Apolitical Postcolonialism

Trading Tongues is an attractively packaged book with a colorful illumination of Charles, duc d’Orléans, one of the multilingual writers Hsy studies, gracing the cover. This picture, analyzed in detail in the book’s “Coda,” includes three images of d’Orléans: writing within the Tower of London (which symbolizes his twenty-five years of captivity in England), looking out a Tower window toward a Thames filled with ships, and in a Tower courtyard passing a letter to a messenger whose departure from the fortress is also pictured. These images of d’Orléans effectively represent the principal issue Hsy explores: how medieval multilingual contact zones such as the city of London, created by mercantile culture and maritime travel, affected the language choices of writers as represented in their translingual literary production. By “translingual,” Hsy means not only code-switching and the simultaneous use of multiple languages, but especially “the capacity for languages within…[contact zones] to interact: to influence and transform each other through networks of exchange.”

The languages Hsy focuses on are English, French, and Latin, the latter two mercantile and legal languages that nonetheless circulated beyond those spheres, as well as Dutch, a language associated with Flemish merchants. The absence of Celtic languages from this list points to Hsy’s Continental orientation, as the Channel is the waterway most crossed by his travelers. The writers he studies include Chaucer, Gower, William Caxton, Margery Kempe, and three London merchants whose early Tudor compilations comprise perhaps the most interesting chapter of Hsy’s book. While the inclusion of Kempe requires Hsy to move outside of his usual London focus, that chapter is also very strong, as he explores the busy trade center of Lynn as well as Kempe’s evident translingual competence despite her avowal that she speaks only English.

Hsy is a good writer whose imaginative recreations of specific spaces are complex and enjoyable. Every chapter includes a vivid reconstruction of such spaces as Chaucer’s Aldgate residence and the waterfront customs house where he worked as well as the multilingual St. Denis home of the merchant protagonist of The Shipman’s Tale (1386–1395), all described in chapter one. Hsy brings to bear a great variety of materials, including account books, tallying sticks, macaronic poems, wax tablets, and other elements of medieval material and mercantile culture to illuminate the texts he analyzes. These deeply contextualized readings help balance the selective nature of his study which extracts short texts from the opus of prolific writers such as Chaucer, Gower, and Caxton, resulting in partial readings whose broad application to their corpus is not always sufficiently clear.

Detail from cover

The cover image also points to one of my principal reservations about this book: d’Orléans is identifiable thanks to his regal robes which contrast with the messenger’s more practical riding apparel, attire that indexes their different status, an aspect of the image that Hsy does not comment upon. While Hsy acknowledges Charles d’Orléans’s aristocratic status, his analyses tend to skirt the socioeconomic conditions that fostered translingual competence in middle class and aristocratic medieval writers. While he draws on postcolonial and sociolinguistic theories developed to analyze language contact in colonial spaces, Hsy eschews their focus on structural inequalities produced by imperial power imbalances. He celebrates the translingual literary production of privileged medieval writers to challenge their enshrinement in monolingual national canons. More problematic from my perspective is his insisting on the superiority of Charles d’Orléans’s trilingual poetic practice over the hybrid bilingualism of the lesbian Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa.

I am not a scholar of medieval English literature; I found several of Hsy’s Middle English citations hard to read and wished he had chosen to translate them to modern English, as he did his French and Latin citations. I am a medieval Iberianist, a space whose multilingual reality has long been embraced by literary scholars, even as the myth of a medieval Castilian...