Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (review)

R. N. Swanson's liberating evocation of a medieval church that, for all its canons and councils, remained minimalist in its definitions of faith, may be imagined as the setting for Alastair Minnis's latest book, which takes as one of its points of departure the fact that, for various reasons, medieval intellectual life as pursued in the courts and schools left so much incomplete. Judicious silence, anxious irresolution, pragmatic inconsistency—all staple elements of theological discourse in its professional modes—created a fertile ground in which vernacular writing could discover and ply its distinctive creativity. "Thinking in poetry," to borrow J. A. Burrow's phrase, thrived in the late medieval period because, where theology in particular was concerned, the topics that exercised the thinkers, and that concern Minnis in this study, left so much work for the poets and other extramural writers to do. The role of good works in ensuring salvation, the remit of indulgences, the exegesis of scriptural passages, or the affective charge of religious relics—all challenged authors to bring arguments to conclusions unforeseen by university disputants, or to no conclusions at all, or to expose the provisionality or the reductiveness of such argument (hence Chaucer's burlesquing of the Strode/Wyclif debate on predestination in Troilus's agonized, but detrimentally unprofessional, philosophizing). The fact that even a dead vernacular poet might be well ahead of a living, professional theologian is soberly brought home to the reader of Thomas Gascoigne, who, in the course of a discussion of chastity, solemnly rehearses arguments the speciousness of which had been exposed decades earlier by the Wife of Bath.

That particular example of the way in which an argument could resound so differently in Latin and English does not feature in the present study, but this book is concerned with a rich variety of similar engagements. Over the course of the discussion, Minnis investigates many possibilities for reciprocity and mirroring between Latin and vernacular, treating both not merely as spoken and written languages, but also as textual, cultural, and institutional practices; and he imagines these discursive worlds as intimately involved, rather than being opposed to one another. Thus he is concerned not only with the ways in which "Middle English carried on the business of Latin intellectual culture" (x), but also with the extent to which "medieval Latin [might] be deemed a vernacular or a group of vernaculars" (xi); and in this context it is salutary to remember how long Latin remained an occupational dialect among schoolmen, and thus how much thinking (and surely even dreaming) must have been macaronic during this period and long afterward.

The first chapter, "Absent Glosses," provides a speculative overview of the unsystematic way in which fragments of intellectual culture trickled into English during the late fourteenth century. Using the efflorescence of contemporary French vernacular translation as one of his points of reference, Minnis concludes that England did not witness such grands projets because "the translatio studii ideal was tainted by the Lollards" (37). The very coherence of that conclusion may mean that it finds resistance even as it enables much further, fruitful discussion. But Minnis does some characteristically energizing intellectual history throughout the rest of the book, providing what amounts to an extensive commentary on selected passages, or showing how particular vernacular texts grow out of, and bear the weight of, contested traditions of thought. Chaucer and, to a greater extent, Langland focus the next two chapters in which Minnis revisits and historicizes uncertainties surrounding the salvation of righteous heathens and the authority of pardons. Chapters on Walter Brut and Margery Kempe follow, knitted together by their subjects' differing expressions of nonprofessional authority. In the final chapter, Minnis further models the enterprise of "valuing the vernacular" by extending the term's frame of reference to include "popular cultural beliefs and practices," and pursuing their interactions with practices sanctioned by the Church. Using religious relics as his testing ground, he mounts a rich...