Macaronic Sermons, Bilingualism, and Preaching in Late-Medieval England by Siegfried Wenzel (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER undergraduate edition will not be a task undertaken by Professor Cawley, who regrettably passed away in 1993. This Early English Text Society edition is, however, a worthy testament to his scholarly achievements, as well as to the more than able editorial work of Martin Stevens. VICTOR I. SCHERB University of Texas at Tyler SIEGFRIED WENZEL. Macaronic Sermons, Bilingualism, and Preaching in Late-Medieval England. Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts Se­ ries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pp. ix, 361. $52.50. This book answers many questions and raises others of a controversial na­ ture, because the author puts forward arguments that call into question the influential theories advanced by Owst and Lecoy de la March regarding the delivery of macaronic sermons. A high proportion of the sermons surviving in England from the period 1350 to 1450 contain mixtures of English and Latin. Wenzel argues that the texts as we have them represent the way in which they were delivered. This draws attention to the linguistic competence of both the preachers and of the congregations who heard the sermons. Sometimes there is very little mixing of Latin and English, perhaps just a piece of vernacular gloss­ ing (e.g., "habeatis internum dolorem, an inderlych sorwe in herte," p. 15). Sometimes a whole sentence of a Latin text is translated into English. Elsewhere we find Latin expressions stitched into a sermon whose main language is English. To all these differing types of linguistic mixture the author applies what he felicitously calls "taxonomic rigor" (p. 29), and presents full analyses of every type according to his classification. The ma­ terial is complicated, and so is the taxonomy, and readers will have to be as painstaking in their attention to this book as the author himself. Fortu­ nately, the introductory chapters are helped by the inventories of manu­ scripts and sermons, which make up Appendix A. Forty-three sermons are classified as "fully macaronic." These are ser­ mons that contain "a significant amount of English material embedded in the Latin context" (p. 29). Sermons of this type form the most important part of the analysis and are to be found in thirteen separate manuscripts, 302 REVIEWS which "belong to three different kinds or types of late-medieval manu­ scripts: the notebook, the miscellany, and the sermon collection" (p.60). None of them contains macaronic sermons exclusively nor "any explicit statement that would tell us for whom or for what purposes the material was collected" (p.63).Stylistic analysis shows that they were deliberately constructed in macaronic register, and the controversial question as to the form in which they were actually delivered has to be addressed.The exem­ plars on which these extant sermons are based have disappeared, and with them the answer to this question. Wenzel discards the explanation that a preacher composing a sermon in Latin would switch to English because he was unfamiliar with a technical term in Latin: "...rather their switching is a random phenomenon for which all-encompassing causes, whether linguistic, stylistic, or psychologi­ cal are hard to find" (p.101).The explanation he advances is that the preachers deliberately switched between English and Latin for rhetorical effect, and the condition in which they survive suggests that they were written for perusal by clerical readers.The base language was English, with a mixture of Latin.In other words these sermon writers are to be regarded as "functionally and fluently bilingual" (p.112), and their sermons were delivered macaronically.Wenzel's thesis contradicts the long-held opinion that sermons for the clergy were preached in Latin, and those for the laity in English.He presumes that the laity would have been comfortable and informed while listening to sermons containing a mixture of English and Latin. This theory makes us think about contemporary remarks concerning the laity's command ofLatin.One thinks of a sermon preached by Archbishop Richard FitzRalph "in processione Londoni facta pro rege" (dated 1346-47 ?) in which he says that he will deliver the sermon in English rather than do everything twice, in Latin and then in English, because the "insipiditas" ofthe lay members ofthe congregation would prevent them...