Normans and their Myth. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Delany, Sheila. Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990. Diller, Hans Jürgen. “Code-Switching in Medieval English Drama.” Comparative Drama (1997/8) 31: 506–37. Dinshaw, Carolyn. “ ‘Glose/Bele Chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators.” In Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. T.C. Stillinger, 112–32. New York: G.K. Hall and Company, 1998. Donoghue, Michael. “Laʒamon’s Ambivalence.” Speculum 65.3 (1990): 537–63. Duggan, Hoyt N. “The Authenticity of the Z-text of Piers Plowman: Further Notes on Metrical Evidence.” Medium Aevum 56.1 (1987): 25–45. Dumville, David N. “An Early Text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Circulation of Some Latin Histories in Twelfth-Century Normandy.” Arthurian Literature 4 (1985): 1–36. Dürmüller, Urs. “Sociostylistics and the Study of Medieval English.” In Linguistic and Stylistic Studies in Medieval English, ed. A. Crepin, 5–24. Paris: Publications de l’Association des Médievistes Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur, 1984.

190

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Eccles, Mark ed., The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perserverance, Wisdom, and Mankind. Early English Text Society o.s. 262. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Echard, Siân, ed. A Companion to Gower. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Echard, Siân and Clare Fanger, trans. The Latin Verses in the “Confessio Amantis”: An Annotated Translation. East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1991. Edwards, John. Multilingualism. London: Routledge, 1994. Elliott, Ralph W.V. Chaucer’s English. London: Andre Deutsch, 1940. Esposito, Anthony P. “Bilingualism, Philology and the Cultural Nation: The Medieval Monolingual Imaginary.” Catalan Review 9 (1995): 125–39. Farmer, Sharon and Carol Braun Pasternack, eds. Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Finke, Laurie A. and Martin B. Shichtman. “Profiting Pedants: Symbolic Capital, Text Editing, and Cultural Reproduction.” In Disciplining English. Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives, ed. David R. Shumway, David R. and Craig Dionne, 159–78. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Fisher, John H. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Fisiak, Jacek. “Sociolinguistics and Middle English: Some Socially Motivated Changes in the History of English.” Kwartalnik Neofilogiczny 24 (1977): 247–59. Fleischman, Suzanne. “Medieval Vernaculars and the Myth of Monoglossia: A Conspiracy of Linguistics and Philology.” In Literary History and the Challenge of Philology, ed. Seth Lerer, 92–104. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. “Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text.” Speculum 65 (1990): 19–37. Fletcher, Alan J. “ ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’: A ThirteenthCentury Sermon For Advent and the Macaronic Style in England.” Mediaeval Studies 56 (1994): 217–45. ———. “The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland: Textual Revision as Ethical Process in Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 61–84. Flint, Valerie. “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion.” Speculum 54 (1979): 447–68. Foote, Sarah. “The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser. 6 (1996): 25–49. Forde, Simon, Lesley Johnson and Alan V. Murray, eds. Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages. Leeds Texts and Monographs. New Series 14. Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995. Frank, Roberta. “Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf.” In The Dating of Beowulf, ed. Colin Chase, 123–39. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Frantzen, Allen J. and John D. Niles, eds. Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. ———. Desire for Origins. New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

191

Frantzen, Allen J. and John D. Niles, eds. Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Furrow, Melissa. “The Author and Damnation: Chaucer, Writing, and Penitence.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33.3 (1997): 245–57. Galbraith, Vivian H. “Language and Nationality in Medieval England.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 23 (1941): 113–28. Ganim, John M. Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture, and Cultural Identity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. ———. “The Myth of Medieval Romance.” In Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, 148–66. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1996. Gardner-Chloros, Penelope. “Code-Switching in Community, Regional and National Repertoires: The Myth of the Discreteness of Linguistic Systems.” In One Speaker, Two Languages. Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching, ed. Leslie Milroy and Pieter Muysken, 68–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Garnett, George. “Franci et Angli: the Legal Distinctions between Peoples after the Conquest.” Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1985): 109–37. Geary, Patrick J. The Myth of Nations. The Medieval Origins of Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Gillingham, John. The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000. Given-Wilson, Chris. Chronicles. The Writing of History in Medieval England. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Görlach, Manfred. “Middle English—A Creole?” In Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries in Honor of Jacek Fisiak, ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Alexsander Szwedak, 329–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. Graddol, David, Dick Leith, and Joan Swann, eds. English. History. Diversity, and Change. London: Routledge, 1996. Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England I c.550–c.1307. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974. Grant, Marshal S. and Douglas Moffat. “Laʒamon’s Archaistic Use of Verbal Prefix To-.” In The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux, 15–28. Cambridge: Brewer, 1994. Greenaway, Diana, ed. and trans. Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum. The History of the English People. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Gumperz, John. Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Hall, J.R. “Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Anglo-Saxonism. The Question of Language.” In Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, 133–56. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1997. Halmari, Helena and Robert Adams. “On the Grammar and Rhetoric of Language-Mixing in Piers Plowman.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 103.1 (2002): 33–50.

