Affective Literacies: Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages [1° ed.] 2503532365, 9782503532363

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Affective Literacies

LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Editorial Board under the auspices of The Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ian Moulton, Chair Arizona State University Frederick Kiefer University of Arizona Markus Cruse Arizona State University Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne Charles Zika University of Melbourne Advisory Board Jaynie Anderson University of Melbourne Susan Broomhall University of Western Australia Megan Cassidy-Welch Monash University Albrecht Classen University of Arizona Robert W. Gaston La Trobe University John Griffiths University of Melbourne Anthony Gully Arizona State University Catherine Kovesi University of Melbourne Paul Salzman La Trobe University Anne Scott Northern Arizona University Juliann Vitullo Arizona State University Emil Volek Arizona State University Retha Warnicke Arizona State University

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Volume 19

Affective Literacies Writing and Multilingualism in the Late Middle Ages by

Mark Amsler

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Amsler, Mark, 1949Affective literacies : writing and multilingualism in the late Middle Ages. -(Late medieval and early modern studies ; v. 19) 1. Literacy--Social aspects--Europe, Northern--History-- To 1500. 2. Multilingualism and literature--Europe, Northern--History--To 1500. 3. Languages in contact-- Europe, Northern--History--To 1500. 4. Latin language, Medieval and modern--Social aspects-Europe, Northern-- History--To 1500. 5. Latin literature, Medieval and modern-Translations--History and criticism. 6. Laity-- Books and reading--Europe, Northern-History--To 1500. 7. Authors and readers--Europe, Northern--History--To 1500. 8. Education, Humanistic--Europe, Northern-- History--To 1500. I. Title II. Series 302.2'244'094'0902-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503532363

© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/256 ISBN: 978-2-503-53236-3 Printed on acid-free paper

For Jason and Vivien

‘with one hand waving free silhouetted by the sea’

(Bob Dylan, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’)

Contents

Illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction xiii Chapter 1. Theorizing Medieval Literacies Chapter 2. Language Ideology and Marginal Latins

1 47

Chapter 3. Affective Literacies

101

Chapter 4. Reading Assimilation and Jewish Latin Textuality

149

Chapter 5. Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers

193

Chapter 6. Grammar of Unruly Latin in Middle English Writing

251

Chapter 7. ‘Clean and Chaste Latin’: Literacy, Humanism, and the Boy Jesus

303

After Words

363

Bibliography 379 Index nominum

415

Index rerum

418

Illustrations

Figures Figure 1, p. 119. Christine de Pizan, Cent ballades, London, BL, Harley MS 4431, fol. 4, Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, Paris. c. 1410–11. © The British Library Board. Figure 2, p. 120. Christine de Pizan, Proverbes moraux, London, BL, Harley MS 4431, fol. 259v, Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, Paris. c. 1410–11. © The British Library Board. Figure 3, p. 125. Grandes Heures de Rohan, Paris, BnF, MS lat. 9471, fol. 133r. 1430–33. By permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figure 4, p. 132. Leaf from a Book of Hours, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection, 58, Cleveland, Cleveland Art Museum. Amiens [?], c. 1490. By permission of Jeanne Miles Blackburn and the Cleveland Art Museum. Figure 5, p. 134. Gautier de Metz, Image du monde, Paris, BnF, MS f. fr. 574, fol. 140r. c. 1320. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plates Plate 1, p. 139. Leaf from a Book of Hours, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection, 21, Cleveland, Cleveland Art Museum. Master of the Gold Scrolls work­ shop, Bruges, c. 1410–15. By permission of Jeanne Miles Blackburn and the Cleveland Art Museum.

Plate 2, p. 140. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Wien, Österreichischen National­ biblio­thek, MS 1857, fol. 14v. Master of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Flanders, c. 1475. By permission of the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Plate 3, p. 141. Robert Campin. Merode Altarpiece. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Flanders, 1425–28. All rights reserved. By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Plate 4, p. 141. Robert Campin (and assistants). Madonna and Child with Saints in the Enclosed Garden, Samuel Kress Collection, 1959.9.3 (1388)/ PA. Flanders, 1440–60. By permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Plate 5, p. 142. Book of Hours, Use of Rouen, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Buchanan e.3, fol. 74r. Rouen, c. 1500. By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Acknowledgements

M

any people have helped get this book written. It has truly been a collaborative, group event. Thanks to all those who have joined in or listened to me at Kalamazoo, The Medieval Academy, Leeds, MLA, ICHoLS, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Bristol, University of Tasmania, University of Adelaide, and other colloquia and seminars, and especially thanks to those who have written or talked back, offered suggestions or corrections or counterarguments. I thank those who gave me helpful readings of individual chapters and sections in earlier stages: James Dean, Ruth Evans, William Frawley, JoAnn Moran, Elizabeth Robertson, Elaine Stotko, and my students past and present, who always find creative and striking ways to remind me that writing and reading are not just what I think. For their advice and rebuttals in later stages of the writing, thanks to Stephanie Hollis, John Joseph, Doug Kibbee, Constant Mews, Jim Miller, Ad Putter, and the editors and anonymous readers for the Late Medieval and Early Modern Studies series. Early on, up and down, my thinking about language and theory has been sharpened by Philip Goldstein and Tom Leitch and their questions and debate. Tracy Adams, Elizabeth Archibald, Mary Carruthers, Ray Clemens, David Cram, Ruth Evans, Andrew Lynch, Philippa Maddern, Jenna Mead, Ad Putter, Elizabeth Robertson, Stephanie Trigg, and Nicholas Watson demonstrate with their shout outs, critical attention, scholarship, and encouragement how far flung yet connected and congenial a critical academic network can be. Anna Cushen was a lifesaver helping format the references. Kristen Liesch is an eagle-eyed copyeditor sup­reme. Claire Mabey has kept the book on track and in shape. I heartily appreciate David Cram’s arranging my stay at Jesus College, Oxford, enabling me to work closely with key manuscripts at a crucial time. Thanks also to Jim Gee, Jo Ann Pagano, Bill Pinar, Bill Stanley, and Tony Whitson for keeping

xii

Acknowledgements

the faith and the edge in curriculum theory and pedagogy. Vivien Law and Elaine Stotko helped me think through this project, and they should have had a chance to see it finished. I miss them. Louis Kelly, whose work on medieval grammatical theory has instructed me, said he would read it. I hope he still will. I appreciate the support of several academic institutions and research groups: University of Delaware, whose research grants-in-aid enabled me to keep medieval studies, linguistics, and literacy studies tied together in my teaching and research; University of Auckland, the Faculty of Arts, and the English department research funds; Network for Early European Research (funded by the Australian Research Council), whose members have shared with me new intellectual opportunities and knowledges in the southern hemisphere; the Worldwide University Network and its research strand on Medieval Multilingualism. Earlier versions of chapters or sections have appeared in Essays in Medieval Studies: Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (ed. by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose), Medieval Multilingualism and its Francophone Neighbours (ed. by Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz), and Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn (ed. by Keith Brown and others). Thanks to the editors and publishers to reprint them here. This work could not have been completed without the assistance of the curators and staff of various manuscript and visual arts collections: Bodleian Library (Oxford), Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), British Library (London), Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), Bibliothèque muncipale (Rouen), Österreichische National­ bibliothek (Vienna), Newberry Library (Chicago), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). My appreciation, too, go to Jeanne Miles Blackburn and the helpful librarians and manuscript curators at the University of Auckland and John Carter Brown Library (Brown University). Finally, to Lisa — for all of it and more. And the crew: Sarah, Jason, Geoffrey, Andrew, Rowan, Laylah, Cameron. To Spain!

Introduction Multilingualism, Discourse, Retext

… as raveling out signifies Penelopes telam retexere, the unweaving of a web before woven and contexted. (Thomas Nashe, Lenten Stuff, 1599)

R

ichard de Bury (1287–1345) was an ambitious, anxious man, briefly Treasurer of England, Clerk of the Privy Seal, and High Chancellor before settling in as Bishop of Durham for the rest of his life. De Bury was also a book collector and advocate for what he described as a new kind of literacy, which he associated with Italian humanism but which also continued many traditional aspects of hieratic clerical literacy. De Bury composed his Philobiblon (if he did compose it) in Latin around 1340, at a time when more and different lay readers had access to more manuscript texts and reading situations in both Latin and the vernaculars. The situation worried de Bury, and he felt that the friars were partly to blame. Books, he wrote, are for the best-educated moral authorities, not commodities to be circulated widely in a society. Latin books should be treated with reverence, authoritative readers and their interpretations should be respected, and authors’ names should be properly attached with authority to the texts they composed. In Philobiblon, the personified character of Books (Libri) launches into an apocalyptic complaint about how authoritative Latin texts have become diminished in status in the new literacy environment. Learned clerics and friars have undermined textual culture by giving up their proper duties, namely, to regulate literate culture and learning and prepare themselves to preach effectively, especially against heretics.1 After criticizing the clergy for abdicating their gatekeeping duties and their literate authority backed by Latin learning, Books turns to the laity. She 1 

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 42–43; see pp. 86–87.

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criticizes those fourteenth-century textual attitudes and material practices that she says have caused the decline in clerical learning and undermined the status of authoritative literacy. Books the allegorical concept speaks about books the objects. The ideal type criticizes its tokens, or rather, its false others. Books, she says, have become everyday commodities, hoarded by seamstresses and cobblers and indiscriminately given by others to ‘Jews, Saracens, heretics, and infidels’ (paganis). Books, says Books, should be revered and cultivated, but instead they have been ‘betrayed’ ‘by worthless compilers, translators, and transformers’ (per pravos compilatores, translatores et transformatores) who impose new authors’ names on copies of old texts, thereby disrupting the proper chain of textual authority. Books have also been corrupted by ‘treacherous copyists’ (falsis scriptoribus), bad interpreters, and error-prone translators.2 The literate archive has become corrupt because the proper sign relations among authors, titles, and texts have been fractured and released into freeplay. Books also criticizes unnatural lay book ownership and uses of scripture and commentaries. Speaking on behalf of all texts, Books chastises book makers, handlers, and owners for whom books have become fetish commodities and raw material: For in us the natural use (naturalis usus) is changed to that which is against nature (contra naturam), while we who are the light of faithful souls everywhere fall a prey to painters knowing nought of letters (litterarum ignaris), and are entrusted to goldsmiths to become, as though we are not sacred vessels of wisdom, repositories of gold leaf. We fall undeservedly into the power of laymen (in laicorum dominium), which is more bitter to us than any death, since they have sold our people for nought, and our enemies themselves are our judges.3

De Bury’s sexually charged language — contra naturam — associates clerical literacy and authority with straight sexuality and improper lay uses of books with queerness, commercial materialism, transgressive reading, and of course heresy. Modern historians and critics often praise de Bury for his avid book collecting and humanism, but as the above passage indicates, de Bury was not entirely in sympathy with humanist ideals.4 De Bury’s literate ideology and book collecting (his famous book collection seems to have disappeared, if it ever really existed) rely on a traditional and hieratic model of writing and reading controlled by friars and learned clergy. For de Bury, the book owning and reading lay man or woman was a social threat, an unnatural, queer reading subject whose touch dirtied the page. 2  3  4 

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 47–49. Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, ed. and trans. by Thomas, pp. 50–51. For example, Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage, pp. 62, 73–74.

