Abstract
It 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 reflect 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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Note
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].
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).
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).
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).
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)
Anthony P. Esposito, “Bilingualism, Philology, and the Cultural Nation: The Medieval Monolingual Imaginary,” Catalan Review 9.2 (1995): 125–39.
“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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
Gloria Anzaldêa, 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.
see Rosina Lippi-Green, 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].
William Rothwell, “The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 56 [45-67].
If only unusual cases of proficiency received this kind of attention, then, for the most part “[i]n this multilingual society people switched languages 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.
see Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England I c. 550–1307 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 380–5.
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 Iglesias-Rábade, “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 briefly 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 Mifflin Co., 1987), p. 194.
John H. Fisher, “A Language Policy for Lancastrian England,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 107.5 (1992): 1170
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].
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.
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 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).
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.
see Ian Short, “On Bilingualism in Anglo-Norman England,” Romance Philology 32.4 (1980): 472 [467-79].
see Short (1980) and Luís Iglesias-Rábade, “Norman England: A Historical Sociolinguistic Approach,” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 15 (1987): 101–12.
see Cecily Clark, “People and Languages in Post-Conquest Canterbury,” Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976): 1–34.
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
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).
see Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
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).
Copyright information
© 2010 Mary Catherine Davidson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Davidson, M.C. (2010). Introduction: Monolingualism and Middle English. In: Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-10204-0_1
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)