192

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Hamers, Josiane F., and Michel H.A. Blanc. Bilinguality and Bilingualism. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hannah III, Ralph. “ ‘Vae octuplex,’ Lollard Socio-textual Ideology, and Richardian-Lancastrian Prose Translation.” In Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland, 244–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. William Langland. English Writers of the Middle Ages. Aldershot: Variorum, 1993. Hanning, Robert. The Vision of History in Early Britain: From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Harvey, Carol J. “Intertextuality in the Anglo-Norman Lyric.” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 10 (1989): 17–28. ———. “Macaronic Technique in Anglo-Norman Verse.” L’Esprit créateur 18 (1978): 70–81. Hassell, Jr., James Woodrow. Middle French Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982. Hauer, Stanley L. “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 98.5 (1983): 879–98. Heller, Monica and Laurette Lévy. “Les contradictions des mariages linguistiquement mixtes: Stratégies des femmes franco-ontariennes.” Langage et société 67 (1994): 53–88. ———. “The Politics of Codeswitching and Language Choice.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 13.1–2 (1992): 123–42. ———. “Strategic Ambiguity: Code-switching in the Management of Conf lict.” In Codeswitching. Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, ed. Monica Heller, 77–96. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988. Henkel, Jacqueline M. The Language of Criticism: Linguistic Models and Literary Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Herren, Michael W. “Latin and the Vernacular Languages.” In Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F.A.C. Mantello and A.G. Rigg, 112–9. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1996. Hertzfeld, Michael. The Social Production of Indifference. Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. New York: Berg, 1992. Hesse, Natalie. “Code Switching and Style Shifting as Markers of Liminality in Literature.” Language and Literature 5.1 (1996): 5–18. Hewitt, David, ed. Scott on Himself: A Selection of Autobiographical Writings of Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1981. Hill, Jane H. “Junk Spanish, Covert Racism, and the Leaky Boundary between Public and Private Spheres.” Pragmatics: Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association 5:2 (1995): 197–212. Hitchcock, Tim and Michèle Cohen, eds. English Masculinities 1660–1800. London: Longman, 1999. Holsinger, Bruce W. “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique.” Speculum 77 (2002): 1195–227.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

193

Horobin, Simon. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003. ———. (S.C.P.) “Chaucer’s Norfolk Reeve.” Neophilologus 86 (2002): 609–12. ———. (S.C.P.) “J.J.R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies 82 (2001): 97–105. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny. The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Howe, Nicholas. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Hudson, Anne. “Laius Litteratus: The Paradox of Lollardy.” In Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, 222–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hunt, Tony, “Code-switching in Medical Texts.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 131–47. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England. 3 vols. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. ———. “The Trilingual Glossary in MS London, BL Sloane 146 ff. 69v–72r.” English Studies 70 (1989): 289–310. ———. “Vernacular Glosses in Medieval Manuscripts.” Cultura Neolatina 39 (1979): 9–37. Iglesias-Rábade, Luís. “Multi-Lingual Education in England 1200–1500.” Studia Neophilologica 67 (1995): 185–95. ———. “The Multi-Lingual Pulpit in England (1100–1500).” Neophilologus 80 (1996): 479–92. ———. “Norman England: A Historical Sociolinguistic Approach.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 15 (1987): 101–12. Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Introduction: Postcolonial Modernity and the Rest of History.” In PostcolonialMoves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 1–15. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. Ingham, Patricia Clare and Michelle R. Warren. “Contrapuntal Histories.” In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 48–67. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003. ———, eds. Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Jaworski, Adam and Nickolas Coupland, eds. The Discourse Reader. Routledge: New York, 1999. Jeffrey, David L. “Early English Carols and the Macaronic Hymn.” Florilegium 4 (1982): 210–27. Johnson, Sally and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, eds. Language and Masculinity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Johnston, R.C, ed. Orthographia Gallica. Anglo-Norman Text Society Plain Text 5. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1987. Jones, Richard Foster. The Triumph of the English Language. A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953.

194

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Jordan, Robert M. “Heteroglossia and Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.” In Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas J. Farrell, 81–93. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1995. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Deanne Williams, eds. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kachru, Braj B. “Standards, Codification, and Sociolinguistic Realism: the English Language in the Outer Circle.” In English in the World, ed. Randolph Quirk and H.G. Widdowson, 11–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Kamowski, William. “The Sinner Against the Scoundrels: The Ills of Doctrine and ‘Shrift’ in the Wife of Bath’s, Friar’s and Summoner’s Narratives.” Religion and Literature 25 (1993): 1–18. Kane, George. Chaucer and Langland. Historical and Textual Approaches. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Kane, George and E. Talbot Donaldson, eds. Piers Plowman: The Evidence for the Authorship. London: Athlone Press, 1965. ———. William Langland. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Will’s Visions of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, Do-Best. London: The Athlone Press, 1988. Kastovsky, Dieter and Alfred Mettinger, eds. Language Contact in the History of English. 2nd ed. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2003. Keene, Derek. “Metropolitan Values: Migration, Mobility, and Cultural Norms. London 1100–1700.” In The Development of Standard English, ed. Laura Wright, 93–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kellman, Steven G. ed., Switching Languages. Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Kennedy, Beverly. “ ‘Withouten oother compaignye in youthe’: Verbal and Moral Ambiguity in the General Prologue Portrait of the Wife of Bath.” In Chaucer and Language. Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele, ed. Robert Myles and David Williams, 11–32. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Kennedy, Kathleen E. “Changes in Society and Language Acquisition: The French Language in England 1215–1480.” English Language Notes 35.3 (1998): 1–19. Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. “Langland and the Bibliographic Ego.” In Written Work. Langland, Labor, and Authorship, ed. Steven Justice and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, 67–143. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. ———. “Piers Plowman.” In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace, 513–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kibbee, Douglas A. For to Speke French Trewely. The French Language in England, 1000–1600. Its Status, Description and Instruction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1991. Kirby, J.J. “Angles and Saxons in Laʒamon’s Brut.” Studia Neophilologica 36 (1964): 51–62. Kiser, Lisa. Truth and Textuality in Chaucer’s Poetry. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

