Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England

Chapter 5: Macoronic Texture

CHAPTER 5 Macaronic Texture The sermons studied here are compositions whose basic fabric is in Latin but in which parts appear in English. The latter should not be thought of as foreign elements woven into the basic fabric; the strands of the fabric themselves change here and there from one language to the other. I will now examine this macaronic texture more closely by looking at the frequency, length, and syntactic nature of the English elements. I will then address the question why the language switches as and where it does. The forty-three sermons I have classified as fully macaronic vary considerably in length. Apart from incomplete pieces, their total number of words ranges from about 2,360 to over 17,000. An exact statistical account is nearly impossible to arrive at, for reasons that include the uncertainty about whether some elements in both Latin and English should be counted as one or two words and the defective state of manuscript Q, in which a good deal of material is illegible. Yet their average length can be estimated to lie somewhere between 5,000 and a little over 6,000 words. Only two sermons, H-25 and L-l, both for Good Friday, exceed this average considerably, extending to nearly 14,000 and over 17,000 words respectively. This wide variation in the total number of words applies equally to the number of English words contained in these sermons,1 which ranges from about 130 to over 2,100. More significant than the actual number of English words is their proportion in the total number of words per sermon: it ranges from a low of 2.28 percent (in W-068) to an unusual high of 33.36 percent (in Q-20). In the three sermons I 1. I am here counting all English words, whether they belong to types a, b, or c. 81 82 Macaronic Sermons have edited in appendices B-D, English words form 7.6 (S-07), 18.5 (0-07), and 2.8 (W-154) percent of the total number of words. The proportion of English material in these macaronic sermons is therefore always low and sometimes very low.2 We must therefore speak of Latin as the matrix or base language of these sermons on the basis of the proportion between the two languages alone. Occasionally this proportion approaches a point where the two languages are momentarily balanced, as in the following example from 0-08: Quamdiu clerus and pe laife huius terre werknet togedur in vno fagot and brendonn super istum ignem, istud regnum was ful warme and ful weI at hese. Caritas brande so hote, pe ley of loue was so huge, quod no Scottich miste ne no Frensche scouris quierunt extinguere istam flammam. Sed nunc, prodolor, perfectus amor is laid 0 watur, caritas fere extinguitur, iste ignis is almost out. Quere vbi vis infra villam et extra, poteris blowe super vngues tuos for any hete of loue. Caritas est adeo frigida as dumbeltomis. Fer truloue is hard to finde, miche similacion per is, faire cher faileth not, picta verba sunt sufficiencia , set fidencia modica est. Vix aliquis confidit alteri ... 3 But such balance lasts only for a few sentences, after which Latin again becomes the dominant language; and such passages in which English elements constitute half of the vocabulary are very rare in the corpus. More importantly, Latin forms the syntactic matrix into which the English elements are always fully integrated, a matrix that follows the patterns of classical Latin morphology and syntax without question. There are occasional slips in gender and in verbal endings, and the classical tense rules are by no means strictly observed, as they were not in medieval Latin generally. And the vocabulary and style of these sermons are so heavily influenced by native English idioms as to make a classicist cringe-facit tremare pilastros, as a later macaronic poet has 2. See appendix E for a table indicating the total number of Latin words, of English words, and of switches from Latin to English in the forty-three macaronic sermons. 3. 0-08/5OV. A similar passage from the same sermon is the description of Fortune's wheel, quoted in chapter 3 as an example of favorite macaronic passages. This sermon was preached at Oxford to the clergy. Macaronic Texture 83 it.4 But the basic features of Latin grammar-the distinctions of...