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De Bury’s diatribe points to one of the most important debates and struggles regarding literacy and textuality in the late Middle Ages, namely conflicts and overlaps between clerical and lay literacies in Latin and vernaculars. Latin and vernacular literacies competed for discursive space, mapping complex social networks of reading and writing which linked as well as divided clergy and laity. Literacy was a social site of connection as well as conflict. Beginning in the twelfth century, medieval Europe saw significant transformations of traditional textuality and reading practices. In this book I argue that concepts of multimodal and multilingual literacies help us understand how and why those changes happened and what differences they did or didn’t make to formations of textual culture and literate identities. By ‘multimodal literacies’ I mean the ways people access texts, participate in literate communities and construct social identities using metacognitive strategies, textual practices, written signs, and speech — for example, through illustrations accompanying written text, by hearing a text read aloud, by reading or hearing read a translation of a text originally composed in an elite or restricted language, or by reading a text composed in more than one language. Medieval multimodal literacies emerged partly as a response to multilingualism. As a descriptive and critical concept, ‘multilingual literacies’ refers to the contact or juxtaposition of different languages within literate or discursive space. Multilingualism and language mixing were the norm in later medieval Europe. There were various kinds of multilingual communities, which often included a pervasive Latin official discourse in religious and official contexts, other religious or authoritative languages (Hebrew, Classical Arabic), different lay or non-traditional Latins, and one or more vernaculars used in households, courts, streets, shops, pulpits, law courts, and royal administration. In post-1100 northern medieval Europe, the primary focus of this book, written Latin, Hebrew, and the vernaculars constituted a multilingual network of literate codes and discursive practices. This book explores how discursive struggles, different linguistic communities, and changing literate practices informed textual cultures and social formations mostly in northern Europe between 1150 and 1510. It is important to begin with the twelfth century because in that period work on grammar, poetics, and reading had already begun to alter the strict hieratic literacy which de Bury still appealed to in the fifteenth century as an abandoned ideal. I end with the 1510 refounding of St Paul’s grammar school (London) as a model humanist school because grammar and grammar schools illustrate clearly some of the implications of the rearticulation of Latin and vernacular literacies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Scenes of literacy education, in schools, households, and parish ­churches, were often contested sites of knowledge transfer and textual a­ uthority.

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The refounded St Paul’s grammar school and its curriculum manifest some of the overlaps between late medieval literacy education and emerging humanist modernity through elite public literacy and the ideal of the humanist child. As we shall see, broad social and cultural trends are embedded in situated acts and events even though individual literate events are not entirely synchronous with broad historical movements. The pathways of medieval literacy and education do not constitute a single line of historical progress; medieval literate events and situations were uneven, up and down, by turns progressive and conservative, inclusive and exclusive, sometimes both at once. New manuscript technologies, reading practices, and language attitudes (to both Latin and the vernaculars) challenged traditional social identities and institutional orders. New and more widely accessible multilingual literacies produced new, sometimes transgressive literate subjects and textualities, with different discursive, economic, or religious clout. De Bury’s anxiety about literate change and the wider medieval struggles over textual authority and who can have access to and interpret scripture point to what literacy theorists call a ‘power’ model of literacy. The power model can be distinguished pragmatically and theoretically from the conduit and marker models of literacy.5 In the conduit model, texts are regarded as relatively neutral channels for transferring information — ‘cognitive content’, ‘cultural values’, stable meanings, traditions, personal expression — from writer to reader or from authority to novice. Texts as conduits are said to be transparent and to ‘contain’ information. They are presumed to be controlled by individual writers who encode intentional meaning in the text which readers then decode appropriately to receive or ‘know’ what the text ‘says’. In the conduit model, writing is described as encoding intended meaning. Reading is idealized as what good (or proper or mature) readers do, and proper reading is governed by claims to authorial meaning and intention, for example, deriving the ‘proper’ informational, allegorical or spiritual meaning said to be enclosed in a text. The power model of literacy shares many of the conduit model’s assumptions (transfer of information, uncomplicated sender-receiver relation), but it privileges a dominant system of meaning in texts. Written texts are for presenting and encoding ‘universal’ meanings or for defining a national, cultural or interpretive tradition.6 De Bury’s Philobiblon presents an unusually explicit version of what 5 

Marvin, ‘Constructed and Reconstructed Discourse’; Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New; Frawley, Text and Epistemology, pp. 129–39; Reddy, ‘The Conduit Metaphor’; Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 31–49. For similar models with different names, see Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, pp. 19–125. 6  For critiques of the Power model, see Reddy, ‘The Conduit Metaphor’; Frawley, Text

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the power model wishes to achieve. In the power model, people’s material circum­ stances, social prestige, and access to power are evaluated in terms of whether they can or should be permitted to participate in literate activities in acceptable ways, defined largely by schooling, standard language, and dominant discourse genres.7 The power model seeks to control the forms and distribution of information, while it dismisses as irrelevant or demonizes the material and cultural conditions which give rise to different literate abilities and strategies. The power model of literacy constructs and maintains hegemony. Universalized reading and writing are correlated with ‘native ability’, ‘intelligence’, ‘social worth’, or ‘breeding’. Standard Latin or Standard English is simply ‘good grammar’. Scribner and Cole cite an extreme example of power model literacy among the Vai people of Liberia. The Vai maintain three different literacies, primarily for men and keyed to different kinds of instruction and functions: English with Roman characters in formal schooling for wider communication; Vai with syllabary writing for personal and business communications and records; Arabic for Qu’ran reading. This structured written multilingualism is a version of what is often referred to as diglossia, or in the Vai’s case, triglossia.8 Whereas Vai English writing uses a quasi-phonetic script, the Vai tribal syllabary uses written symbols that do not directly correspond to individual sound units. As a result, Vai texts demand a great deal of training on the part of readers and are difficult to read even for highly skilled scribes.9 The Vai tri-literate situation illustrates how all literate technologies to one degree or another are embedded within structures of privilege, access, textual codes, and literacy education. Scribner and Cole’s research also indicates that cognitive development and literate competence do not depend exclusively on alphabetic literacy nor on monolingual dominance. Nonetheless, the functional literate differentiation among the Vai uncovers the politics of literate domination. In both the conduit and the power models, reading and writing are deployed to maintain a dominant culture; the acquisition of literacy is ordered according to upward mobility or the reproduction of social, economic, and class differences and Epistemology, pp. 129–39; Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 67–89; Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction, trans. by Nice, pp. 71–106; Macedo, Literacies of Power, pp. 9–36; Crowley, Standard English, pp. 106–37. 7  Freire calls this the ‘banking model’ of education; see Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Ramos, pp. 71–86. 8  See the classic description in Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’. 9  Scribner and Cole, The Psychology of Literacy, esp. pp. 23–34, 62–87.

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or hegemonic meaning. Both models deploy language ideology, written forms, and schooling to construct individuals as appropriate or inappropriate literate subjects within the context of different sets of skills, texts, and reading strategies. Both models presume that standard written language constitutes grammaticality and proper, acceptable speech. Both models find multilingualism within a restricted domain or context to be problematic. Unlike the conduit and power models, the marker model constructs not a single Literacy but a network of literacies as contingent semiotic and discursive practices. The marker model draws on linguistic ‘markedness’ theory to pro­ pose another way of thinking about literacies, where writing and reading are heterogeneous multilingual activities with competing textual practices. Following Trubetzkoy, Jakobson argued that The general meaning of a marked category states the presence of a certain (whether positive or negative) property A; the general meaning of the corresponding unmarked category states nothing about the presence of A, and is used chiefly, but not exclusively to indicate the absence of A. The unmarked term is always the negative of the marked term, but on the level of general meaning the opposition of the two contradictories may be interpreted as “Statements of A” vs. “no statement of A,” whereas on the level of “narrowed,” nuclear meaning, we encounter the opposition “Statement of A” vs. “statement of non-A”.10

Grammatically, a marked term or feature such as pluralization or tense adds a new element and new meaning to the base or unmarked form. Phonologically, a marked feature such as voicing adds a phonemic feature to an unmarked phoneme ([f ] > [v]). Semantically, an unmarked word might have wide distribution, whereas a marked word restricts meaning to a smaller set; Latin dextra signifies not only right hand but hand in general, whereas the marked word sinistra signifies only the left hand. The phonological, grammatical, and semantic domains are constructed by the interrelations and hierarchies of marked and unmarked features or terms, within each domain and across domains. Markedness is distributed throughout linguistic levels (phonological, grammatical, semantic). Dominant or normative forms and modes are unmarked, taken for granted or generally accepted in a given social context, whereas marked forms and discourses are exceptional or nondominant or even disputed (for example, in English standard and nonstandard forms of you plural). The marker model helps us reaccess the absent and the unsaid or repressed in literate discourses and language use. By bringing written discourse’s other back into the 10 

Jakobson, ‘Shifters’, p. 136; see Chandler, Semiotics, pp. 110–18.

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textual field, all language use becomes marked within a contested field. There is no fundamental or original language moment or grammatical form from which all other forms depart or derive except as the product of ideological work. So-called unmarked, standard or given forms are products of ideological work, maintaining and governing regimes of power and truth. The generic, syntactic, and semantic oppositions of marked/unmarked structure the dominant social understandings of what is considered natural and deviant. In the marker model, those oppositions become a critical back draft for opening up, discerning and historically critiquing difference and domination. Turning to late medieval lit­eracies, the marker model foregrounds the contest between dominant and subordinate, literate and illiterate, Latin and vernacular, legitimate and illegitimate, authoritative and unruly. A marker model enables us to reimagine literacies as a fluid field of interrelated activities, and we can begin to read how norms of gender, language code, competence, social prestige, and rationality are inscribed into linguistic and social practices and also how some heterodox texts and readers were already resisting, rewriting, or transgressing those norms in their literate practices. In literacy theory, discourse markers such as language, style, text type, manu­ script format, and interpretive responses not only establish the field for writerreader relations but also constitute ways in which writers and readers fashion literate groups or literate identities. Marking is about difference and association. The marker model posits a contested field of literacies, a hyperliteracy, where writing, reading and power are constitutive of agency, difference and the play of meaning. Different literacies are networks of social and linguistic markers and cannot be defined by a single criterion nor by a unified practice based on a single standard, set of skills or language type.11 The concept of multiliteracy depends on the important distinction between Primary and Secondary Discourses. According to James Gee, Primary Discourse ‘gives us our initial and often enduring sense of self and sets the foundations of our culturally specific vernacular language (our “everyday language”), the language in which we speak and act as “everyday” (non-specialized) people, and our culturally specific vernacular identity’.12 A Primary Discourse constitutes a kind of apprenticeship early in life when we are socialized as members of particular families within a specific socio-cultural environment. Secondary Discourses are acquired ‘within the “public sphere” 11  See Marvin, ‘Constructed and Reconstructed Discourse’; Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, pp. 1–3, 101; Gee, The Social Mind, pp. 107–19; Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 150–222 (on language use and types of people). 12  Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, p. 156.

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[…] within institutions that are part and parcel of wider communities, whether these be religious groups, community organizations, schools, businesses, or governments’.13 In practice, the line between Primary and Secondary Discourses is not fixed. Families and social groups might incorporate aspects of a prestigious or desired Secondary Discourse within their Primary Discourse, thereby creating a kind of hybrid Discourse. A social group’s Secondary Discourse does not always correlate with dominant culture. As we shall see, literacies emerge in Primary or Secondary Discourse or in the borderland between them. Commonly, literacies incorporate bits and pieces of public Secondary Discourse as part of a local group or community-based mode of textual discourse, whether that local or Primary discourse is fully legitimized or not within the wider social context. While all three literacy models describe writing and reading practices and structures, the marker model seeks to account for difference and power relations within writing and reading practices. The marker model calls attention to the ‘logic of supplementarity’.14 Writing substitutes for speech while also making speech more generally available in society: ‘The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified’.15 The supplement, writing, initially absent but now present, substitutes for a presumed original presence which is now perceived to be empty. Through a chain of signifiers, writing opens the possibility for textual meaning as a supplementary field of play and difference. In medieval literacies, the logic of supplementarity is complicated by the multimodal practices of dictating and reading aloud, by the normalcy of multilingualism and by the visual and verbal signs in medieval manuscripts. When medievals and not a few modern readers contrast literacy (literatus) with illiteracy (illiteratus), Latin with vernacular literacy, clerical with lay literacy, and so forth, the privileged, unmarked terms anchor the structure. But the marginal, marked or lesser terms are always essential to and constitutive of the dominant terms and the literate network. The marker model manifests the work of the logic of supplementarity by foregrounding the multiliteracy, multilingualism, excess and differences which de Bury and others maintaining the power model of literacy condemned or tried to control. 13 

Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, p. 157. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Spivak, esp. pp. 144–64, 280–95; Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Bass, pp. 289–93. 15  Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. by Bass, p. 289. 14 