195

Kleinman, Scott. “The Æðelen of Engle: Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities in Laʒamon’s Brut.” Exemplaria 16.1 (2004): 95–130. Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America from the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kristol, Andres M. “L’intellectual <> face à la pluralité des langues: le témoignage implicite du MS Oxford, Magdalen Lat. 188.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 37–52. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lass, Roger. “Language Periodization and the Concept ‘Middle.’ ” In Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, 7–41. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Lavezzo, Kathy, ed. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Lazarus, Neil. “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, 423–38. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Leckie, R. William ( Jr.). The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Lees, Clare A. “Gender and Exchange in Piers Plowman.” In Class and Gender in Early English Literature. Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, 112–30. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———, ed. Medieval Masculinities. Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Legge, M.D. “Anglo-Norman as a Spoken Language.” Anglo-Norman Studies 2 (1979): 108–17. ———. Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. Leicester, H. Marshall ( Jr.). “Oure Tonges Différance: Textuality and Deconstruction in Chaucer.” In Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schictman, 15–26. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. Leith, Dick. A Social History of English. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1997. Lenihan, John H. “English Classics for Cold War America: MGM’s Kim (1950), Ivanhoe (1952), and Julius Caesar (1953).” Journal of Popular Film and Television 20.3 (1992): 42–51. Le Saux, Françoise H.M. “Paradigms of Evil: Gender and Crime in Laʒamon’s Brut.” The Text and Tradition of Laʒamon’s Brut.” In The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux, 193–206. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge, 1997. Lochrie, Karma. Heterosyncracies. Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

196

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Lochrie, Karma, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz, eds. Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lockhart, J.G. Memoirs of the Life of Sire Walter Scott, Bart. 7 vols. Edinburgh, 1837–38. Lodge, R.A. “Language Attitudes and Linguistic Norms in France and England in the Thirteenth Century.” In Thirteenth Century England 4. Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference 1991, ed. Peter R. Cross and S.D. Lloyd, 73–83. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1992. Lynch, Kathryn L. ed. Chaucer’s Cultural Geography. New York: Routledge, 2002. Macauly, C.G. ed. The Complete Works of John Gower. 4 Vols. Oxford, 1899–1902. MacDougall, Hugh A. Racial Myth in English History. Trojans, Teutons, and AngloSaxons. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982. Machan, Tim William. “Editing, Orality, and Late Middle English Texts.” In Vox Intexta: Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages, ed. A.P. Doane and Carol Braun Pasternack, 229–45. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. ———. English in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. “Language and Society in Twelfth-Century England.” In Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen, 43–65. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. ———. “Language Contact in Piers Plowman.” Speculum 69 (1994): 359–85. ———. “Medieval Multilingualism and Gower’s Literary Practice.” Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006): 1–25. ———. “Politics and the Middle English Language.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 317–324. MacNeil, John and William Cran. Do You Speak American? New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2005. Mann, Jill. Feminizing Chaucer. 2nd ed. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. ———. “The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relations between the A and B Version of Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994): 21–49. Mantello, F.A.C. and A.G. Rigg, eds. Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide.Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1996. Marvin, Julia, ed. and trans. The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle. An Edition and Translation. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006. Matthews, David. The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Mellor, Anne K. “Why Women Didn’t Like Romanticism. The Views of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley.” In The Romantics and Us: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Gene W. Ruoff, 274–87. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1990. Mersand, Joseph. Chaucer’s Romance Vocabulary 2nd ed. Brooklyn: The Comet Press, Inc., 1939.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

197

Middleton, Anne. “The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman.” In Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton, 101–54. Woodbridge: Suffolk, 1982. ———. “William Langland’s ‘Kynde Name’: Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England.” In Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson, 15–82. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Mignolo, Walter D. “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)nationalism.” Modern Language Quarterly 57.2 (1996): 181–96. Millar, Robert McColl. Language, Nation, and Power. An Introduction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Millgate, Jane. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. Millward, C.M. A Biography of the English Language. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Milroy, James. Linguistic Variation and Change. On the Historical Sociolinguistics of English. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Milroy, Leslie and Pieter Muysken, eds. One Speaker, Two Languages. Crossdisciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Mitchell, Sarah. “Kings, Constitution and Crisis: ‘Robert of Gloucester’ and the Anglo-Saxon Remedy.” In Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, 39–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Moffat, Douglas. “Sin, Conquest, Servitude: English Self-Image in the Chronicles of the Early Fourteenth Century.” In The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery and Labor in Medieval England, ed. Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat, 146–68. Glasgow: Cruthure Press, 1994. Molloy, Sylvia. “Presidential Address 2001: Crossings.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 117.3 (2002): 407–13. Mooney, Linne R. “Chaucer’s Scribe.” Speculum 81.1 (2006): 97–138. Morris, John, ed. and trans. British History and the Welsh Annals. London: Phillimore, 1980. Muggleston, Lynda. “Talking Proper.” The Rise of Accent as a Social Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Murphy, J.J. “The Teaching of Latin as a Second Language in the 12th Century.” In Studies in Medieval Linguistic Thought, ed. E.F.K. Koerner, H.-J. Niederehe, and R.H. Robins, 159–75. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980. Myers-Scotton, Carol, ed. Codes and Consequences. Choosing Linguistic Varieties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “Codeswitching with English: Types of Switching, Types of Communities.” World Englishes 8.3 (1989): 333–46. Noble, James. “Laʒamon’s ‘Ambivalence’ Reconsidered.” In The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux, 171–82. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 1994.

