Abstract
For 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
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Note
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. 329 [314-30].
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].
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.
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.
see Walter J. Ong, “Orality, Literacy and Medieval Textualization,” New Literary History 16.1 (1984): 1–11.
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
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
Carol J. Harvey, “Intertextuality in the Anglo-Norman Lyric,” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 10 (1989): 17–28
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
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.
see Hans-Jürgen Diller, “Code-Switching in Medieval English Drama,” Comparative Drama 31 (1997/8): 506–37.
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 History, ed. Kurt Braunmüller and Gisella Ferraresi (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), pp. 15–33.
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].
Linda Ehrsam Voigts, “What’s the Word? Bilingualism in Late-Medieval England.” Speculum 71 (1996): 823 [813-26].
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 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.
see also Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982), pp. 112–5.
see Nicholas Watson, “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124.
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.
Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Princeton: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), p. 194 (VI 344–6).
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.
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.
John A. Alford, Piers Plowman. A Guide to the Quotations (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992).
A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. William Langland. The Vision of Piers Plowman (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1987).
John A. Alford, “The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman,” Speculum 52 (1977): 80–99.
see Siegfried Wenzel, “Medieval Sermons,” in A Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. John A. Alford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 155–72.
C. David Benson, Public Piers Plowman: Modern Scholarship and Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), p. 71.
A.G. Rigg and Charlotte Brewer, eds. William Langland. Piers Plowman: The Z Version (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, 1983).
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.
George Kane, “The Autobiographical Fallacy in Chaucer and Langland Studies,” Chambers Memorial Lecture (London: H.K. Lewis, 1965).
William Langland in a monograph of that same year, Piers Plowman: The Evidence for the Authorship (London: Athlone Press, 1965).
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].
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].
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.
William Langland in distinctly gendered multilingual discourse. “Code-switching and Authority in Late Medieval England,” Neophilologus 87.3 (2003): 473–86.
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 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)
Suzanne Romaine, Bilingualism. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
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.
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, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982), p. 183.
A.V.C. Schmidt, The Clerkly Maker: Langland’s Poetic Art. Piers Plowman Studies 4 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1987), p. 81–2.
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.
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].
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].
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.
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).
Copyright information
© 2010 Mary Catherine Davidson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davidson, M.C. (2010). Multilingual Writing and William Langland. In: Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-37139-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10204-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)