The first four essays in this book involve religious texts that take an evangelical attitude toward the vernacular. Written during a period when the power of words to persuade and enlighten was felt with a confidence unequaled before the Victorian era, these texts can be seen as parts of a concerted program of universal outreach, which demanded reflection on language as a means of access to knowledge and on the nature of useful (salvific) knowledge itself. Whether the targets of conversion are Lincolnshire peasants, South German townsfolk, or the Jews and Muslims of Spain and northern Africa, utility and persuasiveness...

Scholars tend to use ‘‘vernacular’’ as if it referred to a class of languages, but its meaning shifts according to temporal and geographical situation. Clearly, if English can be vernacular in one setting—say, tenth-century Europe—and just the opposite in another setting—twenty-first-century Dominica—vernacularity is not a quality but a relationship. The key to understanding vernacularity is its opposite: the closest (though still imperfect) descriptor we have for the languages that sit in contrast to vernacular is ‘‘standard,’’ which suggests that the organizing principle of the relationship is the power to standardize. Usually this relationship is framed in...

The tower of Babel and the multiplication of languages that attended its fall are a source of fascination for modern scholars intrigued by linguistic difference and hierarchy. For medieval preachers, however, language was only a means to an end, and their attention focused not on Babel but on its New Testament companion, Pentecost, where the ‘‘confusion of languages’’ is resolved by the apostles’ miraculous ability to speak to each in his own language.¹ The apostles’ speaking in tongues was regarded less as a matter of language per se than as a matter ofaccess, a concept central to the interaction...

When discussing the perfect vernacular in theDe vulgari eloquentia, Dante writes: ‘‘That it is exalted in power is plain. And what greater power could there be than that which can melt the hearts of human beings, so as to make the unwilling willing and the willing unwilling, as it has done and still does?’’¹ According to Dante, the illustrious vernacular has the power to reunite all that has been torn asunder and made imperfect by the hubristic attempt to build the tower of Babel. This perfect vernacular is, therefore, the universal language that will provide man with the tools...

This essay interrogates the relationship between gender and the use of the vernacular in the medieval German religious writings of Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210–82). Scholars of German vernacular religious literature began early in the twentieth century to postulate a close, perhaps even causal, relationship between women, reading, and the beginnings of vernacular literacy.¹ This line of thinking has often led to the assumption that vernacular writing was generally intended for a female audience, especially when written down by women and in a religious context. Correspondingly, early historians of mysticism understood the emergence of vernacular mystical texts as a direct...

The five essays that make up Part ii of this book cover more varied ground than the essays in Part i, but all focus in some way on vernacular textualities or communities. The vernacular is just as evangelical in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as in the thirteenth, as several writers discussed here testify: Nicole Oresme and Richard Ullerston, writing around 1400, are as concerned with disseminating knowledge as Giles of Rome a century earlier. But if efforts to make learning widely available were on the whole ever more ambitious during this period, they were also more controversial, sometimes to...

Christine de Pizan begins herCité des damesin despair at the misogyny present in the writings of ‘‘so many famous men—such solemn scholars, possessed of such deep and great understanding, so clear-sighted in all things.’’¹ The antifeminism common in both classical and Christian writing is indeed manifest to any reader, medieval or modern, and Christine was not alone among her contemporaries in observing it.² Far from sharing her dismay, however, other writers profited from the association between authority and misogyny. I argue in this essay that misogyny was an important tool used by some French authors to present...

Recent studies of Latin-to-vernacular translation during the central and late Middle Ages have shown that this activity was often implicated, whether in a contestative or supportive way, in a complex of relationships between cultures—clerical and lay, oral and literate, official and popular, masculine and feminine.¹

Useful and insightful as much of this work is, however, it tends to neglect the utilitarian pedagogical concerns that motivated many of the translators. In this essay, I intend to take seriously the stated intentions of translators like Nicole Oresme and John Trevisa, who argued for the utility of their translations as a means...