198

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Nolan, E. Peter. “Beyond Macaronic: Embedded Latin in Dante and Langland.” In Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis. Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, ed. R.J. Shoeck, 539–48. Binghamton: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1985. Olson, David R. The World on Paper. The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Ong, Walter. “Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization.” New Literary History 16.1 (1984): 1–11. ———. Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen, 1982. Ormrod, W.M. “The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture.” Speculum 73 (2003): 750–87. Otter, Monika. “1066: The Moment of Transition in Two Narratives of the Norman Conquest.” Speculum 74 (1999): 565–86. ———. Inventiones. Fiction, and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pahta, Päivi and Arja Nurmi. “Code-switching in the Helsinki Corpus: a Thousand Years of Multilingual Practices.” In Medieval English and its Heritage. Structure, Meaning and the Mechanisms of Change, ed. Nikolaus Ritt, Herbert Schendl, Christiane Dalton-Puffer, and Dieter Kastovsky, 203–20. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006. Parker, Andrew, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds. Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1991. Partner, Nancy F. Serious Entertainments. The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. ———, ed. Writing Medieval History. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Patterson, Lee. “ ‘For the Wyves love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales.” Speculum 58.3 (1983): 656–95. Pearsall, Derek. “The Archaic and the Modern in Laʒamon’s Brut.” In From AngloSaxon to Early Middle English. Studies Presented to E.G. Stanley, ed. Malcolm Godden, Douglas Gray, and Terry Hoad, 188–205. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. “Before-Chaucer Evidences of an English Literary Vernacular.” In The Beginnings of Standardization. Language and Culture in Fourteenth Century England, ed. Ursula Schaefer, 27–41. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006. ———. “Chaucer and Englishness.” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 77–99. ———. “Gower’s Latin in the Confessio Amantis.” In Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A.J. Minnis, 13–25. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. ———. “The Idea of Englishness in the Fifteenth Century.” In Nation, Court and Culture. New Essays on Fifteenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Helen Cooney, 15–27. Portland: Four Courts Press, 2001. ———. Old and Middle English Poetry. Volume 1. London: Routledge, 1977. Peikola, Matti. Congregations of the Elect: Patterns of Self-Fashioning in English Lollard Writing. Anglicana Turkuensia. Turku: University of Turku 2000.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

199

Pennycook, Alistair. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman, 1994. ———. English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. ———. “Performativity and Language Studies.” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies: An International Journal 1.1 (2004): 1–20. Percy, Carol. “Liberty, Sincerity, (In)accuracy: Prescriptions for Manly English in 18th-century Reviews and the ‘Republic of Letters’.” Perspectives on Prescriptivism, ed. Joan C. Beal, Carmela Nocera, and Massimo Sturiale, 113–45. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. Phillipson, Robert. Review of Crystal (1997). Applied Linguistics 20 (1999): 265–76. ———. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Poplack, Shana. “Sometimes I’ll Start a Sentence in English Y Termino en Español: Toward a Typology of Code-Switching.” Linguistics 18 (1980): 581–618. Potts, Cassandra. “ ‘Atque Unum Ex Diversis Gentibus Populum Effecit’: Historical Tradition and the Norman Identity.” Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1995): 139–52. Pryce, Huw. “Lawbooks and Literacy in Medieval Wales.” Speculum 75 (2000): 29–67. Quick, Anne Wenley. “The Sources of Quotations in Piers Plowman.” Ph.D. Diss., University of Toronto, 1982. Ragussis, Michael. “Writing Nationalist History: England, the Conversion of the Jews, and Ivanhoe.” English Literary History 60.1 (1993): 181–215. Reynolds, Susan. “Medieval Origines Gentium and the Community of the Realm.” History 68 (1983): 375–90. Richter, David H. “From Medievalism to Historicism: Representations of History in the Gothic Novel and Historical Romance.” Studies in Medievalism IV. Medievalism in England (1992): 79–104. Richter, Michael. “Latina lingua—Sacra Seu Vulgaris?” In The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst, 16–34. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979. ———. “Monolingualism and Multilingualism in the Fourteenth Century.” Historiographica Linguistica 7 (1980): 211–20. ———. “A Sociolinguistic Approach to the Latin Middle Ages.” In The Materials, Sources and Methods of Ecclesiastical History. Studies in Church History XI, ed. Derek Baker, 69–82. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975. ———. “Towards a Methodology of Historical Socio-linguistics.” Folia Linguistica Historica 6 (1985): 41–61. ———. “Writing the Vernacular and the Formation of the Medieval West.” In Studies in Medieval Language and Culture, ed. Michael Richter, 218–27. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1995. Riddy, Felicity. “Reading for England: Arthurian Literature and National Consciousness.” Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 43 (1991): 314–32. Rigg, A.G., ed. A Book of British Kings 1200–1399 AD. Edited from British Library MSS Harley 3860, Cotton Claudius D.vii, and Harley 1808. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 2000.

200

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Rigg, A.G., ed. A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Rigg, A.G and Charlotte Brewer, eds. William Langland. Piers Plowman: The Z Version. Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1983. Rigg, A.G and Edward S. Moore. “The Latin Works: Politics, Lament, and Praise.” In A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard, 153–64. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Rissanen, Matti, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen, eds. History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. Robertson, Elizabeth. “Measurement and the ‘Feminine’ in Piers Plowman: A Response to Recent Studies of Langland and Gender.” In William Langland’s Piers Plowman. A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen M. Hewett-Smith, 167–92. New York: Routledge, 2001. Romaine, Suzanne. Bilingualism. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ———. Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. Socio-Historical Linguistics: Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. ———. “The Status of Sociological Models and Categories in Explaining Language Variation.” In Towards a Critical Sociolinguistics, ed. Rajendra Singh, 99–114. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Rothwell, William. “Arrivals and Departures: The Adoption of French Terminology into Middle English.” English Studies 2 (1998): 144–65. ———. “Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactic Mixing in the Languages of Medieval England.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 213–32. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. “From Latin to Anglo-French and Middle English: The Role of the Multilingual Gloss.” Modern Language Review 88 (1993): 581–99. ———. “Glimpses into our Ignorance of the Anglo-Norman Lexis.” In Medieval French Textual Studies in Memory of T.B.W. Reid, ed. Ian Short, 167–79. London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1984. ———. “Language and Government in Medieval England.” Zeitschrift für Franzöische Sprache und Literatur 93 (1983): 258–70. ———. “OED, MED, AND: The Making of a New Dictionary of English.” Anglia 119.4 (2001): 527–53. ———. “The Problem of Law French.” French Studies 46 (1992): 257–71. ———. “The Role of French in Thirteenth-Century England.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 58 (1975–6): 445–66. ———. “Stratford atte Bowe Re-visited.” The Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 184–207. ———. “The Teaching of French in Medieval England.” Modern Language Review 63 (1968): 37–46. ———. “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 45–67.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

