English in the Middle Ages (review)

In Textual criticism and Middle English texts, Tim William Machan argued that ‘crediting Middle English literature with modern textual criticism’s conception of texts and works’ is unfeasible, in that it ‘supplies [Middle English literature] with a quality whose absence was one of its conditions of existence’ (1994:176). Rather than offering readings of this or that manuscript or the codicological situation of a given text, this was a book about the whole field of Middle English with ramifications that altered the way we could perceive it. Broadly, M argued that the entire history of Middle English textual criticism since the Middle Ages has performed a set of operations alien to most of Middle English textuality.

In his new book, similarly, M disavows close reading of individual Middle English texts, instead examining a whole discursive field—the sociolinguistic status of English in the Middle Ages—in order to realign, according to medieval norms, what has more often been forced into line with a set of essentially modern assumptions. Like the earlier book, this one has an unadorned title, the bluntness of which is accurate. Specifically, the book ‘explores the social meanings, functions, and status of the English language in the late-medieval period’ (ix). Its ‘particular approach’ is ‘a sociolinguistic inquiry into the status of English in the late-medieval period: the meanings, reputation, and purposes of both the language in general and some of its varieties in particular’ (8). While ‘political, literary, and religious issues’ are important, M writes, the primary interest is always the ‘sociolinguistic practices [that] underwrote the language’s status irrespective of their use of it’ (8–9).

M disavows, then, any literary-critical purpose, offering critical readings of literary texts ‘only as platforms to talk about larger issues of social practice and the semiotics of language’ (19). This is slightly overmodest, as the readings of the temptation scenes in Sir Gawain and the green knight and the language of the clerks in the Reeve’s tale will I think have to be taken into account in future literary-critical consideration of these works.

The basis of this sociolinguistic investigation is the ‘ecology’ of Middle English, a key concept drawn from Einar Haugen’s The ecology of language (1972) and explored in detail in the first chapter. This transfers the more usual sense of ecology to ‘the structured, learned, and analysable sociolinguistic relationships that obtain between speakers and the linguistic varieties they use—whether channels, registers, dialects, or distinct languages—in sustaining particular social and even natural environments’ (10). The resulting account of Middle English, ‘by describing who uses what linguistic varieties under which circumstances and with what social effects, characterizes the relations between a speech community’s linguistic repertoire … and social practices. These ecological practices, in turn, emerge from and enact the overarching status of a language’ (10).

Four chapters follow, the last of them an extended epilogue entitled ‘After Middle English’. M first looks at the English letters, supposedly the work of Henry III, circulated in support of the Provisions of Oxford in October 1258. These two letters are the only such official documents extant in English since the time of the Conqueror. There is nothing like them again until a proclamation of Henry V in 1416, to which M turns in the final chapter: these two vernacular moments, therefore, bookend his argument. In the third chapter, ‘Language, dialect, nation’, M examines the many statements made about English in relation to French and Latin in the Middle Ages, and this leads on to ‘What’s a dialect before it’s a dialect?’ which turns to the Reeve’s tale and Sir Gawain.

In recent years there has been a marked turn among both historians and literary critics toward the idea of emergent nationhood in the English Middle Ages. Even as the modern concept of nationhood undergoes a crisis there is ever more interest in its (possible) origins in the Middle Ages, most clearly suggested by Thorlac Turville...