The Dream of Language: Chaucer "en son Latin"

Taking its cue from the efforts to revive the Ojibwe language in the aftermath of residential schools' closure in Canada, this lecture draws on Giorgio Agamben's essay "The Dream of Language" to make a fresh exploration of the medieval history of language change. Reviewing Agamben's argument that the bilingual Latin–Italian Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (1499) marks the moment when Latin starts being viewed as a dead language, it traces the complex earlier perspectives on Latin and vernacular through a reverse chronology from Villon to Chaucer via Guillaume de Machaut and Dante's writings on language. The case is made that it is misleading to view the relation between Latin and vernacular in the Middle Ages as clear-cut and oppositional. Once we understand medieval writers to be working in a plurilingual and hence only semi-grammatical environment it becomes possible to see how notions of vernacularity and Latin were much more subtly entangled than it is usually assumed. Medieval writers, even in ostensibly monolingual texts, do not deal with a hard-edged distinction between Latin and vernacular, but instead work creatively with the often painful recognition that the power relations between languages involve loss and extinction. The figure of the dream, and also of a female dream-body, central to the playful multilingualism of the love between Polia and Polifilo in the Hypnerotomachia, is shown to be an earlier preoccupation of Chaucer through his creation of Criseyde. Drawing on Machaut's use of dreams to figure linguistic boundaries, Chaucer presents Criseyde as a prototype of Polia, the name and love of language, a figure of linguistic loss and death, yet also of hope and aspiration.