201

Rouse, Robert Allen. The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005. Rudd, Gillian. Managing Language in Piers Plowman. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Salmon, Vivian. The Study of Language in 17th Century England. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988. Salter, Elizabeth. “Chaucer and Internationalism.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 71–9. Sanders, Andrew. “ ‘Utter Indifference’?: The Anglo-Saxons in the Nineteenth Century Novel.” In Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, 157–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Scase, Wendy. Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. “Plowing Parallel Furrows? The Textual Cultures of Piers and Preaching, Response to ‘The Essential (Ephemeral) William Langland’.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 85–8. ———. “Tolkien, Philology, and ‘The Reeves’ Tale’: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 325–34. ———. “Writing and the Plowman: Langland and Literacy.” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 9 (1995): 121–31. Schendl, Herbert. “Code-switching in Medieval English Poetry.” In Language Contact in the History of English. 2nd ed., ed. Dieter Kastovsky and Alfred Mettinger, 305–35. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2003. ———. “Linguistic Aspects of Code-Switching in Medieval English Texts Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter. 77–92. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. “ ‘To London fro Kent / Sunt predia depopulantes’: Code-switching and Medieval English Macaronic Poems.” Vienna English Working PaperS (Views) 6.1 (1997): 52–66. ———. “Text types and Code-switching in Medieval and Early Modern English.” Vienna English Working PaperS (ViewS) 5.1 (1996): 50–62. Schibanoff, Susan. “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59–96. Rpt. in Chaucer’s Cultural Geography, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch, 248–80. New York: Routledge, 2002. Schiffrin, Deborah, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi E. Hamilton, eds. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Schildkraut, Deborah J. Press one for English. Language Policy, Public Opinion, and American Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Schmidt, A.V.C. The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art. Piers Plowman Studies 4. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987. ———, ed. The Vision of Piers Plowman. A Complete Edition of the B-Text. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1987.

202

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Schneider, Edgar W. Post-colonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Scott, Charles T. and Tim William Machan, eds. English in its Social Contexts: Essays in Historical Sociolinguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Scragg, Donald and Carole Weinberg, eds. Literary Appropriations of the AngloSaxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Shell, Marc. “Babel in America; Or, the Politics of Language Diversity in the United States.” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 103–27. Shippey, Tom. “Bilingualism and Betrayal in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale.” In Speaking in the Medieval World, ed. Jean E. Godsall-Myers, 125–44. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Short, Ian. “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England.” Romance Philology 32.4 (1980): 467–79. ———. “Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England.” Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1991): 229–49. ———. “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-definition in Anglo-Norman England.” Anglo-Norman Studies XVIII (1995): 153–75. Shumway, David R. and Craig Dionne, eds. Disciplining English. Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Simmons, Clare A. “ ‘Iron-worded Proof ’: Victorian Identity and the Old English Language.” Studies in Medievalism IV (1992): 202–14. ———. Reversing the Conquest. History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Simpson, David. “Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of Whitman’s Poetry.” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, 177–96. London: Routledge, 1990. Simpson, James. “Desire and the Scriptural Text: Will as Reader in Piers Plowman.” In Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland, 215–43. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. Piers Plowman. An Introduction to the B-text. London: Longman, 1990. Sklar, Elizabeth. “So Male a Speech: Linguistic Adequacy in Eighteenth-Century England. American Speech 64.4 (1989): 372–9. Smith, Jeremy. “Chaucer and the Invention of English.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 335–46. Somerset, Fiona. “ ‘Al þe comonys with o voys at onys: Multilingual Latin and Vernacular Voice in Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2005): 107–36. ———. “ ‘As just as is a squyre’: The Politics of ‘Lewed Translacioun.’ ” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 187–207. ———. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “Expanding the Langlandian Canon: Radical Latin and the Stylistics of Reform.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003): 73–92. ———. “Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston’s Determinacio, Arundel’s Constitutiones.” In The Vulgar Tongue.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

203

Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, 145–57. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Somerset, Fiona and Nicholas Watson, eds. The Vulgar Tongue. Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Sommer, Doris. Bilingual Aesthetics. A New Sentimental Education. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Sorensen, Janet. “Writing Historically, Speaking Nostalgically: The Competing Languages of Nation in Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.” In Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender, and Nationalism, ed. Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde, 30–51. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stanbury, Sarah. “Vernacular Nostalgia and The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 92–107. Stanley, E.G. “Layamon’s Antiquarian Sentiments.” Medium Aevum 38 (1969): 23–37. Stein, Robert. “Deconstruction, History, and Lancaster.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.1 (2002): 16–33. Steiner, Emily. “Medieval Documentary Poetics and Langland’s Authorial Identity.” In Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3, ed. Sally McKee, 79–105. Turnhout: Brepols, 1999. Stepsis, Robert. “Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle: An Essay in Medieval Historiography.” Medievalia et Humanistica 3 (1972): 51–73. Strang, Barbara M.H. A History of English. London: Routledge, 1994. Sullens, Idele, ed. Robert Mannynge of Brunne: the Chronicle. Binghamton: State University of New York, 1996. Sullivan, Sister C. “The Latin Insertions and the Macaronic Verse in Piers Plowman.” Ph.D. Diss., The Catholic University of America, 1932. Summerfield, Thea. The Matter of Kings’ Lives. The Design of Past and Present in the Early Fourteenth-Century Verse Chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. Sutherland, John. The Life of Walter Scott. A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Taylor, Andrew. “Chaucer our Derridean Contemporary?” Exemplaria 5.2 (1993): 471–86. Thiolier, Jean-Claude. “L’itinéraire de Pierre de Langtoft.” Miscellanea Mediaevalia 2 (1998): 1329–53. Thomas, Hugh M. The English and the Normans. Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066–c.1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Thomas, Margaret. “Medieval and Modern Views of Universal Grammar and the Nature of Second Language Learning.” The Modern Language Journal 79 (1995): 345–55.

