Abstract
Language‐learning, orality, and multilingualism in early modern Anglophone narratives of Mediterranean captivity
Highlights
On a Spanish ship bound for Cadiz in the middle of the seventeenth century, an English sailor named Edward Coxere heard the news of Oliver Cromwell’s death
The early modern Mediterranean was a place of contact, commerce, and communication between people of different national, ethnic, and religious origins
While it is true that multilingual communication was an everyday feature of life in the early modern Mediterranean, and that modern notions of the monoglot nation-state break down in the face of the linguistic realities of the period, we should not allow ideas of unity and connectivity to blind us to the kinds of everyday work that underlay Mediterranean and other early modern multilingualisms
Summary
On a Spanish ship bound for Cadiz in the middle of the seventeenth century, an English sailor named Edward Coxere heard the news of Oliver Cromwell’s death. He was proud of his languages, claiming that ‘I spoke [French] as well as if I had been born in France’, and that his Dutch was so good that he was able to disguise himself as a Dutchman when he returned home from an early voyage.[7 ] Whatever his levels of competence in each language (a critic might point out that his rendition of the Spanish announcement about Cromwell is impressionistic rather than strictly accurate), he seems to have been able to act as a ‘linguister’ when the situation demanded it He boasted of his knowledge of ‘the names of ropes and sea-phrases’ in Dutch, mastering the sailor’s vocational jargon in that language before he managed to do so in English, which caused him some embarrassment when he was employed on an English vessel.[8 ] The multilingual abilities Coxere claimed to possess allowed him to ingratiate himself with sailors of different nations and to serve under different flags, and may even have smoothed his way as a captive in Muslim North Africa. Those who had experienced captivity had, in Nabil Matar’s words, ‘heard the Moorish other “speak”’.21 What they heard, what they did with it, how they told their stories, and what they might mean are the questions addressed by this article
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