The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature ed. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, Nancy Warren (review)

REVIEWS complishing a miracle, Lancelot cries like a beaten child. Batt’s reading of this incident is particularly brilliant in its explanation of how Malory first offers a fantasy of wholeness and reintegration and then takes it away. Batt’s final chapter disputes the notion of the Arthurian legend as fundamentally nostalgic. Her discussion of commemoration and memorialization points to the ultimate impossibility of such strategies. She remarks, ‘‘The text movingly solicits our engagement, while it also partially dismantles the means of our remembering. Above all . . . Malory emphasizes the human body itself, in excess, beyond tractability and exemplarity, beyond precise articulation in language, as the primary site of literary and ethical interest’’ (p. 181). For Batt, Malory’s text is never comforting. Its beauty, its genius, is found in its unruliness , in its demand to be contextualized, and in its resistances to all contextualization. Martin B. Shichtman Eastern Michigan University Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren, eds. The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature . New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. 324. $59.95. If there is a single thesis that unites the essays in this volume, it is that when the vernacular languages broke free from Latin’s dominance, a flood of new, unexpected voices were heard whose struggle for recognition may be likened to that of an individual seeking release from servitude . The Oxford Latin Dictionary notes that the root of the word ‘‘vernacular’’ is ‘‘uerna,’’ a slave born in the master’s household, a common town-bred person. No citation associates the noun with languages, whereas that is the first meaning given in English dictionaries. The semantic range of the Latin noun encompassed something dependent, local, and inferior. The epithet the ‘‘mother tongue’’ retains the vernacular ’s association with domesticity and subordination. Little imagination was required to associate an inherent linguistic inferiority with its principal spokespersons: women, children, and illiterate males. Such ‘‘modPAGE 363 363 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:25 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ern’’ languages were judged unsophisticated, rustic, and a medium of communication for the uneducable. Latin was believed, as late as the mid-eighteenth century, even by notable grammarians such as Robert Lowth and lexicographers such as Noah Webster, along with Hebrew and Greek, to be one of the world’s three sacred languages, capable of rendering the most nuanced meaning with grace. It is because of this lingering suspicion that the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge did not introduce English and most modern foreign languages as a major course of study until the early twentieth century. The Vernacular Spirit traces the explosion of forces unleashed when the vernacular languages first challenged the authority of Latinitas. The emergence of the European vernaculars within the matrix of Latin Christendom was at first largely an effort at making the Bible accessible through a variety of ancillary texts. The task was formidable, as the languages had to show that they possessed the intellectual capacity and lexicon for such tasks, and additionally they had to restructure the system of authority that Latin and the clergy had established. While such a broad thesis as outlined above may have much to recommend it, the practice of constructing scholarship on such an essentialist a priori can produce work free of an historical context and at times naively dualist. For almost seven centuries, from the mid-sixth to the thirteenth centuries , the literate work of the monastery was lectio divinia and the ancillary commentary that such study entailed. With the emergence of the mendicants, particularly the Dominicans, the associative linguistic hermeneutic of monastic scriptural commentary was challenged by scholasticism ’s syllogistic search for truth. Although different in method and aims, both systems shared the same language, Latin. A century after Saint Bernard’s beautiful commentaries on scripture, however, sermons, translations, mystical meditations, lyrics, religious epics, letters, treatises , and exegetical works on all manner of subjects in most of the European vernaculars were being written by men and women, clerical and lay alike. Unlike monasticism and scholasticism, there is no univocal way to categorize this flowering of the vernacular because, by definition, it was an individual voice, largely free of the strictures of the Latin...