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De Bury’s rant against the dissemination and decentreing implicit in late medieval literate network highlights another aspect of the marker model. Written languages, text types, and text formats constitute a network of oppositional and associational relations in a literate community. For example, vernacular translations of religious or devotional Latin texts make up one kind of medieval marker literacy, but always in relation to Latin discourse. When reading medieval translations, we always need to take account of who read and used the translations, how the translations were composed, and in what contexts. Texts written by women and non-elite lay men also constitute medieval examples of marker literacies which establish alternative literacy communities, again in relation to traditionally male and clerical communities of writers and readers. Marked and unmarked terms define each other. When nonclerical writers and readers used Latin or Latin-vernacular (mixed language) texts for devotional or parodic purposes, their writing or reading marked transgressive or alternative practices. Marker literacies manifest multiple centres of literate power and community, sometimes separating, sometimes conforming to, sometimes seizing discursive power. The multiple centres of later medieval literate power expose the supplementary logic within de Bury’s critique. Despite de Bury’s claims, his critique in fact depends not on a singular Literacy but on the socio-cultural reality of medieval literacies as a network of contested multilingual and multimodal practices. A third aspect of the marker model of literacy is that it goes beyond semiotic functionalism.16 A marker model suggests how textual practices — writing, read­ ing, interpreting, compiling, rewriting, glossing, illustrating, archiving, trans­ lating, choosing one or more languages — create multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings and intertextualities, and how literate discourses might reproduce or transform subjectivities and cultural statuses in material, political contexts. Medieval commentaries sought to express, shape and/or contain the meanings of authoritative texts. Abelard’s Sic et non took commentary discourse at its word and juxtaposed various authorities to show the heterogeneity of what was claimed to be orthodox scriptural or doctrinal utterance. Similarly, a marker model locates literacy within, not outside of, forms of power. Late medieval literacy education was a diffused activity, not restricted to grammar schools but also undertaken in private households, guild schools, parish churches, and public squares. In the power model Latin grammar was viewed as a gatekeeper, but in practice elementary Latin grammar often enabled people to access a wide range of texts and litera16 

On semiotic functionalism and literacy, see esp. Halliday, Spoken and Written Language, passim; Baron, Speech, Writing, Sign, pp. 31–76.

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cies in vernaculars as well as Latin. Knowledge transfer and cross-over were part of literacy’s potential to be unruly. One of the central arguments of this book is that later medieval literacies were fundamentally shaped by their persistent multilingualism and textual performativities and that different literate groups reworked ideas of grammar and textual authority to create new relations of power, agency, and resistance from the production and reception of written texts. Just as more than one mode of literacy exists in a culture at a given time, so more than one language or variety of language can thrive, emerge or fade at a given time. Medieval translation, vernacularity, and language mixing were intimately connected with the struggles over the status of Latin literacy. After 1200, both Latin and vernacular literacies were increasingly deployed by lay as well as clerical audiences, popular as well as learned writers and readers.17 Sometimes, vernacular texts were authorized as part of dominant discourse, as with the Fourth Lateran Council’s (1215) programme for vernacular pastoral and confessional handbooks. In other contexts, vernacular writers and readers competed with Latin writers and readers. Writers and readers often crossed language boundaries to compose multilingual texts or to ‘translate’ materials from a Latin source text into a vernacular version for a different audience. Translation for maintaining orthodoxy or canonical knowledge was inherently unstable, always edging into unruly dissemination. Sometimes, writers and readers simply used vernacular texts in place of Latin ones for religious, commercial or political purposes. Multilingualism, dialects and multiliteracies are coextensive, but not coequal. Even among biliterates, reading and writing competences and attitudes are unevenly distributed. Alternative or nontraditional literacies are the ghost trace of the cultural work of an elite, privileged literate group. Language ideology and dominant literacies define social membership by serving as ‘dividing practices’ and strategies for sorting discourse and discursive subjects.18 Dividing practices are fundamental maneuvers within Secondary Discourses and dominant culture. But dividing practices also make space, unintentionally, for transgressive and differential literacies and for alternative textual practices. The marker model challenges the power model by acknowledging and valorizing the presence of these other literacies, other kinds of readers and writers obscured or suppressed by the ideology of a power model of literacy. In the marker model, there is no ‘fully literate person’, no ‘complete literacy’, no end to ‘literate development’. Only practices within discursive spaces. 17  For good overviews of primary materials and research on post-1100 vernacularity and language mixing, see The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, and Medieval Multilingualism, ed. by Kleinhenz and Busby. 18  Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, pp. 777–78.

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Fluid textualities and multilingual literacies foreground what in this book I call retexting, the primary gestures of writing and reading against the grain. The antithetical Latin verb retexere/retextere means both ‘to unravel’ and ‘to reweave, retie’. Like Thomas Nash, Cicero used the verb to denote how Penelope delays finishing her cloak so as to defer answering her suitors. (Interestingly, the derived verb retexere appears in Lewis’s Latin dictionary, but not in Du Cange or Latham, although the positive noun textus and its nominal and verbal derivatives do.) Retexting marks writing, reading, and listening as potentially displacing, deconstructive, transgressive practices which produce new texts and hyperliteracy. Hyperliteracy comprises a virtual network of discourses, texts, and attitudes which structure writers’ and readers’ experiences and social activities through cross-referencing, intertextuality, and rereading. Retexting adopts a different, explicitly written perspective on literacy from what Bakhtin calls pereaktsentuatsiya (‘reaccentuation’, ‘revoicing’). Bakhtinian revoicing privileges speech over writing in the formation of discursive subjects.19 Within hyperliteracy, instead of textual voices or versions, we have retexts. Retextual fluidity responds to the mobile and different politics and agencies within textual practices. All texts are retexts within the hyperliterate network. Verb and noun, retext(ere) emphasizes above all practice — overwriting, rewriting, cross writing, double writing, deleting, language mixing, all the literate pragmatics sometimes suppressed by scholars in the object-oriented use of the palimpsest or individual voice metaphors. Thinking about textuality as retext focuses on semiotic activities and practices within chains of signification. Retext marks textual and intertextual strategies within hyperliteracy and emphasizes how those strategies motivate both dividing practices and transgressive appropriations. Retexting theorizes medieval literacies as practice. The following chapters explore various late medieval literacies in Latin, English, French, and Italian in terms of a general theory of performative literacy and textual pragmatics. The chapters also explore how the marker model of literacy as practice localizes three theories of semiosis: Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of ‘unlimited semiosis’; Nietzsche’s idea that ‘the whole history of a thing, an organ, a custom, becomes a continuous chain of reinterpretations and rearrangements which need not be causally connected among themselves’; and Foucault’s critique of ‘governmentality’, understood as the regulation of human behaviours and bodies through ‘technologies of government’, which mediate ‘between games 19 

Bakhtin, Speech Genres, ed. by Emerson and Holquist, pp. 87, 91; The Bakhtin Reader, ed. by Morris, pp. 251–52.

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of power (“strategic relations”) and states of domination’ and which ‘cover the whole range of practices that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other’.20 Chapter One presents the late medieval hyperliterate situation within this wider theory of hyperliteracy, power, and practice. Chapter Two argues that while Latin language ideology established norms for literate practice and tried to control retexting through commentary, gloss, grammar, and official record, multilingual discourses continually resisted Latin language ideology and often subverted normative textual control. In Chapter Three I explore how alternative medieval literacies were not only multilingual or vernacular but also somatic and embodied. In one form of resistant literacy, affective literacy, gestures of reading exceeded literate boundaries and redeployed eyes, hands, mouths, and hearts on the page. Chapters Four, Five, and Six consider multilingual literacies in different retexting contexts. In Chapter Four, I discuss how a twelfth-century Ashkanazi Jew’s Latin conversion narrative presents a complex scene of reading which juxtaposes but doesn’t fully assimilate different modes of reading in Latin, Hebrew, and German within Christian and Jewish European communities. A reader and writer can inhabit different literate formations which may overlap but are not entirely compatible with one another. (This is not diglossia but differential literacy.) In Chapter Five I read official Latin commentaries on Ovid against English and French versions of Ovid’s stories which bristle against the mythographers’ readings and gendered silences. Chapter Six returns to Latin language ideology and examines how codeswitching in Middle English texts created ‘marginal Latins’ and a multilingual creole poetics. These chapters also suggest how some medieval literacies used multilingual poetic and textual strategies to challenge gender, ethnic, and social stereotyping or universalizing. Chapter Seven moves to a grey time of periodization, the end of the Middle Ages and beginning of the early modern period, and considers the role of multilingualism and Latin language ideology in humanist schooling. The founders of St Paul’s grammar school, one of the most famous early humanist schools, retexted earlier modes of schooling through ritual literate performativity and ideological constructions of the classroom and the child. At the same time, the school’s literate structures and scripted behaviours released some of the unruly potential of humanist models of literacy and social behaviour which St Paul’s promoted. For all its 20 

Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. by Hartshorne and Weiss, i, 339; ii, 303; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals trans. by Golffing, p. 210; Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Rabinow, pp. 299–300.

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contradictory schooling, St Paul’s teachers and students perform a very different kind of humanist literacy from that imagined by de Bury. Through these various texts, language mixings, and literacy contexts, we read the performativity and social construction of late medieval literacies within hyperliterate and contested multilingual fields.

Chapter 1

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

L

iteracies locate power and identity. They create, continue, or close down possibilities and affiliations. When different writers, readers, and aud­ iences are described as being more or less ‘literate’, authoritative or unruly, textually adept or awkward, depending on their gender, social status, interpretive strategies, or preferred language, their ways of making, using, or responding to texts become identified, revalued, and hierarchized in a sorting regime, a structuring structure, which empowers some people and privileges certain meanings or ways of reading. People have often assumed that in the Middle Ages, clerks and friars were surely more literate than peasants. People often assume that Latin is a more learned language than English, but they are not always so sure Latin is a more learned language than French. As we shall see, the complexities of medieval literacies as discursive practices call many of these assumptions into question. Following Gee, I take discourses to be ‘ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing, that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities (or “types of people”) by specific groups […] Language makes no sense outside of Discourses, and the same is true for literacy’.1 Discourses also include and depend on spaces and material tools and props, including texts, which different groups use to carry out their social practices and behaviours of belonging. Discourses are ‘ways of recognizing and getting recognized as certain sorts of whos doing certain sorts of whats’.2 Literate discourses affirm or oppose, assimilate, differentiate, apprentice, or abject. Literate discourse is heterogeneous and can resist or contradict its overt goals and strategies, thus complicating the notion of a ‘fully achieved’ literacy or 1  2 

Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, p. 3. Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, p. 156 (Gee’s emphasis).

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‘proper’ training. Some alternative, critical, or resistant discourses also transform social practices and ideology.3 So what discursive practices, sites, and markers constitute the late medieval literate situation? Later medieval writing negotiated the social network of manuscript pro­d­ uc­tion and the increasingly private activities of individual readers and writers. In Chaucer’s dream visions, the narrator Geoffrey represents himself as writing and reading alone at night in his rooms. Christine de Pizan describes herself as a solitary writer and reader, often tired out by her labour, although we know she also oversaw a group of scribes and illustrators producing her texts.4 In the fourteenth century, book production could sometimes be a one-person shop, with the same person copying, illuminating, illustrating, glossing, and binding a manuscript. In 1397, a priest wrote, illustrated, and bound a collection of saints’ lives for the Warden of Winchester. In 1469 the scribe William Ebesham sought payment for several books he had written and illustrated for John Paston, including a copy of Hoccleve’s De regimine principum.5 But, as we know, medieval writing was more typically collaborative. Writers, translators, dictators, and compilers worked with copyists and transcribers, along with rubricators, illustrators, illuminators, and page layout editors. Collaboration could be simple, as when John Gower closely supervised a group of scribes and illustrators producing his Confessio amantis. Margery Kempe read Latin and vernacular devotional texts with clerks and then dictated her life story in English to two clerical scribes, who may or may not have embellished or altered the text themselves. Margaret Paston used several scribes to dictate her many vernacular letters to her husband John and other family members. Or collaborative manu­ script production could be quite complex and disparate. The elaborate literacy regimes in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century Oxford, London, Paris, and Amiens supported networks of professional scribes and illustrators whom patrons, head scribes, and scholars could tap into when they wished to produce a particular text. Much later medieval manuscript production, whether elaborate volumes for family or ecclesiastical libraries or pragmatic, everyday texts such as wills, deeds, and letters, was a kind of collaborative, on-demand publishing system. Richard de Bury’s lament over shabby textual dissemination and circulation points to the way many regarded the multiplication of texts through different sources and modes of production as destabilizing the idea of a unified or author­ 3 

This critical literacy view complements the programme for the sociology of textual editing, outlined by McGann, Critique of Modern Textual Criticism, and McKenzie, Bibliography. 4  Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othéa’. 5  Schramm, ‘The Cost of Books’, pp. 140, 141.