204

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Tokuhama-Espinosa, Tracey, ed. The Multilingual Mind. Issues Discussed by, for, and about People Living with Many Languages. London: Praeger, 2003. Tolkien, J.R.R. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” Transactions of the Philological Society (1934): 1–70. Townsend, David and Andrew Taylor, eds. The Tongue of the Fathers. Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Townsend, Matthew. “Contacts and Conf licts: Latin, Norse, and French.” In The Oxford History of English, ed. Lynda Mugglestone, 61–85. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Travis, Peter W. “Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Fart: Noise in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale.” Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 1–19. Treharne, Elaine. “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.” In Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature. Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, ed. Elaine Treharne, 93–115. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. ———, ed. Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature. Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland.” In Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 15–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Trigg, Stephanie. Congenial Souls. Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Trotter, D.A. ed. Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. Trotter, David. “Oceano Vox: You never know where a ship comes from. On Multilingualism and Language-mixing in Medieval Britain.” In Aspects of Multilingualism in European Language History, ed. Kurt Braunmüller and Gisella Ferraresi, 15–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Tulloch, Graham, ed. The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverly Novels. Volume Eight. Ivanhoe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. ———. The Language of Walter Scott. A Study of his Scottish and Period Language. London: Andrè Deutsch, 1980. Turville-Petre, Thorlac. England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Voigts, Linda Ehrsam. “What’s the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England.” Speculum 71 (1996): 813–26. von Nolcken, Christina. “Some Alphabetical Compendia and How Preachers Used Them in Fourteenth-Century England.” Viator 12 (1981): 271–88. Wallace, David. ed. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Warren, Michelle R. History on the Edge. Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100– 1300. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. ———. “Post-Philology.” In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval Through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 19–45. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

205

Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitution of 1409.” Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64. ———. “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God.” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124. Watt, Diane. Amoral Gower. Language, Sex, and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Wehrle, William O. The Macaronic Hymn Tradition in Medieval English Literature. Washington: The Catholic University of America, 1933. Weinberg, Carol. “Latin Marginal Glosses in the Caligula Manuscript.” In The Text and Tradition of Layamon’s Brut. Arthurian Studies 33, ed. Françoise Le Saux, 103–20. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Weiner, Edmund. “Medieval Multilingualism and the Revision of the OED.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 169–74. Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2000. Weiss, Judith, ed. and trans. Wace. Roman de Brut. A History of the British. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Wenzel, Siegfried. Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. “Medieval Sermons.” In A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford, 155–72. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Williams, Deanne. The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wittig, Joseph S. Piers Plowman: Concordance. Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman, Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best. A Lemmatized Analysis of the English Vocabulary of the A, B, C Versions as Presented in the Athlone Editions, with Supplementary Concordances of the Latin and French Macaronics. London and New York: Athlone Press, 2001. Wogan-Brown, Jocelyn, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds. The Idea of the Vernacular. An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Wood, Chauncey. “The Wife of Bath and ‘Speche Dangerous.’ ” In Chaucer and Language. Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele, ed. Robert Myles and David Williams, 33–43. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Wright, Laura. “About the Evolution of Standard English.” In Studies in English Language and Literature. “Doubt wisely”: Papers in honour of E.G. Stanley, ed. M.J. Toswell and E.M. Tyler, 99–115. London: Routledge, 1996. ———. “Bills, Accounts, Inventories: Everyday Trilingual Activities in the Business World of Later Medieval England.” In Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D.A. Trotter, 149–56. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———, ed. The Development of Standard English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. “A Hypothesis on the Structure of Macaronic Business Writing.” In Medieval Dialectology, ed. Jacek Fisiak, 309–21. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.

206

BI BLIOGR A PH Y

Wright, Laura. “Macaronic Writing in a London Archive, 1380–1480.” In History of Englishes. New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, ed. Matti Rissanen, Ossi Ihalainen, Terttu Nevalainen, and Irma Taavitsainen, 762–70. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. ———. Sources of London English: Medieval Thames Vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Wright, Neil. “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Bede.” Arthurian Literature 6 (1986): 27–59. ———. “Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gildas.” Arthurian Literature 2 (1982): 1–33. ———, ed. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, vol I. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, M.S. 568. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985. ———, ed. The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vol. V. Gesta Regum Britannie. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985. Wright, Thomas, ed. The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft in French Verse. 2 vols. London: Rolls Series, 1866. Wright, William Aldis, ed. Robert of Gloucester. The Metrical Chronicle. Roll Series 86 Vol. 1. London: Spottiswoode, 1887. Wynne-Davies, Marion. “ ‘The Elf-Queen and Hir Joly Compaignye’: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In Women and Arthurian Literature: Seizing the Sword, ed. Marion Wynne-Davies, 14–35. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Yeager, R.F. “Learning to Speak in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture.” In English Literary Studies (ELS Monograph Series) 51 (1991): 115–29. ———. “ ‘Oure englisshe’ and Everyone’s Latin: The Fascilicus Morum and Gower’s Confessio Amantis.” South Atlantic Monthly 46.4 (1981): 41–53. ———. “Politics and the French Language in England during the Hundred Years’ War. The Case of John Gower.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, ed. Denise N. Baker, 127–57. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Zink, Michel. “Plurilingualism, Hermeticism, and Love.” Comparative Literature Studies 32.2 (1995): 112–130. Zumthor, Paul. “Un problème d’esthètique médiévale: utilisation poétique du bilinguisme.” Le Moyen Age 66 (1960): 301–336; 561–594.

