Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature by Jonathan Hsy (review)

Jonathan Hsy’s compelling addition to the ever-growing list of exciting scholarship published in the Interventions series of the The Ohio State University Press is a study of “how multilingualism and commerce shape texts written in medieval contact zones” (p. 4). Redefining the “contact zone” for his purposes not as the space of colonial encounter but rather as that of “more mundane interactions of the sort facilitated by trade or travel” (p. 5), Hsy joins others who have written in recent years about texts produced by and for the middle estates, especially merchants and craftsmen. His own “intervention” in this area, as in the field of medieval literary studies more broadly, is both timely and innovative. Rather than looking simply at how figures engaged in economic transactions are represented in late medieval literature, Hsy instead investigates how “[m]ercantile and legal languages . . . readily informed both the style and the form of imaginative and literary texts from lyric poetry to romance to travel writing” (p. 5). As he demonstrates, the frequent code-switching in late medieval works (here predominantly Middle English, French, and Latin) does not simply have an effect, but also, and perhaps most importantly, an affect. Hsy stresses that medieval multilingualism is really translingualism which, in turn, is not simply the ability to move from one language to another, but rather, as he puts it, “the capacity of medieval people to both think and write in more than one language concurrently (p. 6, my emphasis). It is the impact of that simultaneity upon medieval literary production—as well as upon medieval conceptions of individual and social identity—in which he is most interested. The “trading tongues” of Hsy’s title, as he ably shows, create a late–medieval world “in perpetual motion,” a “hypermobile Middle Ages” (p. 9) whose shifting discourses of exchange might, he suggests, help us to think in new ways about our own increasingly global networks.

After an introduction that plays out some of the above ideas through paired readings of the mixed-language poem known as The Stores of the Cities and the satiric London Lickpenny—texts that together reveal the polyglot imaginary not only of their authors but also of London itself—Hsy turns in Chapter 1 to a delightfully unexpected juxtaposition of The House of Fame with The Shipman’s Tale in order to show “how London’s polyglot character informs Chaucer’s fictive portrayal of urban living” (p. 28). While Hsy’s focus on the passage in the dream vision in which Chaucer represents himself at home after his daily work at the Customs House (ll. 649–58) might at first seem slightly reductive, it ultimately becomes a fascinating entry into a reading of the work as a whole, and particularly its focus on sound of all kinds, as “a complex poetic inhabitation of city space and evocation of urban rhythms” (p. 34). Especially enjoyable here is Hsy’s comparison of Fame’s palace to the halls of Westminster, with “the noisy atmosphere outside [Fame’s] gates conveying the mixed vernacular settings of Aldgate and the waterfront” (p. 36). It is Chaucer’s labor in that “polyglot space” (p. 38) of mercantile London that then makes for a ready transition to The Shipman’s Tale and its fabliau of economic and sexual exchange. Here Hsy reviews some familiar ground—the tale’s infamous puns on cosynage and taillynge, for example—but goes beyond it to consider the way one may inhabit a language (or languages) like a kind of domestic space; as he observes, “Chaucer’s translingualism . . . requires us to actively consider how a single writer might be multiply located, inhabiting more than one linguistic space concurrently” (p. 56).

Chapter 2 turns from languages at home to “languages in motion,” particularly the “act of writing, and producing poetry, in transit” (p. 64). Here Hsy splits his attention between...