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itative text. When we attend only to one of these positions — authoritative text or retexts — we set aside the interrelated social work of ideology and counterhegemonic practice. Many medieval texts were archived and circulated in different communities. Different kinds of texts, especially scripture and poetic writing, were deployed for different purposes among different audiences: to guide public oral performances or textual interpretation (as in liturgy, civic drama, and festival performances), consolidate and maintain official records and knowledge (royal or monastic archives), regulate behaviour and belief (as in devotional and penitential writing or heresy handbooks), or formalize legal and business transactions. After 1250, individual books owners modified their texts to suit reading needs and practices, for example, by adding tables of contents, indices, marginal notae, and evaluative comments. The fourteenth-century owner, probably John Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter (1327–69), of a twelfth-century Norman English manuscript of the Gospels of Luke and John (now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. bib. d. 10) added his own chapter numbers and in the margins scriptural cross-references. Although the manuscript already contained the twelfth-century Norman scribe’s chapter markings in red letters in an older manuscript style, Bishop Grandisson felt compelled to add his own mark-up and more detailed types of finding aides to the text. Different text types and uses of textuality constitute ‘communities of practice’, discursive spaces where people enact group activities, social formation, interpretation, and institutional belonging or opposition. Communities are also constituted by their borders, and every community of literate practice, oppositional as well as mainstream, constitutes others who are excluded, watched over, or abjected in literate practice. Although people often associate the acquisition of literacy with mainstream assimilation, the growing number of Latin and vernacular literates in late medieval Europe did not necessarily guarantee wider social assimilation. Nor was normative assimilation necessarily some new readers’ and writers’ goal. Vernacular literacies competed with high-status Latin literacy. More and more, writing was used secretively and individualistically, for private communications of love, personal diaries, or formation of alternative religious belief. Old and new stories were compiled or rewritten (retexted) for new audiences of religious women and lay people. Books were expensive for many people, but copies of the Bible, religious writing, and classical texts were disseminated in Latin and increasingly in the vernaculars so widely and in such varied contexts — compilations, retexts, summaries, abridgements, glossed versions — among different social strata that arguably there is no ‘definitive’ medieval text of the Bible or Ovid. People read texts silently and aloud, alone and in groups, publicly and privately, for different purposes: legal pleading, aesthetic or carnival pleasure, spiritual improvement,

Chapter 1

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devotion, education, philosophical reflection, medical treatment, and household management. How medieval people read and responded to the many illustrated devotional books featuring, for example, martyred women is difficult to track, but the multimodal texts themselves raise questions about the stability of reading responses. Medieval readers could and did respond to texts and images with unintended interpretations, behaviours, and affects.6 Priests, physicians, midwives, and family members used written charms and prayers to heal the sick. Surgeons read the body in terms of more iconic anatomical texts which identified cauter points for treating different ailments.7 Many later medieval household miscellanies included medical, spiritual, and household management texts along with spiritual readings, sometimes in two or three languages. The increasing avail­ ability and desirability of these text types and the ways people used them diffused traditional literate authority. Margery Kempe and others read or heard read key texts, including scripture and devotional writing, partly in order to memorize them. Kempe internalized scripture, but how she applied or responded to this introjected textuality did not always support or conform to the status quo. De Bury’s hysteria about the dissemination of literacy among the laity in the fifteenth century was not entirely without grounds. A multilingual and multimodal discursive space is structured by different liter­ acies and different practices, despite the fact that Microsoft Word’s spell checker will not accept ‘literacies’ as a proper word. (Microsoft Word is an example of how a technology automatically tries to regulate the categories of critical inquiry and create ‘path dependency’.) Not monolithic Literacy, but multilingual literacies. Literacies, then, are performative spaces and cognitive prac­tices. Written and spoken Latin always existed in relation to vernacular usages, and communities of practice and social affiliations ordered the linguistic field in different ways. In other words, medieval vernacular writing always existed in relation to Latin literate authority, and vice versa. Medieval literacies sometimes extended Primary Discourse, sometimes Secondary Discourse, by marking people as belonging to or affiliating with vernacular or Latin or bilingual textual communities and some­ times by incorporating into children’s Primary Discourse at home the values, attitudes, and behaviours of a prestigious or sought after Secondary Discourse such as Latin or vernacular literacy and reading experiences or textual knowledge.8 6 

Mills, Suspended Animation, pp. 106–44. See, for example, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1462 (late twelfth century), fols 9r, 9v–10r. 8  Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 157–58. See Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 13–16, 20–25, 88–92. 7 

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

5

As Lisa Samuels has told me, ‘A literate or literary tradition is like wanting every­ one you know to have the same friends’. Later medieval people increasingly were using texts across Latin-vernacular boundaries and in multimodal ways. Readers accessed manuscript text and made meaning with multiple sensory modes, with their eyes, lips, voices, hands, ears, and bodies, whether reading aloud to themselves or in a group or reading silently. Most people, clergy and laity, filtered sac­red languages (Latin, less commonly Hebrew or Greek) through one or more vernaculars and adapted Latin grammatica and knowledge of the Roman alphabet for vernacular literacies. Literacy education also made available certain kinds of texts for reading as well as constituting ways of reading and for what purposes. Literate practices could shape or challenge or retext a person’s status and agency within a social network. Textual meanings are multimodally constituted not only by what a text represents, states, or articulates as ‘information’ or what the writer ‘ex­presses’ but also by textual languages, genres, and formats (paratexts) and by how readers handled and responded to texts and constructed meanings with them. After 1100, as readership and immediate book consciousness expanded, the structure of multilingualism and the values attached to sociolinguistic literate practices in medieval Europe changed. First, written Latin was becoming more familiar to new and different kinds of readers and writers and was used not only in churches but also in the streets, courts, businesses, and many households. Whether rudimentary or highly skilled, Latin usage was more available to non­ traditional speakers and writers, those outside the clerical and university circles, partly because Latin grammatica was the way most people first learned to construe and inscribe written language and partly because vernacular translations and glosses gave people wider access to different kinds of learned, official, devotional, and liturgical texts.9 At the same time, European vernaculars, especially English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German, vied with Latin as the authoritative language of written records, literate poetic discourse, everyday written exchanges, and spoken and written religious discourse. Within later medieval multilingual communities of practice, vernacular literacies and different Latin literacies became more widely available and accepted. Nonetheless, the continuing presence and lingering privilege of Latin discourse underwrote vernacular literacies by supplying or en­ forcing a traditional language ideology. In the later Middle Ages, Latin lan­g uage ideology was both a transcendental linguistic ideal and a cultural norm within the medieval power model of literacy. Latin as a language ideology was also the shadow of the dominant in medieval marker literacies, such that Latin discourse 9 

See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 231–52.

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in part constituted the oppositional and identificatory empowerment of other marker literacies.

Latin as a Language Ideology Beginning with Italian humanists and continuing today in debates about literacy and Standard English, scholars and policy makers have long read medieval culture within and against Latin writing and Latin language ideology. During and after World War ii, many medievalists deployed Latin textual culture as a figure of universal reason, cultural excellence, civic order, pan-Europeanism, and paradoxically, ahistorical traditionalism. For these modernist scholars, medieval Latin culture supported their rejection of the growth of barbarism, instrumental reason, politicized culture, and antihumanist nationalism in the mid-twentieth century. In 1945, H. J. Chaytor, in his influential book From Script to Print, declared that ‘Language had little or no political significance in the middle ages’. Chaytor’s ideological motive becomes apparent a few sentences later when he describes Latin as ‘the official and legal language’, the ‘language of a higher and more attractive civilization’.10 Although presented as positive historical truth, Chaytor’s descriptive language — ‘official’, ‘higher’, ‘more attractive’, ‘civilization’ — is loaded and reflects just how much literacy, like language itself, is political through and through. A more influential deployment of Latin as a language ideology in medieval studies has been E. R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (German original, 1948; English translation, 1953). For Curtius, the Latin language and elite writing and reading in Latin establish the principles of unity and cultural preeminence in Romania: My book […] grew out of a concern for the preservation of Western culture […]. It attempts to illuminate the unity of that tradition in space and time by the application of new methods. In the intellectual chaos of the present [post-WW2] it has become necessary, and happily not impossible, to demonstrate that unity. But the demonstration can only be made from a universal standpoint. Such a standpoint is afforded by Latinity. Latin was the language of the educated during the thirteenth centuries which lie between Vergil and Dante. Without this Latin background, the vernacular literatures of the Middle Ages are incomprehensible.11 10 

Chaytor, From Script to Print, p. 22. Curtius, European Literature, trans. by Trask, p. viii. On colonialist linguistics and philo­ logy, see also Stein, ‘Multilingualism’. On the relations between medieval languages, multi­ lingualism, and the idea of nation or Europa, see for example: Crowley, Standard English; 11 

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

7

Curtius uses Latin literacy and the tenuous continuity between classical and medieval written Latin culture to assert Latin discourse (‘the Latin Middle Ages’) as a linguistic norm and dominant discourse for constructing Europa or Romania as a cultural universal which organizes and assimilates medieval multilingualism. Deploying medievalism in the service of modernism, Curtius shores up the ruins of post-war Europe by constructing the long Middle Ages as a cultural universal. Curtius situates elite and popular Latin literate cultures at the centre of a thousand-year cultural period and then rejects nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century nationalisms, dangerous fragmentation, barbarism, and vernacularity which downplay Latin discourses and therefore do not serve elite, pan-European culture. Curtius’s nuanced intertextual readings of late classical and medieval texts link universal Latinity, literacy, and European cultural value. His comparative tropology of Latin literacy and language ideology continues to inform, implicitly or explicitly, the cultural politics of medieval studies as a philological and historical inquiry. Latin discourse and textuality remains the historical and structuring Urtext in the medieval archive. Latin language ideology also underwrites the neomedievalism within colonial and neo-colonial discourse. For example, on the founding of the University of Hong Kong in 1911, F. D. Lugard braided together Latin universalism and English internationalism: If we believe that British interests will be thus promoted [by the founding of the university], we believe equally firmly that graduates, by the mastery of English, will acquire the key to a great literature and the passport to a great trade […]. Since […] [w]e believe that China should find it necessary for a time to adopt an alien tongue as a common medium for new thoughts and expressions — as the nations of the West did when Latin was the language of the savants and of scientific literature — none would be more suitable than English.12

For Lugard, teaching proper spoken and written English as well as the canon of English literature and other subjects in English was the means by which ‘aliens’ could access an elite cultural knowledge not their own. It was also critical for main­taining the British Empire’s hegemony and cultural dominance worldwide. Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’; Evans, ‘Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism’. Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer, Butterfield, ‘Chaucerian Vernaculars’, and Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy focus more on vernacular multilingualism and address medi­eval Latinity in the English multilingual environment only indirectly. 12  Lugard, Hong Kong University, p. 4.

