Robert Henryson and the Matter of Multilingualism

Abstract

Medieval multilingualism can be a gaudy affair. It can feature so promi- nently in the design and rhetoric of a work that it does not simply cap- ture a reader's attention but instead serves, as much as love or virtue or political order, as one of that work's central thematic and organizing principles. Without multilingualism, Piers Plowman would certainly be difficult to imagine. Latin supplies quotations, technical words, and a critical subtext that advance the poem's plot, meditation on concepts like salvation, and even the depiction of characters like Anima, who move into and out of Latin in conversationally strategic ways. This movement itself advances one of the poem's most prominent topics: the dynamics between an authoritative culture (social as well as religious) that is medi- ated by Latin and a popular culture mediated by English and focused on challenging inherited notions of piety, language, and politics. In many ways, through its use of multilingualism Piers Plowman precociously depicts a world in which English has come to displace Latin's status as a High Language in medieval England's diglossia, a world that would not in fact come into sociolinguistic existence for another 300 years or so. And the importance of multilingualism to Piers Plowman was not lost on the scribes who transmitted the text. They gave particular attention to maintaining a consistent, restrained format throughout the tradition, and among the features they maintained was the highlighting of Latin passages, whether through rubrication or underscoring in red. John Gower's works offer similarly gaudy examples of multilingualism. Gower's entire career is of course multilingual, since he wrote successively in Latin and French as well as English, but, more narrowly, the Confessio Amantis offers a widely known and discussed interplay of Latin and English at several compositional levels. The individual English tales are framed by Latin verses, while a Latin commentary develops more fully the poem's allusions, rhetorical devices, and ethics. As with the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those of the Confessio foreground the work's multilingual na- ture by setting off and rubricating much of the Latin text, rendering the interplay of Latin and English a particularly prominent feature of one of the most deluxe manuscript traditions of late-medieval England. Gower