Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages (review)

Reviews 339 strikingly different from those of the first half of the fifteenth century or even the late nineteenth century. But perhaps this is why, as Rice argues, this reprint of Woodward's classic text is so important: it enables us to evaluate 'whether it [Renaissance humanism] has become a historical curiosity or whether, and to what extent, its traditional principles and ambitions can be given new meanings appropriate to our o w n society' (p. xvii). Natalie Tomas Department ofHistory Monash University Wright, Roger, ed., Latin and the Romance Languages in the Early Middle Ages, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; paper; pp. ix, 262; R R P US$16.95. This book preserves the name and comprises the papers of an international workshop held at Rutgers University in 1989. It was published as a hardback in 1991. In a brief preface the editor describes it as a reprint only (though with three minor corrections), produced because the original edition sold out, and in order to make the material available at a more accessible price. H e claims that, six years after the workshop itself, the papers are still 'at the cutting edge of the field', and that their authors 'represent a high proportion of the present experts in the topic'. These claims are bold but sustainable. Space does not permit a roll call, but the eighteen contributors are a distinguished company whose work will delight and probably surprise most scholars w h o care to take it up, while possibly unsettling many medievalists w h o have at any time patiently plodded their way through primary sources, content to accept uncritically such 340 Reviews traditional categories as 'medieval Latin', 'classical Latin', 'vulgar Latin', 'proto-Romance' or what have you. The emphasis is on metalinguistics—the ways in which language is perceived by those within a speech community, and by those outside it. All the contributors are linguists of the highest sophistication w h o are comfortable with the idea (which does not necessarily come easily to most w h o are constrained by necessity, if not desire, to dabble in original sources) that all writing is merely notation, and that language is really about sound and utterance. Let m e illustrate the challenge of this work with an anecdote. A former teacher of mine served in the British army during the war, attached to a West Country regiment stationed in Norfolk. As an Australian, he had no great difficulty understanding the speech of both his o w n troops and of the local East Anglians, but they found each other at times incomprehensible. This in itself is interesting, but of greater interest is the fact that the local East Anglian fishermen apparently found the Friesian Dutch relatively easy to communicate with. The point of the anecdote, of course, is that the formal distinction between 'English' and 'Dutch' was largely illusory: these are categories that are imposed by convention: by geography, by politics, by the power of the media, and by our natural desire for order. The reality, however, was very different. If w e could take away all such imposed perceptions, each speech community might make surprising choices about those other communities with which i t felt the closest linguistic kinship. Many of the contributors concern themselves in this w a y with the redrawing of the boundaries between Latin and 'Romance'. Tore Janson (pp. 19-28) challenges us to ask ourselves why w e happily accept that 'English' is the native tongue of King Alfred, Chaucer and ourselves, and that 'Greek' has been spoken continuously from Homer's day to the present, while 'Latin' Reviews 341 somehow got marginalized, and Dante chose to write his Divine Comedy in 'Italian'. The fact is that Dante probably saw the distinction very differently: Janson would probably maintain that Dante saw himself as using one form of Latin for the Divine Comedy, and another (he called it gramatica) for his De vulgari eloquentia, while accepting both forms as participants in the same great linguistic tradition. It is w e w h o have seized on the distinctions he made, prised them apart and set them in concrete. In m y o w...