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Like Latin, English was regarded as a passport to a ‘higher civilization’ precisely because it was regarded as higher civilization. More recently, globalization policy theorists such as Jorg Friedrichs and Stephen Korbin have invoked the example of medieval Latinity as an historical justification for empowering English as the new international lingua franca which counters the local fragmentation and contested differences of vernaculars in the name of information transfer and global capitalist efficiency.13 In neo-medieval policy theory, contemporary English is no longer a vernacular language or languages but the reinstantiation of Latin as the dominant discourse of power. Curtius’s universalism and contemporary neomedievalisms in the service of empire or global capital deploy Latin language ideology as an established historical fact. But as I shall argue, a critical analysis of late medieval multilingual literacies suggests a more complicated nexus of written languages, discourse, and social identities. A straight up critical sociolinguistics of writing, whether inflected by Pierre Bourdieu or Norman Fairclough or Deborah Cameron, opens a more heterogeneous, dynamic relation between the medieval and the mod­ern, one which releases aspects of medieval textual culture into a more oppositional space. Medieval Latin was not an autonomous discourse but always existed in multilingual and multiliterate contexts. Sometimes written and spoken vernaculars competed with Latin for authority and social function; other times, Latin and the vernaculars were functionally distinct. Occasionally, Hebrew challenged Latin’s privilege as a sacred language; more often, one or more vernaculars destabilized Latin’s hegemony, as in England where French and then English competed with Latin discourse within popular as well as elite and official culture. In the multilingual late Middle Ages language choice was mediated by literate subjectivity, coercion, and textual transgression as much as by convenience, social identity, or institutional conformity. Literate subjectivities are constructed through different languages, genres, and textual practices. Although medieval literacies organized complex interrelations of orality and writing in practice, medieval literate ideology continued the bias toward written language inherited from ancient literacies and traditional grammatica. Even as text types and vernacular literacies expanded to include more readers, medieval textual attitudes and practices were strongly framed by the ancient literacy ideals of hellenismos and latinitas, based on written, not spoken language. As a written standard, latinitas deployed the literary and rhetorical traditions of Greece and Rome as markers of cultural status for readers, writers, and speakers. 14 In part, 13  14 

Friedrichs, ‘The Meaning of New Medievalism’; Korbin, ‘Back to the Future’. Joseph, Eloquence and Power; Ward, ‘Celso Cittadini’; Joseph, Limiting the Arbitrary;

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

9

of course, this was due to the very nature of literate schooling and the use of the Roman alphabet as the basis for elementary literacy training. But after 1100 in Europe a number of factors challenged and then reordered this literate situation and the accompanying attitudes toward language, power, and cognition. In particular: increasing numbers of people were using vernacular texts in their everyday lives; texts previously reserved for clergy or elite learned people became more widely available and for new purposes; new ways of writing the manuscript page and organizing books affected readers’ behaviours and expectations; and how one read the page — silently, aloud, performatively — acquired new and different negative and positive social significances. For many, Latin was part of a more fluid, multilingual environment. Different literacies connect mind and body with different modes of textual­ ity.15 As Foucault and de Certeau have argued, literate subjects are formed more through embodied and textual forms of mediation and negotiations of domination and resistance than by the imposition of a dominant cultural dis­ course. Distinguishing between strategies and tactics, de Certeau suggests that normalization, poaching, domination, and resistance are all post-hoc labels for practices of subjectification.16 Likewise, the labels literate and illiterate are simul­ taneously products of and motivators for different social practices and ideological struggles. Within a literate network, identity markers can specify originary difference, but in fact they are, as Ian Hacking puts it, ways we make people up. Literacy, then, is interested in power. Dominant literacy is attracted to power and invested in power. Alternative or oppositional literacies are also interested in power, but they see socio-cultural power as the question and the opening, not the solution. Likewise, critical sociolinguistics is interested in power, as a question and practice rather than a given. Critical sociolinguistics helps us foreground and defamiliarize language ideology, textualities, grammaticality, poetic language, and subjectivity. New medieval readers and writers used written documents to belong, to organize, or to reimagine their social status, associations, and cultural representations. Some enacted alternative or oppositional meanings and identities through textual performances and what Lisa Samuels calls deformance or shaped Crowley, Standard English; Amsler, ‘History of Linguistics’. 15  Ong, Orality and Literacy; Baron, Speech, Writing, Sign; Heath, Ways with Words; Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice; Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us; Gee, The Social Mind; Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies; Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences’. 16  De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Randall; see Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, pp. 31–39; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Sheridan, pp. 3–31.

10

Chapter 1

reading — embodied, technologically (not only digitally) reshaped reading which disrupts textual linearity, fixed form, or authorial control and relocates the text as the site of the reader’s or audience’s pious, secular, or dissenting pleasure.17 These multilingual and multimodal literate practices and meanings defined heretics and outsiders as well as elite, pious, and more orthodox kinds of readers. Late medieval literacies are other to each other rather than stratified and ordered around a fundamental Latin discourse which guards literate identity and status.

Literate Situations The situation of medieval literacies was grounded on the connections and differences between Latin and vernaculars and on the socio-material environments of textuality and reading formations. The medieval distinction between literatus and illiteratus was based on whether a person could decode and construe some bit of written Latin, but that description was at odds with the ways later medieval Euro­peans were using vernacular and Latin or hybrid texts. (In Anglo-Saxon England, before 1100, there were probably more vernacular literates than Latin literates.) What makes the situation more complicated is that after 1200 we find greater lay literacy in Latin as a second language. The trajectory of literacy in the later Middle Ages was not strictly from Latin to the vernaculars, but from a more restricted Latin-based literacy to wider multilingual literacies. Increasing urban commerce and trade, growing urban density, and more mobility among trad­ itionally land-bound groups encouraged, even necessitated the use of texts (wills, deeds, contracts, pleas, account records, business transactions) for everyday, legal, and pragmatic literacy among middle-class and some peasant laity as well as elites. Books continued to be expensive to produce, but the price and availability of writing materials such as parchment was declining. Aristocrats and a growing number of high-status commercial men and women commissioned multilingual (English, Latin, French) anthologies and single-author manuscripts for their household uses. The chartering of the London Stationer’s Company in 1403 as a permanent guild suggests the growing prestige and power of the book trade in urban England and a wider demand for books among the commercial and aristocratic ranks, even as most books were still expensive to acquire for the ordinary person.18 The active 17  See Samuels, ‘If Meaning, Shaped Reading’; Samuels and McGann, ‘Deformance and Inter­pretation’. 18  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 240–52; Thrupp, The Merchant Class, pp. 155–74; Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, p. 103.

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book culture and trade centred around Amiens seems to have been more oriented toward elite patrons and modes of production.19 Literacy requires schooling and training. Grammar schools and home school­ ing were people’s initial access to literate discourse, and basic Latin grammatica continued to be the gateway to literacy even for secular people. During the thir­ teenth and fourteenth centuries, grammar instruction and Latin and vernacular literacy were more eagerly financed and more widely available to lay readers of many ranks. After 1200, many urban grammar schools taught not only Latin and elementary literacy but also vernacular reading, computation, and commercial literacy skills. In Flanders, for example, influential, monied burghers challenged the Church’s monopoly on education by establishing guild grammar schools, staffed by clerics but funded and supervised by laymen. Such lay involvements with elementary literate power were never neutral. Eventually the Church ex­ communicated the burghers for interfering in the Church’s privilege to police the borders of even basic civic literacy. While there was general growth in literacy in Europe from 1200 to 1500, lay access to literacy education developed unevenly, as a comparison of the literate situations in Italy and England suggests. Using public sources and comparative methods derived from his accounting experiences, the chronicler Giovanni Villani (c. 1280–1348) famously described the stratification of Florentine school­ ing during the 1330s: Troviamo ch’e fanciulli e fanciulle che stanno a leggere, da otto a dieci mila. I fan­ ciulli che stanno ad imparare l’abbaco e algorismo in sei scuole, da mille in mille­ due­gento. E guegli che stanno ad apprendere la grammatica e loica in quattro grandi scuole, da cinquecentocinquanta in seicento. (We find there are eight to ten thousand boys and girls learning to read. Of boys study­ing abbaco [business accounting] and arithmetic, there are about 1000 to 1200 in six schools. And those studying Latin and logic in four large schools num­ ber from 550–600.)20

Villani’s vernacular chronicle represents Florence as the epitome of enlightened civic literacy, and the merchant-turned-chronicler regards the stratification of vernacular, Latin, and business literacies as a sign of Florence’s humanist achieve­ 19 

Nash, Between France and Flanders. Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, bk 12, chap. 94 (iii, 198). Black’s study of Florentine tax returns for 1427 conforms to Villani’s statistical description of urban literacy. Black claims that for about ninety years, Florentine literacy rates were above sixty-six per cent; see Black, Education and Society, i, 1–42. See Gehl, A Moral Art, p. 20. 20 

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ment. However, some contemporary scholars challenge the idea that Italian grammar education was a leading wedge of reform. Robert Black argues that Villani’s statistics refer only to Latin literacy education and that vernacular literacy was taught outside formal urban schooling. This leads Black to emphasize the hieratic, conservative aspects rather than the ideology of Italian humanist education. (I will return to this question in Chapter Seven when I discuss the refounding of St Paul’s school.) Paul Grendler and Paul Gehl, however, argue that Villani’s otherwise inflated statistics suggest that Florentine schooling included both vernacular and Latin literacy education.21 Literate situations are often plural and heterogeneous with respect to goals, access, and language attitudes. What Villani’s account of Florentine schooling implies is that lay vernacular literacy was disseminated in several ways and was strongly supported in the city and that Latin literacy was regarded as elite but not altogether clerical. Besides numbers of literates, we also need to attend to how literacy education was socially positioned and sustained and which languages were taught and for whom. In England, urban literacy lagged behind that of Italy until the early fifteenth century. Between 1300 and 1350, English society was rocked by plagues, economic crises, weakening agriculture, and falling population. But between 1350 and 1500, as studies of schooling in London, York, and other urban centres show, elementary schools and book trades recovered, flourished, and expanded.22 The primary motivations for literacy education were a mixture of vocational, utilitarian, and religious, as the example of the Flemish burghers and their guild school suggests. Villani’s account of civic-progressivism through education and literacy indicates how Latin continued to be a powerful but increasingly unstable dividing practice between pragmatic and learned literacies, as vernacular lay education provided new models and problems for wider literacy. Wealthier merchants hired clerics or sometimes lay people to educate their children at home as well as in specially founded schools. Prosperous peasants sought to maintain grammar schools in their parishes. By the fifteenth century, grammar schools and special schools for letter writing and accounting were maintained by 21  See Black, Humanism and Education; Gehl, A Moral Art, pp. 34–35. Paul Grendler argues that Villani’s figures overall cannot be correct, but he still acknowledges that Florentine literacy rates were high relative to other areas of Europe at the time. See Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 71–74, 160, 276, and Grendler, ‘Review of Education and Society’ and the statistical information there. Grendler assumes (incorrectly, I believe) that nineteenth-century Florence in the age of printing could not have had a lower literacy rate than in the fourteenth century. 22  Thrupp, The Merchant Class; Orme, English Schools; Moran, The Growth of English Schooling.

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guilds, urban groups, and confraternities in England, France, Flanders, Italy, and Germany. By 1460, some English and French guilds were supporting elementary vernacular education for their apprentices.23 Women’s literacy education was marked not only in terms of social status but also by the expectation that better educated women of rank would be more successful mothers. These emerging contexts and motives materially expanded literate opportunities among the laity. But these expansions and enrichments were not universal. Many people were neither encouraged nor expected to learn to read and write Latin or the vernacular, especially poor people and those of lower peasant ranks. Nonetheless, the literate practices of many medieval landholders, religious dissenters, and pious women of all ranks directly challenged the ideology of dominant clerical literacy. Studies of guild records, the Paston family letters, and the backgrounds of witnesses in court cases, wills, and testaments suggest that as much as thirty per cent of the population of fifteenth-century England, men and women and most nobles and gentry, were literate in the vernacular if not in Latin.24 Literate in this case means not just inscribing and decoding but using texts to communicate, organize one’s social spaces, archive important information and materials, and provide literate experiences for others in one’s immediate circle. Using Thrupp’s analyses of London guild records, Harvey Graff estimates that nearly forty per cent of male Londoners could read and write at least English, mostly to handle household or business accounts, personal and business letters, or legal transactions.25 Witness lists for land cases in and around Glastonbury in 1334 and 1373 suggest that ‘more than 40 per cent of the lay witnesses possessed minimal or pragmatic Latin literacy’.26 If so, the vernacular literacy rate in the region must have been higher. Clanchy argues that the estimates of thirty to forty per cent literacy in four­ teenth- and fifteenth-century England are probably too low, since pinpointing the exact number of ‘literate’ people by collecting signatures obscures questions as to who used written texts and how people might consider their behaviour to be literate in meaningful ways. From the thirteenth century on, literate practices and textual communities were increasingly common and important in English society, for legal and learned discourses and for the creation and dissemination 23  Deansley, ‘Medieval Schools’, pp. 773, 777–78; Cipolla, Literacy and Development; Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, pp. 59–73; Orme, ‘The “Laicisation” of English School Education’; Petrucci, Writers and Readers, ed. and trans. by Radding, pp. 186–87. 24  Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition, pp. 118–19. 25  Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, p. 97. 26  Kauper, ‘Two Early Lists’, p. 366.

