Common Language and Common Profit

Abstract

A nineteenth-century missionary objects to the Bible being sold in an Indian marketplace; a fourteenth-century chronicler objects to its degradation at the hands of the common people. Both writers express anxiety over how the English Bible is to be valued, over its potential to be placed in an everyday nexus of exchange. Homi Bhabha has argued that it is the presence of the English book—particularly the English Bible—that creates the “agonistic colonial space” in nineteenth-century narrative, whether novels or missionary writings. Bhabha shows how the mystified power of the English book, while intended to “fix” colonial subjects in a Western scheme of representation, instead ultimately calls into question (through processes of differentiation and discrimination) its own twin discourses of linguistic and national authority. But how did the English book come to occupy this position of authority in the first place? How do we begin to account for the distance between the twelfth-century Middle English whose prestige was defined by the farmhands who spoke it, and present-day standard English, the international “default” language of global capitalism and, hence, translation? As the theoretical paradigm best equipped to situate the social, cultural, and political commitments of modern global English, postcolonial theory offers an appropriate position from which to analyze how English began to assert itself as a fit medium for intellectual work in late medieval Britain. This chapter argues that one of the ways the English book gained its presence was by laying claim to the public space through an alignment with the “common profit,” a term that was itself being redefined in relation to the marketplace at this time. To this end, I read controversy over vernacular translation against contemporary debate over trade, exploring how the same questions of authority and ambivalence that surrounded the reception of the English book in nineteenth-century India also marked its emergence in medieval Britain.

Late medieval attempts to control mercantile trade and individual spirituality employed a similar rhetoric of identity regulation, a vocabulary that asserted absolute value. This chapter looks at the relationship between two sites where such control was resisted: the marketplace and the growing body of vernacular theological literature funded by it.

Still everyone would gladly receive a Bible. And why? That he may store it up as a curiosity; sell it for a few pice; or use it for waste paper....Some have been bartered in the markets.... If these remarks are at all warranted then an indiscriminate distribution of the scriptures, to everyone who may say he wants a Bible, can be little less than a waste of time, a waste of money and a waste of expectations.

—Missionary’s Register, May 1817

The gospel, which Christ gave to the clergy and die doctors of the church, that they might administer it to the laity and to weaker brethren, according to the demands of the time and the needs of dhe individual, as a sweet food for die mind, diat Master John Wyclif translated from Latin into the language not of angels but of Englishmen, so that he made that common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, which used to be for literate and perceptive clerks and spread the Evangelists’ pearls to be trampled by swine. And thus that which was dear to the clergy and the laity alike became as it were a jest common to both, and the clerks jewels became the playthings of laymen, that die laity might enjoy now forever what had once been the clergy’s talent from on high.

—Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–96, ca.1390