Quoting Speech in Early English (review)

Colette Moore’s contribution to Cambridge University Press’s Studies in English Language series confronts the tension between the pragmatics of a manuscript text and the editorial imposition of different pragmatic systems on its edited version, and so in many ways is about much more than quoting speech. Moore shows that the use of quotation marks in an edited text may conceal earlier strategies for marking speech or may result in distinctly defined speeches where an otherwise meaningful, or artful, underdetermined separation of voices exists in the manuscript version. The result of such editing of texts is, as Moore states, “a pragmatic palimpsest,” a figurative use of the term that conveys her notion that the inscription of our modern punctuation systems over preexisting strategies for marking speech is effectively to layer “modern interpretive apparatus onto pre-modern lexical content” (182), a process that ultimately alters the relationship between the text and its reader.

Moore’s study is indeed firmly grounded in historical pragmatics and its dimensions are triangular, touching as it does on paleographical, linguistic, and literary aspects of texts. Through case studies, she assesses the textual apparatus on the manuscript page, provides linguistic analysis of corpus data, and brings textual analysis to a broad spectrum of genres (legal, religious, historical, and literary) in order to interpret the ways direct speech is flagged in different textual contexts. Limitations of space preclude a depth that would have given greater satisfaction, but Moore’s presentation of short case studies allows for a disciplined and perceptive overview of reported discourse in the late medieval period. She demonstrates some schemes for marking speeches, illustrates the interpretative potential of taking these strategies into account, and therefore promotes careful reading of speeches in premodern texts, by reference to textual and material contexts.

Moore’s methodology is clearly laid out in the introduction, in which she discusses the editing of reported speech, with the premise that, whereas the modern convention of quotation marks is “a necessary interpretational layer,” their use alters “the pragmatic functions of a [pre-modern] text, creating a layer of mediation” (10). In the first of her central chapters, Moore describes and analyses some strategies of marking speech, beginning with the material page. Her case studies are based on samples from several manuscripts of Piers Plowman and Nicholas Love’s The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, chosen for their numerous passages and different levels of reported discourse. While Moore is careful to analyze and explain scribal practice for marking reported discourse, she does not provide a key for her transcriptions, a lack that was compounded by the scarcity of images of manuscript samples against which to compare her transcriptions or descriptions: just two images from manuscripts of Piers Plowman are reproduced in an appendix. While Moore identifies a number of ways that scribes could mark direct discourse to guide the reader, she notes that the apparatus is principally employed not so much to flag direct discourse per se as to draw attention to voices of authority.

When she turns to the exploration of lexical marking, Moore’s study is on more secure ground. While she takes into account a variety of pragmatic markers (interjections, vocatives, deictic pronouns, tense switching, explicit quotatives), she gives special attention to repeated inquit phrases. She recasts the idea that such phrases are formulaic by arguing that the most common verbs of speaking demonstrate grammaticalization. This she illustrates through the example of seien, “to say.” Grammaticalization is defined by syntactical fixing that shifts the lexical component away from having ideational or semantic force. The search of the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse that Moore undertook for this section had, she admits, its limitations, dependent as it was on editorial quotation marks as indicators of direct speech. While a necessary strategy, this potentially has the drawback of excluding ambiguous discourse that may have been rendered indirect by an editor. Moore also uses corpus data from a sample of legal texts in her...