Spoken and Written Language: Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages ed. by Mary Garrison, Arpad P. Orbán, and Marco Mostert (review)

This collection of papers in linguistics, socio-linguistics, and philology, all stem from a conference held in Utrecht in 1999, a full fourteen years earlier than publication. The prefatory material admits that much has been published on the relationships between Latin and the vernacular languages in the intervening period, and this volume seems to be occupying a curious place in the discourse, inviting readers to consider ‘whether the assumptions and conclusions of the contributions … have stood the test of time’, and in this light exhorting rigorous reading to be able to answer that question.

It is unusual for an academic volume to start so apologetically, and this is an odd frame from which to set the collection up; in fact, this publication does not conform readily with a number of academic standards of publications that the readership can expect, not unreasonably, from this publisher. Perhaps Brepols was not paying close attention when they put this one to bed. The volume lacks an Introduction, instead only including an anonymous and very brief preface. Given that there are two editors who are not contributors, it is not unreasonable to expect a more developed Introduction, perhaps guiding the reader to commonalities, issues of contention, and an overarching structure of the publication, as has been done for many of this volume’s stable mates. Moreover, there is no index. Neither is there any biographical information about the twenty contributors, and given that the volume is multilingual – eleven contributions in English, three in French, and six in German – it is surprising that there are no abstracts for each contribution. There is even a change in font size within one chapter.

But putting these matters to one side, the scholarship in this work is certainly to a high standard (at least as far as the English language papers are concerned), and the collection delivers some very useful insights into an array of contextual and linguistic issues around the relationships with Latin literacy of a variety of vernacular languages and their users, notwithstanding the fact that some decade and a half has passed since these works were written, and the preface notes that ‘in some cases the authors have updated their bibliography [sic]’.

These papers traverse a wide geography, dealing with issues of relationships, linkages, literacies, and the social context of interactions with Latin of a smorgasbord of antique and medieval languages, including Middle Welsh, Greek, Old Swedish, and related Scandinavian languages, Old and Middle Irish, Old English, a number of Romance languages (such as Castilian, Leonese, Old and Middle French, Gaulish Latin), and Old High German. In places, the contributions consider social conditions that influence usage, such as Michael W. Herren’s consideration of Frankish/Irish interactions between Adamnan and Arculf, Inger Larsson’s assessment of Scandinavian literacy (a field certainly progressed somewhat since 1999; see, for example, Zilmer and Jesch, eds, Epigraphic Literacy and Christian Identity (Brepols, 2012)) and Nicholas Brooks’s comparison of Latin usage in ninth-century Canterbury with Old English, and the possible gendering of the vernacular against Latin. There are also contributions that provide overviews of the (then current) state of play, such as Anthony Harvey’s review of Celtic-Latin vocabulary, and Michael Richter’s look at traces of Welsh in Latin recorded in an early fourteenth-century manuscript from Hereford Cathedral, and in such works it would take further research to know the extent to which such topics have advanced.

In all, this is a potentially very useful collection to specialists in these languages, and to scholars interested in well-worked examples of sociolinguistic interactions between different historical language groups, notwithstanding the production issues identified.