Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and its Neighbours (review)

Medieval multilingualism generally and the use of French in multilingual contexts in particular are currently growth areas for research. Whereas the relation between the vernacular and Latin throughout Europe, and between English and French in England, has always preoccupied medievalists, the direct and indirect assimilation of ideas from postcolonial studies has led to the questioning of a range of disciplinary premises that are grounded in modern notions of nation states and national languages. Anglicists and Anglo-Norman scholars have thus begun to understand how porous and elastic linguistic boundaries were, and they are no longer wedded to an account of multilingualism in Britain that concentrates on the emergence of English as the national language; more generally, medievalists are taking stock of the extent of the use of French outside France in Flanders, Italy, or further afield, of the complexity of the phenomenon, and of how our knowledge has been occluded by traditional research methods that foreground the centrality of Paris, major French courts, and the emergence of a French nation state, other manifestations of French being regarded as peripheral or derivative. As this field is just opening up, there is something inevitably piecemeal about the volume under review here, based on a conference held in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2006. The coverage of the topic is thus uneven: there is nothing on the use of French in the Iberian Peninsula or in the Eastern Mediterranean, very little on Southern Italy and Sicily. There is also some unevenness in the presentation of the fourteen chapters: some are polished articles, packed with informative notes, while others read very much as conference papers. It is also frustrating that the volume lacks the usual editorial apparatus: it has no notes on contributors, no index, and no abstracts. There are nonetheless some fine and riveting contributions. David Trotter demonstrates with magisterial aplomb how English and French dictionaries may occlude as much as reveal information about language use, and even the language to which individual words may belong. Ad Putter reinterprets provocatively, but persuasively and wittily, references to multilingualism and bilingualism in Gerald of Wales and other sources. Remco Sleiderink offers a useful synthesis of our current state of knowledge concerning the dissemination of French literature in the Low Countries. Daniela Delcorno Branca highlights how recent research reveals that the Italian readership of Arthurian literature in French was even more extensive than had been thought. Fabrizio Cigni gives a richly documented account of manuscript production in French in Liguria and Lombardy, and of the relation of these manuscripts to manuscripts in Italian and Latin. Finally, Gloria Allaire, Marie-José Heijkant, Carolyn Muessig, and Anthony Lodge offer fascinating analyses of particular hybridized texts or corpora (respectively, the Tristan en prose in Italy, Aquilon de Bavière, vernacular sermons, and late medieval administrative records from the Auvergne). Muessig’s work might have benefited from consideration of Occitan material, and I do not agree entirely with Lodge’s interpretation of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras’s multilingual descort, but in both cases the material presented and the linguistic commentaries thereon are nonetheless fascinating.