In his Latin treatise on the uses of vernacular language, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante argues that the vernacular is ephemeral and mysterious, wild and weirdly dangerous. One must use deliberate intention in order to find the feral vernacular; it is only “by the assiduous practice of cunning, [that] we can at last entice into our trap this creature whose scent is left everywhere but which is nowhere to be seen” [ut ipsam reperire possimus rationabilius investigemus de ilia ut, solerti studio, redolentem ubique et necubi apparentem nostris penitus irretiamus tenticulis].1 While the savvy hunter might follow the vernacular’s olfactory trail, its constant movement and change make actual capture difficult.
For speakers and composers of vernacular language, however, fluency was obtained not via practiced tracking but by a quotidian, familial process. The vernacular is “that which we learn without any formal instruction, by imitating our nurses” [vulgarem locutionem asserimus quam sine omni regula nutricem imitantes accipimus].2 Consumed like the nourishing calories and antibodies in breast milk, vernacular language is the tongue acquired while completely dependent on the mother, learned without effort while in her arms. This description of language, as at once alien and as familiar as mother’s milk, should be understood within the complex relationship between Latin’s perceived durability and the changeable variety of medieval vernacular language. As the Latin of De Vulgari itself attests, Latin permeated all forms of reading, writing, and thought throughout the middle ages. This was because, as Ruth Evans has argued, “to read was either to read in Latin, as the medieval use of the term litteratus implies, or to read a vernacular text written in the Roman alphabet.”3 Latinity was synonymous with medieval literacy. Yet this Latin literacy does not preclude a simultaneous fluency in vernacular language. There was no simple binary between literate and illiterate, Latin and vernacular, during the medieval period. Rather, there were various levels of fluency in many languages, including Latin, as can be found within single, multi-genre poems like “Sumer is icumen in” or “London Lickpenny.”4 Medieval writers moved easily between three languages, or more, which the oeuvre of John Gower also attests.5 Latin literacy therefore must be understood as co-equal, existing alongside similar (or better) levels of vernacular literacy. What separates the two, according to Dante, is the method of acquisition.
The fact that Dante sees the vernacular as a wild prey animal, living in multiple places and forever escaping capture, suggests that there was a proliferation of languages and dialects across a single region during the medieval period. Amidst this proliferation, there was also no clear differentiation between the standard forms of a single vernacular language and all of its dialect varieties. Indeed, spoken and written forms of a single vernacular were so heterogeneous that Chaucer uses his Troilus and Criseyde, itself a translation of Boccacio, to bemoan the “gret diversite/in English” and his fear that he might “myswrite” or “mysmeter for defaute of tonge.”6 Late medieval vernacularity, then, must be understood within a context of diverse variety between as well as within individual languages.
Late medieval vernacularity was a shifting, plural category, one that did not depend on geographic or ethnic boundaries. In her The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, Ardis Butterfield observes that Middle English was just one linguistic choice among French, Anglo-French, Flemish, Italian, and Latin, for late medieval English communities . Moreover, it was “not the only language in the late fourteenth century in which to think of oneself as English.”7 Within a context of war, trade, travel, and interrelatedness, for instance, medieval English and French texts are perpetually engaged in playing with and upon one another; they cannot exist without each other. Butterfield observes in her careful reading of the punning rhymes that constitute the French fabliau “Des Deus Anglois,” that “the language is French, but the tongue turns it in English ways.”8 In other words, even in self-consciously “French” poetry, the rhyme depends on English pronunciation. Likewise, Middle English texts deploy seemingly foreign terms, as well, as part of a larger strategy of mercantilism and exchange, as Butterfield argues in her analysis of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale. “A word can hover,” she notes, “on the border of being recognized: one moment it is a foreign word, autonomous if not independent; the next it has become unnoticeably English, unthinkingly possessed and used.”9 We cannot, therefore, consider individual medieval vernacular languages as separated by today’s national boundaries. Butterfield argues instead that the medieval vernacular is “a verbal world that is both fragmented and plural, where audiences are not merely ‘English,’ but multilingual (in varying degrees), partly local, partly international, and from more than one social, cultural and intellectual background.”10
The vernacular, therefore, was often just one of many linguistic choices available to multilingual speakers and writers. Jonathan Hsy, building on studies by Christopher Baswell, Robert Stein, and D.A. Trotter, argues in his Trading Tongues for a capaciously translingual later middle ages.11 The cosmopolitan diversity of vernacular produced, according to Hsy, “the capacity of medieval people to both think and write in more than one language concurrently,” shifting easily between one language or another depending on context or audience.12 In many ways, translingual proficiency was the social, political, and mercantile norm, exemplified by the bilingual Charles d’Orleans, whom Hsy calls “a poet held, as if in suspended animation, between the lands of England and France.”13 Vernacular languages blurred and bled into one another via trade and exchange in polyglot centers which include Gower and Chaucer’s London, Charles d’Orleans’ English prison cell, as much as Margery Kempe’s King’s Lynn.14
While Latin persisted as the language of theology, vernacular languages had also become a primary choice of composition for writers throughout Britain and the continent, by the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. There was enormous growth in textual and aesthetic production that includes the Lollard heresy and the Peasants’ Rebellion, the poetic inventions of Christine de Pizan, Machaut, Langland, Lydgate and Hoccleve, alongside the creation of musical lyrics, devotional texts, spiritual autobiographies and dramas. Within t...