Multilingualism and Mother Tongue in Medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan Narratives (review)

Catherine Léglu examines a complex literary and linguistic phenomenon in vernacular works composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Providing clear synopses, detailed analysis, and new readings of the narratives, she explores ways in which significant texts employ multilingualism and the mother tongue, a notion to be replaced by 'other tongue' or '(m)other tongue'. She aims to examine 'the literary use of competing Romance vernaculars in the later Middle Ages' (p. 13), in examples of multilingual interaction, taking into account cultural and geographic differences and socio-political factors relating to individual texts. She moves with ease among the different languages and supplies appropriate English translations. The book has three parts, each with three chapters. Nineteen texts are examined closely and extensively, one or more in each chapter, of which the aim and fulfilment are made explicit (e.g. pp. 161 and 175). As is acknowledged, Chapter 1 and parts of Chapters 3 and 5 have already been published, but are here integrated into a wider investigation.

The Introduction opens with an engaging commentary on two pages of a manuscript of Peyre de Paternas's Libre de sufficientia e de necessitat (Paris, BNF, fr. 3313A), a bilingual treatise (c. 1350), where sections of Latin text alternate with Occitan translation 'en nostra linga maternal', the language the Austin Friar and his Limousin dedicatee share. Furthermore, the manuscript was copied in Avignon by a French and Francophone Breton team. This kind of multilingual cultural interaction was then possible.

In Part I, The Myths of Multilingualism, four Occitan texts are studied: the twelfth-century epic, Girart de Roussillon, Arnaut Vidal's Guilhem de la Barra, a translation of Paolino Veneto's Compendium (a universal history in vertical genealogical tables), and the Leys d'Amor. Images of the Tower of Babel and tongues of fire figure in the discussion of the hybrid linguistic and generic character of these Occitan works.

Part II, Language Politics, begins with Bernat Metge's Lo Somni (c. 1399), a dream poem in which material from Latin and Tuscan sources is rendered in Catalan, followed by the trilingual História de l'amat Frondino e de Brisona, where dialogue and narrative in three different languages are intertwined, and a love-story in fifteen images, without words. In Chapters 5 and 6, the Sleeping Beauty motif is tracked, firstly in novas in hybrid languages, where the problematical association of language and lineage is expressed, then in monolingual French texts, where an unspoken incest narrative underlies tales relating to exogamy.

Part III, The Monolangue, deals firstly with the multilingual Paris and Vienne tradition, which probably originated in Provence, although no Occitan version has survived. Pierre de La Cépède, author of the French version, seems to have accessed a Catalan version via his knowledge of Occitan, and wrote a new romance in his adopted language (pp. 144-47). The next example, Lystoire du Chevalier Pierre de Provence et de la Belle Maguelonne (c. 1453), is a French romance originating in Provence with recognisable topography and an unacknowledged intertextual connection with the French prose Roman de Troie tradition. The final chapter contains five examples of monolingual travel writing, mostly in French, with particular attention to the Provençal-born Antoine de La Sale and his compilation/translation La Salade (1444), which shows how the mother tongue can be manipulated.

The book has no overall conclusion, which is more or less in line with the initial specification that texts are to be read individually, 'rather than as part of a grand metanarrative of what happens to the literary vernaculars in this region and period' (p. 13). While in their composition the texts reveal aspects of language transfer and hybridization, their content also reflects language awareness and versatility: Berte, in Girart de Roussillon, has a command of five languages; Maguelonne, travelling in foreign places, uses...