The Emergence of Standard English by John H. Fisher (review)

REVIEWS natural fay" to the "evil witch in later medieval romances" to a rehabil­ itated twentieth-century Morgan who becomes an "admirable oppo­ nent" and "the true love and worthy companion" of Arthur. Thompson argues that her new role points, primarily among female writers, to the "recognition that the best hope for a better world lies in cooperation, rather than competition, between men and women" (p. 342). It is a hopeful conclusion to a volume that brings together a number ofexcel­ lent articles, with only an occasional exception. The critic who ap­ proaches this volume looking for much new research will be disap­ pointed. However, while there is little that is significantly new in Arthurian Women, the volume will no doubt be a useful addition to the library of many Arthurian scholars. JUNE HALL MCCASH Middle Tennessee State University JOHN H. FISHER. The Emergence of Standard English. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Pp. 208. $34.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. This collection ofJohn H. Fisher's essays on Standard English provides a welcome and useful arrangement of several related arguments that he has made over the past twenty years. In it one can see more clearly the recent (and older) scholarly traditions on which he has drawn, the orig­ inal contributions that he has made, and the discoveries by others that have followed from those contributions-from his ideas about the processes of linguistic standardization, and specifically about the situa­ tion in England; from his hypotheses and tentative suggestions along the way; and from his collaborative archival work. Fisher's analyses ofthe emergence ofStandard English have made use of an approach to Middle English dialectology laid out by Angus McIntosh and M. L. Samuels in a series of programmatic essays during the 1950s and 1960s. A key element in that approach is the scrutiny of variations that might seem part ofthe writing system only and not nec­ essarily indicators of variations in the spoken language. In some of the early work on that project Samuels noted the importance ofthe Central Midlands dialect in the formation of written Standard English and 241 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER coined the term "Chancery Standard." With attention to Samuels's find­ ings Fisher has argued the double hypothesis that the rise of Standard English was more separate both from the English of London and from the spoken language of any region (because it was a written language) than the traditional histories of the language have recognized. A part of Fisher's argument that especially captures the imagination is the idea that a few individuals, particularly the Masters of Chancery in the early fifteenth century, were strategically placed to alter the course of the English language as no individuals have been able to do since. This idea led Malcolm Richardson to investigate the individuals so placed, including Henry V; and it led John Fisher, together with Richardson and Jane L. Fisher, to collect and edit An Anthology of Chancery English (1984), a valuable complement to R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt's Book ofLondon English: 1384-1425 (1931). Fisher's investigations in sociolinguistics and historical philology have worked well with his skill and learning as an editor and critic of the great Middle English poets to accommodate within his story the evi­ dence from both literary and bureaucratic sources. Three chapters on Chancery English and European chancelleries are followed by two chap­ ters on Chaucer's texts and languages, one chapter on Piers Plowman, one on Caxton, and a final chapter on the history of Received Pronunciation. Whereas literary and sociolinguistic approaches to the history of the lan­ guage are sometimes opposed, Fisher sees the treatment of Chaucerian manuscripts in the early fifteenth century as consistent with the idea of implementing a national language policy. When published in 1988, chapter 5, "Animadversions on the Text of Chaucer," was an essay that focused on the psychology of Chaucer and the reasons why he did not su­ perintend the preservation of a single one of his poems. In the present context, especially in light of chapter 2, "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England" (1992), the essay becomes an implicit "prequel" of sorts, setting up the...