Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature

Graham Williams

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137540683
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137540690
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

© The Author(s) 2018

Graham WilliamsSincerity in Medieval English Language and LiteratureNew Approaches to English Historical Linguistics https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54069-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Sincerity, Language Change and Medieval Literature

Graham Williams¹

(1)

School of English, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Graham Williams

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Ye knowe ek that in forme of speche is chaunge

Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho

That hadden pris, now wonder nyce and straunge

Us thinketh hem, and yet thei spake hem so,

And spedde as wel in love as men now do;

Ek for to wynnen love in sondry ages,

In sondry londes, sondry ben usages.

(Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde II.22–28)

The proem to Book II of Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century romance affords a neat way to open my own ‘little book’ in that it localizes questions to do with language change, cultures of emotion , and the role of literature in both. It also serves as a cautionary statement for those of us, like many of Chaucer’s readers, dealing with a language that is for reasons of historical and cultural distance straunge, which in Middle English originally meant ‘foreign’, but also ‘strange’ by Chaucer’s day. The narrator is at this point addressing would-be lovers in the audience who might find the language and rituals that follow to be unfamiliar or odd.¹ For although the poem is entirely in Middle English , the setting is the Trojan War, in a pseudo-Classical but simultaneously Christian medieval aristocratic speech community, and Chaucer (re)wrote Troilus and Criseyde just at the moment when a more widespread Englishing of the romance tradition, along with its emotional culture and linguistic rituals , was beginning to reach a less-than-aristocratic audience for whom such language had hitherto been rarely accessible. And while it would not have been as self-evident in the fourteenth century as it perhaps is today, the observation that languages vary and change in the context of cultural variation and change also forms a fundamental starting point for my study. More specifically, while it is often cited in discussions of Middle English lexical-semantic change, within the larger context of Troilus and Criseyde , the proem to Book II is mostly concerned with pragmatics , the forme of speche and sondry usages employed to perform what was by Chaucer’s time an idealized emotion and accomplish a related communicative goal, i.e. to wynnen love . The language and rituals derived from the period-specific culture of love presented throughout the poem were at this point concomitant with trends in the popularization of late medieval courtesy , and getting acquainted with these customs would have been one of the main motivations that much of Chaucer’s likely socially aspirant audience had for reading his affectively driven redaction of the double sorwe of Troilus (I.1). In the books that follow this proem, the audience is exposed to outward expressions of love in the vernacular, while also sometimes simultaneously being given exceptional privy access to the minds and hearts of fictional speakers, most elaborately for the controversial figure of Criseyde . The final century of the English Middle Ages, roughly from Chaucer’s time of writing through the fifteenth century, forms the end point for this book’s study, and we will come back to Troilus and Criseyde in particular in Chapter 5; but this last point, to do with outward speech and inward affect, constitutes the main overarching interest that this book shares with Chaucer’s: What is sincerity, and how does it relate to medieval language and literature?

Taken as a communicative condition , in love and other contexts, sincerity simultaneously divides and ideologically binds affect with language. By its very mention, it compounds the perhaps natural suspicion that the two are not one, but it also introduces an arguably impossible goal to make language congruent with thought and feeling. As such, it puts especial emphasis on affective (inter)subjectivity , and so under the rubric of sincerity it matters not just what you say but how you feel when saying it. My perspective is positioned at an intersection of the history of emotions and historical pragmatics , from which view I aim to show how it became increasingly important that the speaking subject feel, or at least performed feeling, in delimited, morally condoned ways in particular communicative contexts over the course of the Middle Ages. My argument is that the driving force behind this movement was the affective-linguistic ideal of sincerity . The ideal was originally introduced by way of Christian devotion, but Christianization is not treated here merely as a moment of official conversion, but as a syncretic process of acculturation over time, and like many other ideas introduced by Christianity , sincerity took a very long time to be integrated generally across lay culture. This has been my primary rationale for treating a long diachrony in a relatively short space; to see the change one needs a long view, and this book traces sincerity ’s development from socially restricted origins in Anglo-Saxon monastic communities of prayer and confession to evidence of its more widespread influence in the late Middle Ages, once it had become part of the scripts and communicative condition s for courteous speech. Stopping at the end of the English Middle Ages, while potentially problematic in compounding side effect mythologies of medieval otherness, is also not arbitrary; and I will rely on previous discussions in order to clarify in this introduction how the idea of sincerity did actually change with the onset of the early modern Renaissance . Throughout the book, sincerity will be considered primarily as a condition for interpersonal pragmatics , but it will also become apparent not only how crucial a role medieval literature played in the forwarding of this influential ideal and its scripts, but also how having sincerity as one of its main concerns influenced literary styles of narrative.

