The Role of Technical Vocabulary in the Construction of the Medieval Romance Text Type

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper offers a new approach to the question of how technical language is used in the construction of the romance text type in medieval Britain.¹ The starting point for this investigation is my impression that the romance text type of the medieval period includes descriptions that seem more detailed than we might expect given the genre and its likely audience. Indeed, it includes a number of poems in which the vocabulary choices suggest a level of precision seeming to amount almost to the appropriation of a technolect for poetic purposes.² We may think of the Gawain-poet's use of terms that precisely distinguish breeds of deer (hiʒe for the height of head and antlers, paumes for terminal portions of antlers, brode for extremities of low, wide-slung antlers) and his deployment of the technical term hastletteʒ (pieces of wild pig killed on a nobleman's hunt), which is attested only three times in the corpus of Middle English, in the sections of the poem dealing with the hunt and the treatment of the kill.³ Further evidence for the use of precise terminology is provided by the romance Sir Degrevant; see, for example, the description of the bed belonging to the story's heroine, Melidor:

Hur bede was of aszure,With testur and celure,With a bryght bordureCompasyd ful clene. And all a storye as hyt wasOf Ydoyne and Amadas,Perreye in ylke a plas,And papageyes of grene.The scochenus of many knyghtOf gold and cyprus was idyght,Brode besauntus and bryght,And trewelovus bytwene.Ther was at hur testereThe kyngus owun banere;Was nevere bede rychereOf empryce ne qwene.Fayr schetus of sylk,Chalkwhyghth as the mylk,Quyltus poyned of that ylk,Touseled they ware;Coddys of sendal,Knoppus of crystalThat was mad in WestfalWith women of lare.Hyt was a mervelous thingTo se the rydalus hyngWith mony a rede gold ryng,That home upbare.The cordes that thei on ranthe Duk Betyse hom wan;Mayd Medyore hom spanOf meremaydenus hare.

(ll. 1489–520)⁴

This depiction includes the place of manufacture of the crystal knobs that decorate the bed (Westphalia) and details about the curtains, the rings that support them (made of "rede gold"), and the cords on which they run.

Despite the examples referred to above, this precision in the lexis of the romances has not been much noticed by scholars. The romances of medieval England have generally been categorized as somewhat déclassé versions of their Continental French ancestors: as a genre, it is "judged low-class on account of … its reliance on stereotypes, formulae and conventional plot structures."⁵ As far as the language is concerned, Derek Pearsall deems the genre to be one of "formulaic motifs and verbal formulae."⁶ Nicola McDonald, too, refers to medieval romance's "formulale diction."⁷ These appraisals, all focused on the rather unsophisticated quality of the writing and the likely audiences of the genre, do not notice any particular use of vocabulary that might further our understanding of the construction of the text type and our interpretation of what constitutes technical language in the medieval period.

There are few discussions of the use of technical language in medieval text types and even fewer that are focused on romances. Middle English Word Studies: A Word and Author Index includes summaries of twenty studies that make explicit reference to technical terminology, but of these only three concern romances (two discuss the usages in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight noted above; one considers the phrase kan ke dort, which appears in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde).⁸ One possible exception is W. A. Daven-port's examination of the vocabulary of Sir Degrevant, in which he points to the presence in the romance of a number of what may be technical terms from fields such as armor and heraldry, castle architecture, and clothing and soft furnishings, noting that many of the lexical items in that romance are otherwise...