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of many genres of poetry, popular political writing posted on walls and city gates, household organization, business actions, and everyday contacts and social exchanges.27 Literacy as discursive space also brought more and more people from different ranks and social spaces into contact with one another through texts, whether face to face (reading aloud) or through textual communities. Late medieval literacies developed unevenly, but in the aggregate, from 1250 on, there was a steady increase in the number of readers and writers in Europe, the availability of books in different usable formats, and translations for elite, clerical, and nontraditional readers and patrons.28 Texts and textual practices organize and regulate the bodies of literates. Medieval literacies link the voice, eyes, bodies, minds, and emotions in complex technologies for performing and using texts. Medieval literacies often emerge in ‘border scenes’ of collaborative orality and writing or in individual acts of em­ bodied reading. Many literates accessed texts through hearing them read aloud, either in public or as part of smaller, private or family reading groups. 29 At the same time, silent reading was a persistent practice throughout the Middle Ages and not just among elite scholarly readers. After the twelfth century, silent and private reading were increasingly privileged and authoritative as more scribes made greater use of word separation and shifted their copying practices from dictation or ‘writing aloud’ to silent reading.30 After 1200, silent reading was also encouraged by the increasing use of private as well as public documents and letters in law and administration in both ecclesiastical and secular contexts. Like literacy education, people’s experience with documentary texts, such as Margaret Paston’s handling of estate documents, writs, legal formulae and procedures, and account records, strongly affected how they handled or imagined texts in general.31 Medieval multimodal literacies challenge the idea of silent reading as a trans-historical norm. Silent modes of reading were not always liberating, progressive, or modern, despite what some social historians and critics might say. Silent and individualized reading excluded some people who might otherwise 27  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 185–96. See Cipolla, Literacy and Develop­ ment; Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition, pp. 118–19, 124–26; Scattergood, Politics and Poetry. 28  Coleman, English Literature in History, pp. 18–57; Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, pp. 92–93, 96, 103, 108–09; Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, pp. 19–20; Bell, ‘Medieval Women Book Owners’; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 104–05, 159–62; Nash, Bet­ween France and Flanders, pp. 45–51; Bumke, Courtly Culture, trans by Dunlap, pp. 426–571, passim. 29  See Coleman, Public Reading. 30  Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 165–82, 202–14, 243–49. 31  See Spedding, “‘I shalle send word in writing”’; Steiner, Documentary Culture, pp. 23–28.

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have participated in literate culture by hearing texts read aloud. Silent reading privileged solitary literacy rather than group reading and interaction. Depending on who was reading where and why, silent, private reading could connote either secret, illicit, erotic, or counter-hegemonic reading, or elite, sophisticated, learned reading, or deeply spiritual, devout reading.32 Thus, silent or private reading served different purposes within different reading formations. The signification of reading in the late Middle Ages was also constituted by the material practices (scripts, languages, page layouts), reading formations, and interpretive textualities through which texts were construed and made meaningful. Texts could regulate literate bodies and minds, but the social status of texts was not entirely synchronous with the social status of readers. As products of retexting, textualities depended on paratexts and whether texts were regarded or handled as sacred objects, authoritative archives, commodities, memory aids, convenient records, or vehicles for negotiating social power. Was a text imagined to be remixable writing space or a prompt for devotional or aes­ thetic experience? For example, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86, a tri­lingual English miscellany (c. 1271–83), the scribe combined stanzas from different religious lyrics, rearranged parts of other texts, and grouped secular and religious texts together based on linguistic and poetic similarities as well as themes. In compilation, the scribe remixed or retexted parts of a text or a group of texts in different languages to produce a new manuscript with unique texts, features, and themes.33 Later medieval counter-hegemonic or non-normative readers and writers suggest important changes in what constituted hyperliteracy. Several scholars have attempted to characterize the structure of late medieval literate consciousness or mentalité, something beyond the production and reception of individual texts.34 What I want to emphasize here is not the sameness but the multiplicity of medieval hyperliteracy, embedded with multilingual discourses, textual dissemination, and the fluid of retexting. Reacting to the perceived decline in standards for pastoral 32 

Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp.  115, 119–20; Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 12–87; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 271–72; Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 264–65, 73–76. 33  See Corrie, ‘The Compilation’, pp. 241–44. 34  See Stock, The Implications of Literacy, esp. pp. 88–240; Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 193–217; Hudson, Lollards and their Books; Hudson, The Premature Reformation; Gellrich, The Idea of the Book, esp. pp. 29–93; Heresy and Literacy, ed. by Biller and Hudson; McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy, pp. 42–43, 58–61, 98–99; Arnold, Inquisition and Power; Mills, Suspended Animation; Rust, Imaginary Worlds.

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care and individual piety, the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the Council of Toulouse (1229) hoped to improve the spiritual health of the Christian faithful and encourage more productive work with lay people by getting handbooks of penance, collections of sermons and exempla, and catechisms in both Latin and vernaculars in the hands of clergy and friars. In England, the Gregorian reforms were disseminated by programs for clerical instruction of the laity as outlined in Pecham’s Ignorantia sacerdoctium (1281) and modelled on Archbishop Thoresby’s Instructions (1357). Such pastoral and preaching renewal required extensive reference texts and compilations in Latin and vernaculars to regulate and disseminate the ‘proper’ information to clergy and lay people. These pastoral and lay literacy initiatives unleashed a flood of multilingual and vernacular writing as well as new arguments for making scripture more available to wider lay audiences. By 1405, in England, Archbishop Arundel was looking seriously to control the growth of Latin and vernacular literacies, not just among Lollards but among all Christians.35 Although the church officially promoted lay piety and to some extent women’s devotional reading and greater involvement in local church ministries, the clergy did not always support the idea of general lay literacy. De Bury’s rant reflected other post-1215 anxieties about literate dissemination, especially through vernacular writing and reading. Wider vernacular literacy was read by many as a sign of weaker, not stronger, social stability. According to the thirteenthcentury chronicle Passau Anonymous, one of the main causes of heresy among the Waldensians was ‘they have translated the Old and New Testaments into the vulgar tongue, and thus teach and learn them’. The chronicler then argues, without acknowledging the contradiction, that ‘since they were illiterate people, they expounded scripture falsely and corruptly’.36 For the Passau chronicler, illiteratus clearly means ‘unable to read Latin’, and he condemns the Waldensians because they openly read vernacular rather than Latin scripture and because they presumed to (wrongly) interpret scripture for themselves. The chronicler’s concatenation of reasons deploys literate ideology to manage hyperliteracies and multilingual discourses. Similarly, Henry Knighton in his Chronicon (for 1382) links his condemnation of the English rebels who marched on London in 1381 with his sharp criticism of Wyclif for encouraging the translation of the Latin Gospels into English. Vernacular translations, Knighton asserts, unfortunately make scripture more 35  36 

Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. Heresy and Authority, ed. by Peters, p. 151.

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accessible to lay people, including ‘women who know how to read’ (mulieribus legere scientibus) whereas previously scripture and its interpretation were restricted mostly to ‘well-read clerks of good understanding’ (clericis admodum literatis et bene intelligentibus).37 Like de Bury and other chroniclers, Knighton contrasted ‘learned’, properly educated (i.e. clerical) readers of Latin scripture and historical texts with ill-trained, unruly, incompetent, and disrespectful lay readers of vernacular scripture. The suspicions of Knighton, de Bury, and others as to the widening literate access to scripture (and probably to other authoritative text types) were a confused ideological jumble of charges and criteria. Sometimes, their criticisms had to do with texts written or read in the vernacular as opposed to Latin. Other times, they criticized lay people who owned or even held books. Handling or construing a text symbolized individual readers’ control of reading, and that is what disturbed Knighton the most. In the fourteenth century, Knighton and de Bury blamed slack or unco­ operative male clergy, people like Wyclif and the friars, for relinquishing their traditional responsibility and disrupting the social hierarchy by encouraging that sacred books and literacy skills circulate more widely among the laity. In Knighton’s apocalyptic vision, one of the signs of the end of the world was that lay people were usurping the clergy’s assigned role as interpreters of scripture.38 Late medieval hyperliteracy was marked by change and resistance to change within the regime of clerical literacy, to the blurring of boundaries between clerical and lay cultures, between Latin and vernacular discourses, between traditional and oppositional identities. The charges of vernacular riot directed at French Waldensians in the twelfth century were remixed and directed at English Lollards in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. (The Albigensians constituted a different kind of threat to traditional literacy in that they actively wrote and used Latin texts and presumed to found a separate Church.) Following Wyclif, the more Lollards stressed how much reading scripture directly was a spiritual obligation and act of faith for all Christians and the more they denied the clergy’s role in the sacraments, the more they threatened the established hyperliterate order. By 1400, some clerical elites were looking to the ruling class to help maintain their status and authority in literate discourse, while other secular elites such as John of Gaunt were giving cover to dissenters. The English parliamentary statute De heretico comburendo (1401) empowered the king on behalf of the Church to root out heresy and used 37  38 

Knighton, Chronicon, ed. by Lumby, ii, 152. Knighton, Chronicon, ed. by Lumby, ii, 153.

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written law to mark as heretice all those who usurped the office of preaching, held schools and conventicles where they gathered, talked about, preached, and wrote books ‘contrary to the Catholic faith’, and taught sedition.39 De heretico points to the political subtext of multilingualism, textuality, and reading practices and the regulation of literate power as a key part of governmentality. The statute constituted a documentary intervention in the discursive history of literacy, defining an emerging hyperliterate space as unruly and imposing regulations, boundaries, and punishments on those who inhabited that space. The criticisms of particular readers’ interpretations of scripture and the charges that textual dissemination diluted authority were instantiations of a wider anxiety about literate authority. Textual interpretations consignify not individually but as part of discursive and embodied spaces. The more polyvocal a literate discourse, the more unstable and decentralized literate ideology becomes. And the more hostile. Multilingualism within late medieval literacies made it possible for new, nontraditional readers and writers to seize genres, modes of textual communication, and modes of discourse for their own purposes, orthodox or alternative.40 Affective and embodied modes of responding to texts also transgressed the received norms of textual response. Questions of orthodoxy shadowed all medieval literacy conflicts, as it still does. The fortunes of John Wyclif within medieval literate discourse illustrate the struggles within hyperliteracy for authority and the consequences of boundary shifting. Wyclif, unlike lay followers of Waldes, wasn’t charged with heresy just because he wrote and read books in the vernacular or Latin, because that is what Oxford theologians were supposed to do. But his ideas, vernacular translations, and the actions of his followers could be condemned. During his lifetime, Wyclif met with suspicion and strong criticisms, but only after his death in 1382 did his position within literate discourse change. Between 1380 and 1410, Wyclif ’s ideas were discussed and debated in England and on the continent. Wyclif ’s writings and ideas were highly influential in reformist movements in England and Prague. Following the Peasants’ Rising and the Hussite uprising, Wyclif became the auctor-function for oppositional ideas and wider, vernacular literacies. Roger Dymmok compiled the vernacular Lollard Twelve Conclusions (first posted in 39 

Statutes of the Realm, ed. by Luders and others, ii, 125–28 (2 Henry IV, stat. 15). This point could be made more strongly in some recent accounts of medieval multilingualism; for example, Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer; Machan, English in the Middle Ages. An instructive recent analysis of dialectal and multilingual variation and textual communities in terms of concepts of nation in medieval ‘France’ is in Lodge, ‘French and Occitan’. 40 