In the first instance though, I need to specify what I mean by sincerity and introduce the ideas and themes that run throughout the analytical Chapters 2–5. In this introductory chapter, I provide an overview of the lexical and semantic evidence for sincerity as a word and concept in early Englishes, which will also anticipate broader issues addressed in following sections. I then outline a definition for sincerity which takes into account medieval usage as well as several previous discussions of this topic in language and cultural studies. As I am defining sincerity as an affective-linguistic ideal, there is also a very brief overview of developments in the history of emotions, particularly those relevant for the English Middle Ages and how these relate to Christian views of language. Finally, I introduce several areas of historical pragmatics and stylistics drawn upon for my discussions.

Medieval Words for Sincerity?

An onomasiological (conceptual) and semasiological (lexical) overview of medieval sincerity is both complicated and facilitated by the fact that sincerity is not a word in the medieval English vernacular. Complicated in that our word was not theirs; facilitated in that we cannot simply, and very possible wrongly, take the sense of our modern word for granted. The first known attestation of the word sincerity in a vernacularized context is from an anonymous fifteenth-century translation (MS Harley 2261) of Ranulf Higden ’s Polychronicon (from CMEPV ):

[…] lytelle men schalle not be inducede oonly to doctrine but also grete men schalle be prouocate to exercise, that men whiche haue not seen so large volumes of this mater may be instructe by this compendious labor, where y say not that subtilite of sentence or mellifluous eloquence schal be expressede in hit, but sinceritie of deuocion schalle schewe obsequy to the matere.

The corresponding Latin in Higden is devotionis sinceritas, which is here translated literally using the Latinate term; whereas John of Trevisa , writing slightly earlier in the fifteenth century, translates the phrase as swetnesse of deuocion (ed. Babington 1865). Trevisa’s translation is interesting not only for what it reveals about the currency of the Latin term in the vernacular, but also for what it suggests about medieval notions of sincerity. Sincerity was, as it to an extent remains, a judgment of one’s moral quality. Thus, one’s obsequiousness, or dutiful behavior, is related to one’s ‘sweetness’. In its textual context here, the affective, inward-looking qualification is explicitly to do with language, particularly as a way of distinguishing a high style from a plain style , or artful eloquence as public show versus sincerity of expression derived from true devotion. In making this stylistic distinction the author situates his intent within the ideology of sincerity in the prologue, which he trusts to serve his moral purpose—a type of authorial sincerity that will be discussed in later chapters. But given that this anonymous translator writing at the end of the English Middle Ages affords us the only seemingly Englished example until well into the sixteenth century, it is clear that the concept of sincerity was not generally lexicalized in this form for medieval Englishes. It is therefore necessary to ask to what extent earlier Englishes expressed this or a similar concept using a different lexicon: The absence of our modern word of course does not imply an absence of the concept in English-speaking communities of the Middle Ages. Furthermore, the word comes from medieval Latin and can be found elsewhere in Anglo-Latin texts. In this way, it is possible to locate medieval English words for ‘sincerity’ as evidenced by (1) bi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Sincerity, Language Change and Medieval Literature
• 2. Before Sincerity: Pagan Beliefs of Language and Emotion
• 3. God Who Knows the Heart: The Christianization of Language and Emotion
• 4. Sincerity in Contrition: From Confessions to Apologies
• 5. Sincerity in Love: From caritas to affectio maritalis
• 6. Conclusion: What is Sincerity?
• Back Matter