Reversing Babel: Translation among the English during an Age of Conquests, c. 800 to c. 1200 by Bruce R. O’Brien (review)

As Bruce O’Brien states at the outset, “this book offers a historian’s understanding of translation, including its context and consequences, in medieval England” (p. xii); and as a legal historian, one of the main questions he wishes to answer is why the Normans translated English law (not to mention English saints’ lives and historical records) into Latin in the years following the Conquest of 1066. The book takes a wide view, not only to answer this question and related ones, but also to undertake a synthesis and survey of what we know about language variety, multilingualism, and translation activity in England from ca. 800 to ca. 1200. It provides an invaluable guide for those reading translated texts either as literary products or as source materials for historical study, and importantly it attempts to deal with the social and cultural contexts of translation activity as well as the theoretical and intellectual contexts that tend to be the focus of literary and textual scholars. Along the way O’Brien supplies fresh and interesting insights and asks provocative questions. Perhaps his most provocative thesis in the book is his foregrounding of the rise of the Angevins and the reign of Henry II as an explanation of the longevity of French as a prestige language in England. This argument is reinforced by a further theme running through the book, that the relationships between language, national identity, and ethnicity should not be oversimplified.

Chapter 1 focuses on the issues of what contemporaries understood by a language and what they considered translation to be. Just as the origin of language variety was located in the Biblical story of Babel, so too Bible translators and patristic writers, principally Jerome and Isidore, provided the chief influences on translation theory. In practice, however, there appears to have been little theoretical debate. Translators were on the whole pragmatists responding to pressing contemporary concerns in education, administration, or law.

Chapter 2 is directed toward types of language contact and the contexts in which translation occurred. O’Brien undertakes a wide-ranging survey of English geography, trade networks, travel routes, community structure, and patterns of settlement, with particular focus on some important centers: Gloucester, Worcester, Lincoln, Nottingham, and Canterbury (in the last case building upon the work of Cecily Clark). In considering books and libraries, he takes Exeter and Worcester for his case studies, including the works of Adelard of Bath, whose translations from Arabic are indicative of the changing horizons of English contact and scholarship in the twelfth century. The chapter concludes with the observation that for most rural workers, life continued monolingual. One wonders whether this observation should not be further qualified in the light of place-name and settlement archaeological evidence in areas like eastern Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Although O’Brien summarizes and discusses the various theories of mutual intelligibility between Norse and English speakers and the ways in which the two languages may have coalesced (creolization has been one modelling), further illustration from the extensive literature he cites would be helpful here.

Chapter 3 considers the motives of translators and indicates how explicit statements in prefaces need to be subjected to critical historiographical scrutiny, taking into account unstated factors that also come into play. O’Brien divides his discussion into sections on the teaching of basic skills, instruction of the clergy, issues of property rights and administration, understanding the world, edifying the laity, literature for the elite, and the role of patrons.

Chapter 4 moves on to methods of translation, considering how translators learned their craft, the resources they drew upon, and the practical decisions they made in the course of their work. The chapter concludes with an illuminating discussion of the processes of drafting a translation that Peter Baker observed in manuscript F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a bilingual version produced...