In 1355, the Commune of Florence agreed that the autonomous commercial court, the Mercanzia, should hear all cases before its tribunal not in Latin but in the vernacular, ‘‘especially so that those things which have been done or contracted in good faith in the vernacular shall not be drawn into malicious prosecutions through the subtlety of the law and through the method of legal judgments.’’¹ According to this institutionalization of the vernacular, Latin does not convey authority so much as it increases the risks a merchant must face. Consequently, given that the economic history of capitalism is largely a history...

The history of western European vernaculars is written in the language of the victors. One such victor is Parisian French, or what Chaucer calls ‘‘Frenssh of Paris,’’ which has long been a synecdoche for themission civilisatriceand already carried overtones of cultural sophistication by the thirteenth century. Another victor is Standard English, which began to coalesce in the late fourteenth century. In at least one way, the establishment of Standard English and French echoes the reestablishment of standard medieval Latin during the Carolingian revolution of the eighth and ninth centuries: in both cases the result was to widen the...

Bourdieu’s remarks on how authoritative groups make statements unsayable or exclude those who might say them will probably ring true for many who work in corporate environments of whatever kind.¹ But censorship is of course never as perfect as the invisible censorship described in the epigraph’s first paragraph—or, at any rate, never consistently so. Forms of perception and expression internalized through processes of education or training may ‘‘impose form’’ to the extent that they determine what counts as well-expressed statement, what genres or forms of expression count as authoritative, and what their standards of excellence are—even what kinds...

The four essays in this final group deal with the formation and elevation of national or ethnic languages and literatures in the half millennium after 1500. The choice of any specific topic in this vast field has an inevitable arbitrariness to it. However, each of the language situations discussed here, like that of English in the later medieval period, is in some sense marginal to western European vernacular politics, offering a perspective on this politics from a position geographically or symbolically near or beyond Europe’s edge. Each essay, that is, reflects on western European culture (or a specific polity, such...

In the period between 1150 and 1500, several dialects were spoken and written in the present Dutch-speaking region: what we know today as the Netherlands and about half of Belgium, including the towns of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent.¹ All of these earlier dialects, like modern Dutch and English, have Germanic roots. However, there were also many loanwords imported into these dialects from Old and Middle French, via cross-border contacts and through trading centers and aristocratic culture. French influence on the dialects of Middle Dutch dates from as early as the twelfth century. But since Latin was the language of the...

The early nineteenth century was a time of ‘‘national awakening’’ for most ethnolinguistic groups in the Habsburg Empire.¹ The revival of many forgotten and stateless peoples’ nationalist aspirations in Austria-Hungary and throughout eastern Europe moved one observer, the Romanian critic Titu Maiorescu, to predict that the nineteenth century would be called ‘‘the century of the nationalities.’’² He warned, however, that not every group would succeed in being recognized as a ‘‘nationality.’’ The key to achieving such desired recognition would be the development of a national language and literature. After all, he stated elsewhere, ‘‘language and nationality are . . ....

The late nineteenth century in India saw the revival of ancient Sanskritic texts such asSakuntalaby Kalidasa, identified as the fourth-century poet belonging to the ‘‘golden age’’ of the Gupta period, when Sanskrit literature, arts, and culture supposedly flourished and reached their high point.¹ As scholars have pointed out, such recuperation of an ancient literary and cultural past had an intimate relationship with the contemporary historical context. In the case of colonial India, claims to a ‘‘golden’’ Hindu past served to ‘‘instill pride among its members in the past and to create confidence in [the subordinate group’s] ability to...

Despite its Latin origins, thevernacularis itself a vernacular category. That is, the wide, informal use of the term in humanistic scholarship makes it an example of the phenomena it describes. Of varying importance across a variety of fields—art history and the history of architecture, folklore, history, the history of science, linguistics, literary studies, and musicology—the term belongs to no one of them in particular and possesses no consistent definition. Linguistics might have the best historical claim, inasmuch as one can trace the term’s application to language study at least as far back as Varro’sDe lingua...