The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language. By Katie Chenoweth

Abstract

Katie Chenoweth seeks to understand the mechanics of a widely recognized but little-understood phenomenon foundational to the history of modern French: the effect of print technology on the development of the French language. Starting from the claim that the act of printing changes the language being printed, Chenoweth argues that print technology simultaneously facilitated and encouraged standardization of the vernacular. As a technology of reproduction, print stimulates the latent potential in language towards an ever more accurate self-replication. Thus, for Chenoweth, printing is the ‘engine of modernity itself’ (p. 13) while also constituting a powerful manifestation of the characteristic Renaissance desire to replicate. For, in order to restore the Golden Age of classical antiquity, humanists believed it was necessary to reproduce the shape of that civilization in their language, art, architecture, and even statecraft. Chenoweth brings a demanding intellectual rigour to bear upon this watershed moment for subsequent modernity, in which replication technology appears to take control of language in order to forge the imagined community of the nation. Deploying a formidable command of recent interpretative theoretical frameworks (drawing, for example, on Martin Heidegger, Walter Ong, Benedict Anderson, Terence Cave, and above all on the grammatological philosophy of Jacques Derrida), the author interrogates an impressive range of primary sources in order to uncover the effects of print technology on the early modern French language. Following a dense but necessary introductory chapter in which Chenoweth lays out in greater detail her intellectual points of reference, Chapter 2 prioritizes the idea of the prosthetic in order to broach the emergence of printing in Europe and its spread across France. Chapter 3 homes in on the humanist printer Geoffroy Tory, whose 1529 Champ fleury is a manifesto in favour of using roman letter typography for vernacular printing. Tory is also known for having pioneered the introduction of diacritics in French (the cedilla in particular being attributed to him), leading Chenoweth in Chapter 3 to explore the effect of print technology on the material representation of the sounds of French. Moving from phonography to the invasive grammatization (the spread and imposition of grammatical normativity on the vernacular) characteristic of sixteenth-century vernacular discourse, Chapter 5 explores the transformation of the French language into an object of humanist pedagogy. As schoolchildren began to reproduce the sounds and script of nascent, standardized, and paradoxically manufactured mother tongue, the newly technologized French language was also being co-opted as a tool for projecting monarchical power. Chapter 6 therefore explores the interplay between print, François Ier, and the 1539 Edict of Villers-Cotterêts (which designated French as the language of legal proceedings throughout the kingdom). The book ends with an appraisal of Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), exploring its beguiling horticultural rhetoric in light of the mechanized, prosthetic framework within which French was now being forged and thought.