The Gift of Tongues: Women’s Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages (review)

The practice of “speaking in tongues” has received scant scholarly attention, although it has remained firmly in the public eye thanks to the activities of Christians mostly of the charismatic persuasion. As Cooper-Rompato’s timely study reminds us, it is all too easy to oversimplify the terminology of what is a multifaceted phenomenon reaching back to the biblical narrative of Pentecost. Contemporary Christians tend to express a belief in glossolalia; in other words, that the Holy Spirit can move individuals to speak in an abstruse language that calls for an interpreter to decode the message. Cooper-Rompato’s concern is instead with xenoglossia, a coinage borrowed from the psychologist Charles Richet. Xenoglossia takes two chief forms, what the critic calls “miraculous Latinity” (p. 123)—the ability to speak untutored in Latin—and “miraculous vernacularity” (p. 145)—the acquisition of other contemporary languages.

Hagiography is the first port of call for tracing the medieval depiction of this miracle. A sharp gender gap is discerned, as for male saints the gift of vernacular xenoglossia was usually tied up with the Pauline injunction to preach the Gospel. Where women’s vitae are concerned, vernacular xenoglossia is “almost always semiprivate, and it emphasizes vulnerability and a certain lack of control or limited control over the language” (p. 40). The author deftly demonstrates that females were all too often caught up between the sometimes opposing expectations that they should prove conduits for sapiential wisdom and yet remain obedient servants of the patriarchy. With Latin xenoglossia the situation is even more challenging. Some saints like Christina of Stommeln were not blessed with immediate fluency, but with an accelerated ability to acquire Latin for the purposes of study. This in itself is a most productive point. It certainly implies that the designation of a holy woman as illiterata in a vita is, to say the least, “slippery” (p. 68).

Chapters 3 and 4, which amount to half the length of the study, are devoted to Margery Kempe’s experiential encounters with different languages and to Chaucer’s literary use of xenoglossia. In the former, Cooper-Rompato casts the quest for authority on the part of the textual Margery as animated through the adaptation of “xenoglossic tropes” (p. 104) by both Kempe herself and the scribe of her Book. Whereas critics such as Charity Scott-Stokes have tried to explain the mechanics of how Margery might be able to converse with German and Frisian interlocutors, the author avoids speculation about overlap between the East Anglian dialect and continental vernaculars. As for Chaucer, he, too, is seen as a medieval figure who was fully conscious of the discourses of miraculous Latinity (The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale) and miraculous vernacularity (the Man of Law’s Tale).

The book is adapted from the author’s dissertation and stands as an extremely fine model of how apprentice material can yield a monograph of pedagogical substance. Particularly impressive is the pan-European breadth of scholarship in the literary review section. Some of the anecdotes add verve and humor. Repeated references are made to the testy Flemish-speaking nun Lutgard of Aywières. She prays that she will not receive the gift of conversing in French so as to eschew a position of higher authority within the Francophone religious community—in effect, allowing her to remain an isolated solitary (pp. 48–49). Furthermore, as her elders had successfully prayed for her to receive understanding in Latin, she pleads with God to remove this onerous blessing (pp. 78–79) as she did not want to challenge the authority of her male superiors.