Competing Archives, Competing Histories: French and Its Cultural Locations in Late-Medieval England

Abstract

The complexities of multilingualism in late-medieval England and the shifting relationships of its languages have now been described with great nuance. If, on the one hand, it is clear that English and French were “living vernaculars,” it is equally clear that French must be grouped with Latin as a language “of record.” If English survived the Conquest as an important language for homiletic writings and the religious prose compendium, from 1150–1300 “the ‘common tongue’ of religious instruction was not English but French.” “Few people in England actually spoke French after the thirteenth century,” but there is abundant evidence that the language had a widespread “oral presence.” Latin may have been a “dead construct,” but, even as a “second language . . . based on an immutable grammar,” it was “as alive as any other language . . . in practical use.” This is why Walter Map tells us Henry II “spoke” Latin as well as French, and why the Summoner in the Canterbury Tales will “speke no word but Latyn” when drunk. It is also why, in a collection of passages for translation into Latin, the fifteenth-century schoolboy learned that “wis men saye that nothyng may be more profitable to them that lurns grammer than to speke latyn.” As supple in its use as the distinctions we make, slicing through all this linguistic variety, the word “vernacular” makes less subtle distinctions. “Vernacular religious writing”—and the immensely valuable category of “vernacular theology”—may refer without qualification to “English religious texts,” just as French approximates English in the varieties and pervasiveness of its use when it is described as England's “other” or “second” or “co-vernacular.” Cutting across all these complexities, in other word, one simple distinction remains: “vernacular” is exactly what Latin is not.