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

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English in public spaces), translated them into Latin, and then refuted them point for point in Latin (Liber contra XII errores et hereses Lollardum, c. 1395), thereby effectively retexting Wyclif ’s ideas within dominant literate ideology. The Wycliffite texts are attacked as outside discourse but textualized as appropriate scholastic orthodoxy. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. th. e. 30 reproduces the Wycliffite English texts in exactly the same format as Dymmok’s Latin translations and refutations, thus unintentionally establishing vernacular Wycliffite discourse as textual comparable to Latin academic discourse. After Wyclif became the name of the author and auctor-function, he was indicted by name in the Statute of 1401 and the Constitutions of 1408 and declared heretical at the Council of Constance in 1415. His books were burned, and in 1427 his bones were finally dug up and burned. Wyclif could be accused of heresy as an auctor, both before and after his death, because his writings created real and ideational communities of heterodox readers. Who used Wyclif ’s books and how they deployed his ideas and writing to support and authorize their own religious and political arguments, handbooks, sermons, and interpretations made Wyclif the auctor-function a continuing threat.41 Wyclif ’s discursive status depended on which part of the hyperliterate network his texts circulated in and how they were used by others as much as it depended on his arguments for religious reform through apostolic Christianity, lay access to scripture, sacramental theology, reform of clerical abuses, and virtuous poverty.42 While the Church had been encouraging since 1215 forms of vernacular translation of the Bible and pastoral catechisms to guide lay people’s orthodoxy, many clerical writers and readers still found the image of an individual or group of lay readers or even a mixed group of lay readers and a priest to be threatening and destabilizing. Wyclif the auctor-function motivated a dangerous community of practice which destabilized the dominant hyperliterate order. The post-1200 Church and traditional aristocratic elites deployed metaphors of otherness — heretical, irrational, idioti, treacherous, contra naturam — to represent new and different readers as socially dangerous. Representing the Other as dangerous, rather than enlightening, liberating, or dialogically necessary, is a strategy (in de Certeau’s sense) for resisting change and maintaining dominant ideology as the determination of proper literacy skills and what texts are for and who can use them. According to dominant literate ideology, Others aren’t 41 

See Somerset, Clerical Discourse, pp. 14–16. On eleventh- and twelfth-century religious dissenters, see Moore, The Formation of a Per­ se­cuting Society, pp. 13–23. 42 

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literatus or textually competent no matter what they might actually do with texts. R. I. Moore, argues that ‘For all those who were to be persecuted, […] it was necessary first to create an identity’.43 To be Othered is to have an identity created for you by dominant ideology, that is, to be identified as a subject rather than accepted as an agent. The anthropologist Mary Douglas neatly describes the constitutive force of the dialectic between dominant and insubordinate culture: ‘Where there is dirt, there is system.’44 The Passau Anonymous chronicler’s misrecognition of Waldensian literacy as ‘illiteracy’ suggests how dominant literacy and Latin language ideology were deployed as discursive strategies to legitimate symbolic capital, even as that description unintentionally archived evidence for the very literate agency and affirmative power it could not name. As Bourdieu writes: Symbolic struggles are always much more effective (and therefore realistic) than objectivist economists think, and much less so than pure social marginalists think. The relationship between distribution and representations is both the product and the stake of a permanent struggle between those who, because of the position they occupy within the distributions, have an interest in subverting them by modifying the classifications in which they are expressed and legitimated, and those who have an interest in perpetuating the misrecognition, an alienated cognition that looks at the world through categories the world imposes, and apprehends the social world as a natural world.45

Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century ruling elites and some aspiring members of the commercial classes perpetuated and supported the Church’s misrecognition of groups of dangerous and unruly readers and writers as illiterati, even when those new readers could decode texts for themselves or when they maintained clerics and chaplains in their households to handle legal documents, devotion, and elementary education.46 While the late medieval Church increasingly depended on the resources and support of cultivated pious women and socially aspiring commercial families, many self-interested clergy constructed literacy’s Other as female and lay. Actual social networks and material practices clashed with dominant literate ideology. The number of non-clerical book owners increased dramatically during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, suggesting that de Bury’s hysteria was 43 

Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, p. 152. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 35. 45  Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. by Nice, pp. 140–41. 46  Bumke, Courtly Culture, trans by Dunlap, pp. 441–45. 44 

Theorizing Medieval Literacies

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partly based on observed circumstances. Late medieval books circulated more widely to people who wanted and could afford books, more people wanted to read books themselves, borrow them, give them, or receive them as gifts, more people wanted to hear them read aloud, and more people used writing in various genres to communicate, manage their affairs, gather information, engage with important ideas, or provide entertainment for themselves. Wealthy devout lay men and women inscribed themselves visually into religious books in donors’ portraits, coats of arms, and other signs of lay power and prestige.47 Families made or commissioned elaborate compilations of secular and religious texts and some­ times added their own compositions, as in the bilingual (Middle English + AngloNorman) Vernon manuscript (c. 1390–1400) and commonplace books (for ­example, the commonplace book of Humphrey Newton, a Tudor gentleman).48 The greater availability and uses of everyday and imaginative writing among many social ranks created spaces for new, more diverse communities of practice, the single greatest threat to the literate status quo in the late Middle Ages. Sometimes these reading connections and collaborations brought clergy and lay people together to form new kinds of reading groups, as with Margery Kempe and her clerical readers/scribes or Lady Mary of Burgundy and her clerical collaborators. Other times, group reading or bookmaking was primarily a secular affair, as was likely the case with Chaucer’s London circle of writers and professional intellectuals. The establishment of new grammar schools for the laity in England, France, Flanders, and elsewhere provided material and social support for emergent lay literacy, often with the assistance of clerics.49 Women, especially pious mothers, were recognized as responsible for their children’s early literacy education, in the vernacular and sometimes Latin.50 Images of St Anne reading with the Virgin Mary and perhaps teaching her to read appear more frequently in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century devotional texts.51 After 1400 (earlier in Italy), more children had experience with some form of schooling than ever ­before in Europe, especially among the wealthy, increasingly powerful urban 47 

Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, pp. 104–09; Amtower, Engaging Words, pp. 72–74. The Vernon Manuscript, intro. by Doyle; Humphrey Newton’s commonplace book is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c. 66 (late fifteenth to early sixteenth century). 49  Nicholas Orme’s work has updated and clarified but not displaced that of Leach. See Orme, English Schools; Orme, ‘The “Laicisation” of English School Education’, pp. 23–31; Orme, Medieval Schools; Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, passim. 50  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 13, 198, 245; Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers; Amtower, Engaging Words, pp. 29, 69. 51  See Scase, ‘St Anne and the Education of the Virgin’. 48 

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commercial classes. There were also more kinds of texts for them to read in the multilingual hyperliterate archive — romance, heroic narratives, poetry antho­ logies, Latin poetry and vernacular translations, history, the Bible, devotions, religious handbooks, catechisms, exemplary and holy lives, sermons, conduct guides, wills, deeds, account books, family letters, and so on. To sum up on the late medieval literate situations: Beginning in the early thirteenth century and prompted partly by the Church’s desire to better guide the faith and conduct of the laity, material and institutional literate practices diverged sharply from earlier, clergy-based literacy networks and practices. All regions or emerging nations (England, France, Italy, Sweden) were normatively multilingual in speech and writing, to varying degrees among different social groups and levels. Devotional texts in Latin and vernaculars were disseminated more widely among private or small groups of lay readers. Canonical Latin poetry was translated or adapted in vernacular versions (remixes) and retexts. As a result of schooling, devotional literacy, and translations, writers and readers were more familiar with various forms of Latin textuality. Scribes and compilers made greater use of scholastic modes of manuscript layout and hyperliterate strategies for ‘discontinuous reading’. New textual environments and reading formations challenged scholastic and sermonic models for study with affective, personal, or oppositional ways of reading. These realignments of traditional, Latin and clerically based literacy empowered lay as well as clerical readers and writers by creating better access to the languages, forms, and interpretations of official culture and textuality and by introducing new, alternative, insubordinate ideas into mainstream literate discourse. These new readers and audiences brought different interests, experiences, and suppositions to ancient stories, scripture, and commentary reading, interests shaped by commerce, heroism, individual agency, physical or romantic pleasure, and sheer ornery resistance to traditional authority. In these more open spaces for textual activity, religious writing and reading and ways of responding to classical literature became themselves sites of resistance. As we shall see in later chapters, anticlericalism and oppositional agency were often performed as literate practice, in multilingual parody, counter commentary, retexting, desacralizing writing, and affective reading.

Literacy as Discourse What are some of the implications of hyperliteracy in the context of late medieval literacies? Individual textual activities are situated within the hyperliterate domain. Late medieval hyperliteracy resists closure in favour of more open

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23

kinds of textuality, semiosis without limit, based within manuscript practices. Hyperliteracy, the ground of intertextuality, is contingent on material practices and situations and destablizes the power model of literacy which it might be presumed to protect. Through embodied reading, counter commentary, parody, and other deformative reading practices, hyperliteracy releases an individual text into the sign chain of unlimited signifying, resignifying, and retexting. Alternative reading and writing try to seize the discursive power which literate and Latin language ideology seek to control. Hyperliteracy, then, is constituted as a struggle for power and meaning in texts and reading formations, in a field of representation and reproduction. Literate ideology and the power model continually work to close textuality’s borders and restrict the number of available passports. But the network of texts (hypotexts) and filiations (intertextuality) cannot be totalized nor held stable. Hyperliteracy is a space which is reproduced and remade, retexted, in asynchronous developments and local practices. Strategies such as manuscript formats, discontinuous reading, multilingualism, and parody are always on the move, never having a single signification or context. Late medieval hyperliteracy is structured as a network of mobile practices which were controlled, refashioned, and poached on by different communities of literacy practice. The medieval hyperliterate network of multilingual and nonidentical practices (retexts) foregrounds the unacknowledged modernity and post­modernity of the Middle Ages and the unacknowledged medievalism of Modernity. In 1200, being literate enacted different, often contested meanings, depend­ ing on one’s social position and relation to hyperliterate power. Being called literatus was a normative judgment that someone could read some Latin text or at least people thought one could.52 For others, however, being literate (functionally, pragmatically, experientially) could mean handling texts to ach­ ieve specific goals or being able to hear or appreciate texts read aloud in small groups or with a clerically trained reader even if the audience members could not decode inscription from the page themselves.53 Other times, being literate could mean being able to recite or repeat key texts such as Latin or vernacular prayers in a devotional context. Being literatus and being able to handle texts for specific purposes were not necessarily the same thing. Literatus belonged to Latin discourse as a dividing practice and structuring structure within medieval 52 

Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 226–30. Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 266–72; Coleman, Public Reading. 53 

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language ideology. In everyday terms, being a text handler meant using one or more languages (Latin, vernaculars) to accomplish an expanding range of socially meaningful tasks. After 1150, being literate could also mean poaching on or resisting the Church’s control over the production, circulation, and archiv­ ing of sacred and learned discourse or the unofficial use of administrative or bureaucratic documents and legal formulas. 54 As the early fifteenth-century Norwich heresy trials indicate, certain literate practices were becoming visible markers of dissent, defiance, and expressions of anticlericalism among laity and clergy: in particular, popular preaching by lay men and women, based on Latin and vernacular scripture reading, and gatherings of text-conscious lay people, with or without clerical guidance, seeking spiritual or social support, private worship, and scriptural study.55 Whereas modern literacy debates often emphasize pedagogy and schooling according to achievement standards, late medieval literacy conflicts typically focused on who was reading with whom, where they were reading, what they were reading and talking about in which languages, and how they were making meaning from the texts they were using. Late medieval lay people’s new opportunities for accessing the hyperliterate network, together with anxieties about increasing lay literacy and Latin literacy, challenged received representations of language, social order, textuality, and subjectivity. Changing material forms of literacy — in particular, wider uses of scholastic text formats for discontinuous reading, silent reading, commentary without clerical or official mediation (two different situations), vernacular writing, and wider access to schooling — enabled lay readers to participate in a wider range of political, religious, and aesthetic activities. Sometimes this meant lay people intervened or intruded into discursive realms not customary for them. In addition, the growing literate anxieties also made medieval Europeans more interested in and, paradoxically, more wary of other cultural literacies ( Jewish and Muslim), inside and outside Europa or Romania. Late medieval literacy events, such as lay scriptural reading, translations, or collaborative writing, did not represent social conflicts. Literacy events were the conflicts. Historical research focusing on how many people were ‘literate’ at a given time does not usually consider fictional representations of reading, writing, and literate subjectivity as ‘evidence’ or ‘testimony’. (A notable, and controversial, exception is the collaborative History of Private Life, edited by Philippe Ariès 54  See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 154–72, 226–30; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 38–64; Steiner, Documentary Culture, pp. 17, 47–90 (on ‘documentary poetics’). 55  See Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, p. 21; Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, xx.