INDEX

Anzaldúa, Gloria, 5–6, 177 n.27 Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 20, 148 n.41 Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica, 50, 64 Benson, C. David, 88–9 Beowulf, 23, 146 n.14 bilingualism varieties of: additive, 12; instrumental, 70, 102, 107; integrative 102; subtractive, 12, 137; transitional, 7, 136 see also code-switching; diglossia; multilingualism borrowing as colonial discourse, 145 n.5 and medievalism, 31, 44 modern Anglophone attitudes toward, 18–21, 25, 27, 30, 32, 43–5, 74, 80 relationship to code-switching, 9 see French Brut, Laʒamon’s, Caligula and Otho versions, 59–64, 66 see also Laʒamon; Wace Brut narratives depicting language conf lict, 48, 50, 54, 56, 57; see also Hengist Butler, Judith, 4 The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 139 n.2 Cannon, Christopher, 17, 145 n.2, 157–8 n.45, 173 n.4

The Canterbury Tales characters discussed: Aleyn and John in “The Reeve’s Tale,” 111–12; Chaunticleer, 109–10, 123; Custance, 124; Friar Huberd, 109, 117–19, 124–6, 128; friar in “The Summoner’s Tale,” 127–30; Pardoner, 8–9, 85–7, 109–11, 117–19, 124–6; Prioress, 70; Summoner, 109, 117–19, 124–30; Wife of Bath, 109, 115, 117–26, 128 see also Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, Geoffrey and code-switching, 13, 107, 119, 123, 174 n.9 and dialect, 111–15, 131, 136–7, 173–4 n.5–7, 175 n.10 as the father of modern English, 65, 89, 107, 134 and French lexis, 13, 17, 137 and subalternity, 137 works: “Chaucer’s Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” 113; Troilus and Criseyde, 112, 115–16; see also The Canterbury Tales Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, 6–8 Chronicle of Robert Mannyng, 57, 68–9, 71–3 language anachronisms in, 159–60 n.62

208

IN DEX

code-switching approaches to among linguists, 81, 140 n.11 attitudes toward: medieval, 10, 13, 85–6; modern, 5–6, 80–1, 84 vs. borrowing, 9–10 literary descriptions of: “embedded,” 80; “interlarded,” 80; “pepper,” 90; “saffron,” 85, 111, 124 “woven,” 80; see also “macaronic” social function of: accommodation or solidarity, 8, 87, 93, 96–7, 99–101; dissociation or distancing, 8–9, 54–6, 60, 67, 74, 85, 93, 99–101, 128 studied by medievalists, 82 syntax of, 100, 168–9 n.52 Colley, Linda, 38, 149 n.56 colonialism, 14, 19, 37 see also borrowing; globalization; postcolonial studies Confessio Amantis, 13, 46–50, 73–5, 83 see also Gower, John diglossia, 7–8, 12, 59, 74–5, 91, 137, 142 n.24, 155–6 n.23 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 122 Dutch, 148 n.40 English dialect humor, 112 Scots, 28 standardization, 11–12, 81, 143 n.29, 182 n.18 see also globalization; language contact; Middle English; monolingualism English-only movement, 4, 140 n.8; see also monolingualism Fisher, John, 11, 175 n.15 Francophobia, 13, 25, 32, 43, 133, 147 n.22

French Anglo-French, 101, 120, 175 n.14 Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 145 n.2 attitudes toward in late medieval England, 7, 144 n.34, 173 n.4 borrowing from by Anglophones, 9–10, 13, 17, 107 Cajun, 141 n.15 and Chaucer’s lexicon, 17–18, 44–5 in Ivanhoe, 35–7, 40–1 Law French, 159 n.58–9, 175 n.15 modern Anglophone effeminization of, 3, 28, 39 in Piers Plowman, 99–102 varieties in late medieval England, 142 n.24, 159 n.58 gender and sexuality and dialect, 149–50, n.61 effeminization see French and language acquisition, 21, 28, 38–9, 41 heteronormativity and the Wife of Bath, 118–19 homosocial identity and language acquisition, 84, 158 n.47, 165 n.20 as linguistic difference, 109–10, 121 masculine authority and medieval multilingualism, 84, 104–9, 121 and nationalism, 20–2, 37, 43, 144 n.37, 147 n.28 queer theory, 118–19 see also monolingualism Geoffrey of Monmouth, 26, 50–7, 63–4, 68–9, 73 see also Historia Regum Britanniae Germanic languages, 24 and masculinity, 160–1 n.7 see also Dutch Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae et Conquestu, 50–1, 64

IN DEX

globalization and the English language, 3, 19, 134–6, 139 n.5, 182 n.15 Gower, John, 13, 45, 74, 83 and multilingual writing, 75 see also Confessio Amantis Hengist, 13, 49, 50–7, 59–75, 80, 83 in the Confessio Amantis, 47–50, 74–5 early modern representation of, 160–1 n.70 as father of medieval English, 49, 66, 71, 73, 115, 134, 138 see also Brut narratives; Geoffrey of Monmouth; “Night of the Long Knives” Henry of Huntingdon, 68, 156 n.25 Historia Regum Britanniae, 26, 50–2 First Variant Version, 55, 63–4 as parody, 147 n. 27 see also Geoffrey of Monmouth The Idea of the Vernacular, 79, 183 n.21 Ivanhoe as popular language history, 31–3, 39, 43–4 reception and adaptation, 150 n.66, 151 n.71 see also Walter Scott Laʒamon, 59 and archaisms, 156 n.29, 157 n.44 see also Brut Langland, William, 2, 13, 80, 106 as author, 89–91, 172 n.85 his multilingualism, 99, 107 see also Piers Plowman language contact Chinglish, 134 Creole, 135–6 Middle English as a, 174–5 n.9

