Robert Henryson and the Matter of Multilingualism

Medieval multilingualism can be a gaudy affair. It can feature so prominently in the design and rhetoric of a work that it does not simply capture a reader's attention but instead serves, as much as love or virtue or political order, as one of that work's central thematic and organizing principles. Without multilingualism, Piers Plowman would certainly be difficult to imagine. Latin supplies quotations, technical words, and a critical subtext that advance the poem's plot, meditation on concepts like salvation, and even the depiction of characters like Anima, who move into and out of Latin in conversationally strategic ways. This movement itself advances one of the poem's most prominent topics: the dynamics between an authoritative culture (social as well as religious) that is mediated by Latin and a popular culture mediated by English and focused on challenging inherited notions of piety, language, and politics. In many ways, through its use of multilingualism Piers Plowman precociously depicts a world in which English has come to displace Latin's status as a High Language in medieval England's diglossia, a world that would not in fact come into sociolinguistic existence for another 300 years or so. And the importance of multilingualism to Piers Plowman was not lost on the scribes who transmitted the text. They gave particular attention to maintaining a consistent, restrained format throughout the tradition, and among the features they maintained was the highlighting of Latin passages, whether through rubrication or underscoring in red.

John Gower's works offer similarly gaudy examples of multilingualism. Gower's entire career is of course multilingual, since he wrote successively in Latin and French as well as English, but, more narrowly, the Confessio Amantis offers a widely known and discussed interplay of Latin and English at several compositional levels. The individual English tales are framed by Latin verses, while a Latin commentary develops more fully the poem's allusions, rhetorical devices, and ethics. As with the manuscripts of Piers Plowman, those of the Confessio foreground the work's multilingual nature by setting off and rubricating much of the Latin text, rendering the interplay of Latin and English a particularly prominent feature of one of the most deluxe manuscript traditions of late-medieval England. Gower himself may not have supervised this tradition, but it seems to have developed from a coterie interested in furthering a specific design for the work, which may well have been his.¹ And in any case Gower is likely to have been the author of the Latin commentary, all of which points to his embrace of multilingualism in his own literary self-conception. Indeed, while both the Confessio and the Vox Clamantis follow traditional Christian exegesis in portraying the diversity of speech as the sinful product and affirmation of human pride and weakness,² the Latin biographical "Quia unusquisque" and "Eneidos Bucolis," both of which were likely written by Gower and have substantial manuscript support, make the poet's multilingual record particularly prominent. The effigy on Gower's tomb in Southwark Cathedral could well stand as a gaudy emblem of just this kind of gaudy multilingualism. Probably designed by Gower himself, the tomb depicts the poet reclining with his head rather awkwardly supported by three books, each containing a copy of one of the long poems he wrote in Latin, French, and English.³

Examples like these, to which a good many shorter and simpler but still rhetorically arch macaronic lyrics could be adjoined, show multilingualism being put to extraordinary rhetorical, literary, and even visual purposes in literature of the late Middle Ages. But the thing about multilingualism is that it is not always extraordinary. In fact, whether in the Middle Ages or today, it can be quite ordinary. The socially codified bilingualism of Belgium or Switzerland or the presence of hundreds of co-existing languages in India or Indonesia may offer the best-known examples in the modern world, but it is a rare truly living language—as opposed to a dying one spoken by a handful of isolated speakers—that lives alone. Even in a country as prominently and, on occasion...