Studies in the Age of Chaucer

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature on ‘‘Latinitas’’ Fiona Somerset University of Western Ontario This volume, among all its other virtues, provides a sort of snapshot of Medieval English literary studies at the turn of the century, and indeed of the millennium. It is therefore unsurprising that it gives so much attention, more or less throughout, to the development of the cultural authority of the English vernacular Middle English: this is, after all, a widespread preoccupation in the field today. While some among future generations might choose to dismiss this preponderance of attention as modish or trendy, it seems to me that by focusing on vernacularity the volume records some of this generation of scholars’ most important insights: an understanding of how the perceived importance of Middle English rose and fell; how the language took up different relationships, in particular circumstances, to other languages widely used in Britain; and how its status was exploited to a variety of ends in the prologue-posturings of a whole range of authors. My concern here, however, will be with another, related issue: not vernacularity, but ‘‘Latinitas .’’ While scholarship is admirably attentive, nowadays, to the registers and institutional affiliations in particular varieties and usages of Middle English, it seems to me that Latin is often something of a blind spot: scholars often fail to take account of the variations in register and institutional affiliation in contemporary usages of Latin. Does this volume also reflect this general inattention to Latin’s variety? ‘‘Latinitas’’ certainly figures as a more or less undifferentiated hegemonic force in the short prefaces and introductions by David Wallace that give signposts for the volume’s overall narrative structure. Along with forming the topic of a whole chapter in part 1, ‘‘Latinitas, as hegemonic force and as discrete acts of practice, makes itself felt in every chapter’’ of this first section (p. 5). In part 3, on ‘‘Institutional Produc489 ................. 8972$$ CH17 11-01-10 12:22:43 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tions’’—where as Wallace notes, the ‘‘Latinitas’’ chapter could equally well have appeared (p. xix)—‘‘[m]onks, friars, and secular clergy [combine ] to preserve the hegemony of Latinitas and hence their control of biblical interpretation’’ (p. 314). ‘‘After the Black Death,’’ in part 4, ‘‘Practices of Englishing . . . are of pre-eminent importance for all topics considered’’ (p. 485). Yet while ‘‘motives for translating were complex and various, often at odds with one another (and with themselves),’’ Latin itself appears rather simpler: ‘‘Difficulties of positioning and selfrepresentation attend all writers here situating themselves between Latinity and the vernaculars’’ (p. 486). One Latinity: many vernaculars, motives, and complexities. ‘‘Processes of Englishing’’ continue in part 5, ‘‘Before the Reformation,’’ and ‘‘assume increasing importance as English monarchs identify themselves ever more closely with the English tongue’’ (p. 637). It is, of course, necessary and appropriate to take the broad view when writing introductory material of this sort. Wallace is right to sketch out a broad narrative within which Latin displaces English, then is displaced in turn by new sorts of English. Wallace’s ‘‘long view’’ of ‘‘Latinitas’’ as a largely undifferentiated hegemonic force is useful and effective for another reason, too: the view he gives, from outside ‘‘Latinitas ’’ looking in, is that of many Middle English readers, whose inability to read Latin with ease cuts them off from all sorts of erudition and enjoyment. The allure of Middle English translations and original compositions is that they present, from such a point of view, ‘‘novelries’’ to be relished and absorbed without necessary recourse to the mediation (impossible for many, as Trevisa’s Lord in his Dialogue sensitively explains ) of someone literate in Latin.1 Still, the limitation of this point of view from outside ‘‘Latinitas’’ is that while it may be the standpoint of many Middle English readers, it is not that of most writers of Middle English—or, obviously, of anyone who translates from Latin. To fully appreciate how writers and translators view Latin in relation to Middle English, and their own project of negotiating between the two, we need a much more subtly differentiated view of the various kinds of Latin they would have been familiar with, the kinds of...