209

Spanglish, 134, 141 n.15 see also borrowing; code-switching language-mixing see code-switching Latin in clerical discourse, 91, 103–4, 116 and medieval masculinity, 84 see also bilingualism; diglossia; multilingualism Lochrie, Karma, 118–20 Lollards, 2, 162 n.3 “macaronic,” 1, 80, 88, 99, 139 n.1, 163 n.7, 163 n.8, 164 n.9, 164 n.16, 174 n.9 see also code-switching Machan, Tim William, 70, 82, 151–2 n.1, 154 n.15, 161 n.2, 166 n.34, 174 n.8 Mankind, 84–5, 87 Mann, Jill, 123, 166–7 n.37 Matthews, David, 23, 28 medievalism as Anglo-Saxonism, 22, 145 n.3, 146 n.11, 146 n.17 see Germanic languages and antiquarianism, 23, 25, 146 n.18 and disciplinarity, 138 see also Middle English and language anachronisms, 26, 28, 32, 44, 59, 147–8 n.30–1, 148 n.44 and Romanticism, 21–2, 28 Victorian, 23, 73 see also Ivanhoe; Walter Scott Mersand, Joseph, 17, 145 n.1 Metrical Chronicle, 68–73 see Robert of Gloucester Middle English studies and disciplinary identity, 79–80, 162 n.4 first appearance as a term and field, 23, 43, 146 n.18; vs. “semi-Saxon,” 23–4

210

IN DEX

Middle English studies—Continued in history of the English language studies, 133–4 monolingual bias in, 134 Middle English Dictionary, 17, 120 and The Oxford English Dictionary, 145 n.2 Millward, C.M., A Biography of the English Language, 19–20, 139–40 n.7 monolingualism (Anglophone) and American nationalism, 4, 141 n.15–16, 144 n.36 appropriated in late medieval England, 160 n.66 and disciplinarity, 12–13, 17, 44 and farting, 130–1 as masculine or “manly,” 13–14, 21, 23–4, 27, 34–5, 43–4 modern, 4–5, 12–14, 20–1, 23–4 see also colonialism; English-only movement; globalization; nationalism “monolingualist,” definition, 4–5 as subordinate in late medieval England, 13, 46, 64, 68–70, 73–4, 80–1, 92–5, 97, 102, 104, 107–8, 112, 115, 165 n.20 Mooney, Linne R., 113–14 multilingualism first, second, or third language, 7, 81, 84 as clerical discourse in writing and speech, 75, 85, 90–1, 103–4, 116 language choice, 8, 11, 80 marked vs. unmarked, 68 and medieval masculinity, 14, 84, 123 modern Anglophone effeminization of, 3–4, 30 and The Oxford English Dictionary, 145 n.2

see also bilingualism; code-switching; diglossia; language contact; Latin Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, 82 N-Town, 86–7 nationalism linguistic nationalism, 6, 11, 12, 19, 42 medieval nationalism, 144–5 n.38 see also gender and sexuality; monolingualism Nennius (pseudo-), Historia Britonnum, 50–1, 54 “Night of the Long Knives,” 51, 74, 153 n.13 see also Brut narratives Norse, 59, 63, 120, 133, 157 n.41, 160 n.62, 178 n.30 Norton Anthology of the English Language, 65 Oxford English Dictionary, 17 and multilingualism, 145 n.2 see also Middle English Dictionary Ossian, 28 Pennycook, Alistair, 4, 19 performativity, 4 and multilingualism, 84–7 see also Butler, Judith; Pennycook, Alistair Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle, 66, 71 Piers Plowman characters discussed: Anima, 93–5, 100–1; the commons, 102–3; Conscience, 104–6, 109; Coueitise, 102; Dreamer, 92; field laborers, 100; Mede, 14, 104–6, 109, 118–19; Patience, 101, 103–4; Piers, 86, 103; the Priest, 86, 91; Reason, 98–9; Scripture, 96–7; Will, 96–8 language contact in, 82, 89

IN DEX

and multilingualism in The Canterbury Tales, 117 reception, 89, 106 similarity to sermon composition, 80, 88, 95–6, 99 speech features of, 90–1, 166 n.34–5 versions and authorship, 88–9 see also Langland, William postcolonial studies Anglophone bias in, 134–6 and Chaucer, 136–8 for history of the English language studies, 138 in linguistics and language studies, 135–7 in studies of the Middle Ages, 181 n.5 see also colonialism; globalization; nationalism racism and code-switching, 141 n.17 and linguistic nationalism, 42–3, 141 n.17, 144 n.37, 150, n.67, 159 n.61 Rigg, A.G., 73, 166 n.37 Riverside Chaucer, 120, 178 n.30 Robert Mannyng see Chronicle of Robert Mannyng Robert of Gloucester see Metrical Chronicle Romaine, Suzanne, 136, 140 n.12, 142 n.26 Roman de Brut, 57–9, 66 see also Wace Roman de la Rose, 120, 128

211

Romance languages, 116, 160–1, n.70 Spanish, 5, 135, 141 n.17 see French Rothwell, William, 81, 141 n.18, 145 n.2, 159 n.58, 164 n.13, 178 n.31, 179 n.39 Samson, Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds multilingualism of, 7–9 Scase, Wendy, 65, 161–2 n.2, 163 n.6, 166 n.33 Scott, Walter, 13, 20, 64, 138 his attribution of Sir Tristrem, 28–9, 148 n.33 his multilingualism, 21, 27, 37, 148 n.46, 149 n.55 see also Ivanhoe, medievalism Somerset, Fiona, 91, 162 n.3, 171 n.72, 179 n.40 Sommer, Doris, 4, 136, 176 n.18 Spivak, Gayatri, 135 Statue of Pleading, 107, 159 n.59 Trevisa, John, 107, 120, 172 n.84 Trigg, Stephanie, 158 n.47, 172 n.86 Turville-Petre, Thorlac, 68–9, 81 vernacularity, 2, 46, 79, 102–3, 107 “vernacular nostalgia,” 2, 14 Wace, 57, 60, 63, 71 see also Roman de Brut Welsh, 1, 82, 133, 152 n.9, 154 n.16 William of Malmesbury, 68