Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages

3. Vernacular Language and Secular Power in Emerging Europe

3Vernacular Language and Secular Power in Emerging Europe The last chapter traced the failure of Western vernaculars to become vehicles for Christian worship between the end of antiquity and the eleventh century. In this chapter we will examine the gradual appearance of the written vernacular in the exercise of secular power in the early Middle Ages, a period during which, except in Anglo-Saxon England, the vernacular was never the normal vehicle for textualizing public authority. Nowhere did the sporadic use of vernacular during this long period constitute the beginnings of a gradual and inevitable rise of the vernacular. Indeed, a recent and important colloquium on the relationship between Latin and vernacular languages carried the title “the resistible ascension of vernaculars.”1 The process was neither linear nor inevitable. Only very gradually , from the tenth century to the fifteenth, did vernacular languages become normal written media for the use of chancelleries , law courts, and aristocratic institutions. In royal chancelleries , Serge Lusignan has shown that the process was not completed in Castille until the thirteenth century; in France, not until the fourteenth; and in England, only in the fifteenth. In parts of Eastern Europe, the process would not be complete until the nineteenth.2 Nor could this process take place without 57 Vernacular Language and Secular Power a transformation of the vernaculars themselves. Lusignan has argued that before French or English could replace Latin as the normal written language of the French and English monarchies, these vernaculars had to undergo serious latinization. Thomas Brunner, who has traced the gradual introduction of the vernacular into archival practice across Western Europe, has found much the same thing as Lusignan: with the clear exception of Anglo-Saxon England (and the possible exception of Ireland and Wales), vernaculars only gradually became normal languages of record keeping between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.3 Brunner recognizes that one must be careful to avoid overgeneralizations about this phenomenon, bearing in mind that very specificcircumstancesdeterminedhowandwhenthevernacular was adopted in each society. In some areas—particularly certain regions where Romance languages such as Occitan, Catalan, and Castilian were spoken—the process took place gradually, beginning as early as the tenth or eleventh century with the appearance of what has been termed latin farci, texts in Latin containing isolated words or even phrases, usually toponyms but also technical terms, in the vernacular.4 Elsewhere—not only in Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic regions but also in places such as France—the vernacular appeared later but abruptly alongside or in place of Latin, without an intermediate phase of bilingual or mixed texts. If the “how” of this transformation differed across Europe, so too did the “why.” Whatever the causes of such transformations , older hypotheses such as the speculation that scribes were forced to turn to the vernacular because of their declining ability to write in Latin or the development of vernaculars as expressions of national identity must be rejected. In many areas of Europe, scribes who prepared documents in the vernacular continued to prepare others in Latin: the choice of language was strategic, not a linguistic necessity. Furthermore, the vernacu- Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages 58 lar did not necessarily represent the use of the ordinary speech of the local community. Certain prestige vernaculars such as French replaced written Latin in areas where it remained the spoken vernacular, and elsewhere standardized or even artificial dialects that were not in ordinary usage were chosen for use in documents. Part of this strategic move from Latin to other languages relates directly to the development we have examined in the previous chapter. After the linguistic reforms of the late eighth century, Latin was, in the Frankish empire and its successor kingdoms, essentially and ideologically the language of government , law, and administration. It was the language of religion, too, but not exclusively so. Progressively, however, as we have seen, ecclesiastical consolidation created an ideological role for Latin closely related to the mysteries of the Christian faith and the domain of the clergy. The movement away from Latin as the language of secular power should be understood at least in part as a result of the increasing identification of Latin as the language of the clergy. The most explicit example of this is the substitution of German for Latin in the German empire, a process that began fairly abruptly, as Brunner has shown, first with a charter of Counts Albert and Rudolf of...