In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages edited by Mary Garrison, Arpad P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert
  • Eleanor Dickey
Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages. Edited by Mary Garrison, Arpad P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert, with the assistance of Wolfert S. van Egmond. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 24. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Pp. xi + 364. $106.

This volume publishes twenty papers originally presented at a 1999 conference on diglossia in the Middle Ages. In a short preface the editors, while giving no explanation of the fourteen-year time lag in publication, rather disarmingly admit that the field has moved on during that period and that if the same conference were to be organized today, the theme would be referred to as multilingualism rather than diglossia. On this point they are right: the concept of diglossia (the use of distinctly different “high” and “low” languages for different purposes within a single culture) enjoyed a brief fad as a template that could be slapped onto nearly any interesting linguistic situation in what sometimes amounted to an attempt to force them all into the same mold. Mercifully this fad has now been replaced by a desire for more nuanced and individual examinations of complex linguistic situations, with an increased awareness that many linguistic communities make use of more than two language varieties.

But this volume does not suffer from the problems often associated with work on diglossia; in fact, if the editors had not admitted that the theme of the conference was diglossia, readers would not be able to work that out from the contributions, most of which provide intelligent and sensitive analyses of specific instances of multilingualism. The title, however, is somewhat misleading, for most contributions are not concerned with the interaction of spoken and written language but with the use of different written languages in different ways. Despite the time lag in publication, the pieces remain useful, less for their theoretical contributions than for their insight into the particular historical settings described, most of which fall within the purview of this journal (though about a third of the contributions concern Romance) and many of which this reviewer found highly interesting.

The volume contains three contributions in French: A. Demyttenaere, “Qu’une femme ne peut être appelée homme: Questions de langue et d’anthropologie autour [End Page 516] du concile de Mâcon (585)”; M. van Uytfanghe, “L’ancien français (archaïque) et le fonctionnement de la communication verticale latine en Gaule (VIIe - VIIIe siècles)”; and M. Banniard, “Quelques exemples de compromis morphologiques au VIIIe siècle en Francia.” Six others are in German: A. Orbán, “Wie groß war der Einfluß des Griechischen auf die Sprache der (ersten) lateinischen Christen?”; W. Berschin, “Die Figur des Dolmetschers in der biographischen Literatur des westlichen Mittelalters (IV. - XII. Jh.)”; R. Bergmann, “Volkssprachige Glossen für lateinkundige Leser?”; A. Quak, “Rustice vel Teodisce appellatur oder: Warum schreibt man Glossen?”; E. Glaser, “Typen und Funktionen volkssprachiger (althochdeutschen) Eintragungen im lateinischen Kontext”; and D. Geuenich, “Sprach Ludwig der Deutsche deutsch?”

The remaining eleven contributions are in English: M. Richter, “Trace Elements of Obliterated Vernacular Languages in Latin Texts”; I. Larsson, “Nordic Digraphia and Diglossia”; A. Harvey, “The Non-Classical Vocabulary of Celtic Latin Literature: An Overview”; M. W. Herren, “The Cena Adamnani or Seventh-Century Table Talk”; N. Brooks, “Latin and Old English in Ninth-Century Canterbury”; R. Wright, “A Sociophilological Study of the Change to Official Romance Documentation in Castile”; R. Hofman, “Latin Grammars and the Structure of the Vernacular Old Irish Auraicept na nÉces”; C. D. Wright, “From Monks’ Jokes to Sages’ Wisdom: The Joca Monachorum Tradition and the Irish Immacallam in dá Thúarad”; D. Green, “Writing in Latin and the Vernacular: The Case of Old High German”; E. Rose, “Liturgical Latin in Early Medieval Gaul”; and A. Adamska, “Latin and Three Vernaculars in East Central Europe from the Point of View of the History of Social Communication.”

A considerable amount of multilingualism is thus expected on the part of the reader, who is...

pdf

Share