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and Georges Duby.56) But literacy narratives, found in chronicles, sermons, dev­otional books, administrative documents, fictional narratives, lyric poetry, and drama, are representations and fashionings within the social imaginary, productions of cultural imaginations and textual performances. The dominant ideological scheme equating literatus with clericus and therefore with men of a certain social status has governed not only medieval accounts of hyperliteracy but also many modern accounts, so as to mask the many ways in which medieval people were probably creating, accessing, and using written texts for different, some­times cross purposes. Some cultural historians, notably Michael Clanchy and Brian Stock, argue that controlling concepts such as literatus, illiteratus, clericus, and laicus and their relationships to one another were in fact constitutive of lived social reality in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Steven Justice shows how official chroniclers’ descriptions and ideological misrecognition of the 1381 Peasants’ Rising in England actually subverted their accounts of the rebels as ‘illiterati’ and ‘idioti’.57 The rebels communicated through written messages, negotiated in writing with the king, and burned key documents related to land rents and taxes which they deemed unjust. The rebels’ organizing and rebellious activities show how the rioting group was operating within, not outside of, literate networks and also how much their political ends and means differed from those of the official powers. The rebels promoted their goals of social justice and tax relief in part through a counterhegemonic literate practice which materially and violently challenged the documentary archive and subverted official chronicle representations. Within the hyperliterate network, definitions of literatus and illiteratus are discursive acts, markers of social order and dissent, performatives rather than constatives. Groups with greater prestige, social power, or cultural capital typically have more access to influential modes of cultural representation and (re)production and therefore greater ability to control discursive practices and cultural contests. However, as the marker model of literacy emphasizes and as Justice, Clanchy, and others have shown in concrete cases, the multiple significations of late medieval reading and literacy emerge through discursive interactions, at the intersections of Latin and the vernaculars, in material, ideological, political, psychological, and symbolic practices. Texts and writing and reading as activities are relatively, not absolutely, autonomous. Texts are part of social reality and always travel with 56 

A History of Private Life, ed. by Ariès and Duby. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 224–52; Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 13–66. 57 

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authorized commentary or approved reading strategies, in explicit commentary or coded performance habits. One of the aims of this book is to embrace medieval literacies within a critical pragmatics which unhinges texts from their prevailing authorized commentaries (modern as well as medieval) and tries to hold them in a luminal, defamiliarizing critical gaze. I am trying to tease out possible counter associations, contesting responses, and unruly knowledges which texts and ways of reading might present within hyperliterate networks. Fluid textuality, instantiated in manuscript culture and multiple modes of writing and reading, foregrounds dissent, difference, creolization, and nonstandard discourse as critical practices. The marker model disrupts the unitary stability of power model literacy and acknowledges cultural otherness as a positivity, as when lay people use vernacular devotional books as gifts, keepsakes, status markers, or affective prompts or when court poets retext Ovidian stories which challenge aristocratic values and the status of old Latin texts.

From Literate Anxiety to Hyperliteracy The critical concepts of retexting and the marker model of literacy reframe late medieval writing as an open series of multimodal semiotic performances. Medi­eval literate practices were not simply opposed to orality as many Great Divide literacy theories might presume.58 Rather, medieval literate practices were interwoven with modes of orality, through dictation, university lectures, trans­cripts of trial speech, performative reading, singing from a text or reciting it from memory, reading aloud to a small group, or reading aloud or subvocally to oneself. Nonetheless, as Brian Stock has argued, no matter how oral it remained, late medieval society was fundamentally a textual one: ‘The cultural problem in the Middle Ages is the relation of orality to a world making ever increasing use of texts, not only, as is obvious, in its real social interchange, but more importantly, in the ontological sphere, that is, as a set of pure abstract or intellectualized models out of which any experience may potentially be interpreted.’59 The world as text, text as framing metaphor. Wider uses of texts replaced many earlier forms of oral communication and interaction with new written models for thought and consciousness. 58 

See, for example, Goody and Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’; Goody, The Logic of Writing; Olson, ‘From Utterance to Text’; Olson, ‘Oral and Written Language’; Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp.  78–116. For a concise critique of Great Divide theories, see Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 70–76. 59  Stock, Listening for the Text, p. 35.

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While I agree with Stock’s characterization of the central and later Middle Ages as inherently textual, I find his opposition between ‘real social interchange’ and ‘the ontological sphere’ problematic. Stock implies that textuality can be con­ ceived as both prior to and independent of its social contexts, functions, and per­ formances. I argue that texts do not inhabit discrete spaces in an autonomous ‘ontological sphere’. Rather, texts are part of and often constitutive of ideological, com­municative, documentary, and insubordinate relations. Texts are tools for and traces of power relations and counter-hegemonic discursive practices. Even if we imagine that aesthetic texts can exist in a discrete ‘art world’, they still circulate and signify within social, historical, material situations of reading and inter­pretation. The historicity of reading is marked by the interactions of text and contexts, ‘reading formations’, which include material arrangements and environ­ments of textuality, writing and reading practices, and reading responses and effects.60 Medieval literacies often created new intersections and conflicts and new associa­tions within traditional linguistic practices. Formulaic written documents replaced oral agreements and were often archived in central locations, thus constituting new sites for legal and social power. 61 When a text was translated into another language or reformatted into a different genre or form, the translated text called into question visually and aurally which language was primary, originary, or authoritative. For example, vernacular translations of Latin scripture, commentary, legal proclamations, and university learned texts were sometimes encouraged and authorized by the Church, but other times they were condemned for diluting or violating the authority of Latin discourse. I have already mentioned Dymmok’s 1395 incorporation of Wycliffite English texts in his Latin refutation. Dymmok decontextualized the Lollard conclusions posted in English in public spaces, but first he had to reproduce the English texts, then translate them into Latin before critiquing in Latin the Wycliffite writers’ conclusions. To answer the Lollard Conclusions, Dymmok first retexted the English texts into a language he could address as academically legitimate. In this way, Lollard public textuality entered scholastic textuality. Just as troubling was the question of who was using vernacular writing and what interpretations or outcomes they produced. When Innocent III sent papal delegates in 1199 to investigate the rash of vernacular translations of scripture in Lorraine, he initially was concerned not with the translations themselves but 60  Bennett, Outside Literature; Taylor, Textual Situations; Bourdieu and Passeron, Repro­ duction, trans. by Nice; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. by Nice. 61  See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 145–84.

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with why and how lay readers were reading scripture.62 Lay men and women such as Waldes, Wyclif ’s followers, and Margery Kempe were suspect because they were reading vernacular religious texts or having Latin texts translated for them without official authorization or, in Kempe’s case, appearing to have acquired knowledge of vernacular scripture without permission. Similar multilingual conflicts occurred over whether to use Latin or a verna­ cular for royal or official letters. During the baronial rebellion of 1258, Henry III sent letters patent in English and French (18 and 20 October 1258) rather than in Latin to every county, proclaiming that people should abide by the decisions of his new baronial council and that the activities of the sheriffs would be investigated to root out corruption. The king’s use of vernacular letters suggests he did not trust the sheriffs to be the sole interpretive intermediaries between him and a presumably non-Latin reading public. Perhaps Henry used English rather than French in these letters so he could establish his own ‘nativist’ connections among the general population. In the late thirteenth century, a few Westminster statutes were recorded in French while the majority of English statutes at the time were officially recorded in Latin. Some baronial communications were disseminated in both English and French texts, but it is not always clear there existed a Latin original to authorize the vernacular versions.63 Sometimes a Latin ‘original’ or proof text kept in the royal or diocesan archives was in fact composed after the vernacular version. By the mid-fourteenth century, English was the spoken language of parliamentary discourse, while Latin remained the official language of written record.64 In 1362, English Parliament was opened for the first time with a speech in English by the Chancellor. After 1362, the official spoken language in English law courts was English, but Latin was the language for written legal records, and the Goldsmiths and other companies continued to keep their records in French with Latin borrowings for legal terminology. The 1362 English statute regarding courtroom vernacular points to the ambiguities of multilingual literacy. In trial records, official Latin ‘originals’ almost certainly were produced after the vernacular testimony, just as Dymmok Latinized the English Lollard Conclusions. The 1362 statute was actually written in French, and court judgments were still required to be officially 62 

Innocent III, Selected Letters, ed. by Cheney and Semple, Letter 141 (Innocent III, Regestorum sive epistolarum, in PL 214, cols 695B–C). 63  Brand, ‘The Languages of the Law’. 64  Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 220–23; Machan, English in the Middle Ages, pp. 21–69.

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inscribed in Latin.65 The emergent code (English) was thematically embedded in the dominant codes (French, Latin). Vernacular translation is unruly textuality. At times vernacular translations were sought after by religious dissenters (the twelfth-century Waldo and his followers, Lollards), by readers of classical mythology, and by clerical, aristocratic, and commercial readers wanting access to devotional writing. Other times and typically from the top, translations were deplored (Innocent III, Richard de Bury, Henry Knighton, Archbishop Arundel). Vernacular scripture translations were often embedded in devotional texts for lay women alongside Latin quotations (for example, Ancrene Wisse). For many in the Church, even after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), vernacular translations of scripture or commentary were always subordinate to the ‘higher’, authoritative Latin version of the text. But by the end of the fourteenth century, the question of translation was disseminated into different spaces, with scriptural translation increasingly condemned by officials in England and France, vernacular translations of learned texts eagerly sought after by clergy and lay readers, and vernacular poetry incorporating more features usually reserved for Latin texts and readers. 66 For many late medieval lay readers and listeners, vernacular scripture and commentary gave them more direct access to religious culture. Many of these new literates read vernacular translations as alternate versions, differends of official Latin texts, and those retexts became the original texts themselves.67 Vernacular translations provided readers with familiar linguistic pathways to new knowledge, images, or cultural spaces. For some clergy whose Latin literacy was limited, vernacular scripture and commentary actually improved their textual knowledge and interpretive authority. In medieval multilingual discourse, vernacular translations inhabited more than one ideological position and practice. So did Latin, as more and more lay people became familiar with at least some forms of Latin discourse, through devotions, magic, or law. Sometimes manuscripts were recopied (translated) into a more local or more authoritative dialect within a language. For example, the scribe of London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C. xiii (mid-thirteenth century) modified the original language of Laȝamon’s Brut, replacing the author’s archaic, 65 

Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, p. 102; Jefferson, ‘The Language and Vocabulary’, pp. 185–86. The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, esp. pp. 316–30; Voigts, ‘What’s the Word?’. 67  According to Lyotard, ‘As distinguished from a litigation, a differend [differend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.’ See Lyotard, The Differend, trans. by Van Den Abbeele, p. xi. 66 

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Old English vocabulary with presumably more familiar or audience-friendly French loanwords. The texts of Cursor Mundi include northern and southern English dialect versions. Medieval multilingualism was broader than just secular vernacularization. In multilingual environments, translation constituted an institutional form of governmentality. Translations of Latin into vernaculars and vernaculars into Latin disrupted local linguistic and textual norms. Written Latin ‘translations’ of vernacular speech became the official record, the ‘originals’, which the law claimed was a true account of the proceedings. Dymmok unintentionally legitimized Lollard English writing by translating it into academic Latin discourse. When Margery Kempe was questioned by members of the archbishop of York’s court in Latin, she claimed not to understand them and asked her interrogators to question her in English. According to the Statute of 1362 she had a right to be questioned in the vernacular, but any formal legal record would have been recoded in Latin and once again, at least according to Kempe’s pragmatic fiction, that official information would be unavailable to her as a non-Latin using woman. (We shall return to Kempe’s Latinity later.) Late medieval literate anxieties and hyperliterate conflicts constituted a sem­i­otic network of relations and practices, comprising an archive, hypotexts, textuality, intertextuality, and hyperliteracy. Hypotexts are encoded within the literate archive. A hypotext is a base text (vernacular romance, Latin prayer) or node (devotional phrase), even an individual word or an icon, which relates a discourse to the archive.68 The hypotext is the literate material which is trans­ formed, rewritten, or reproduced by the interventions of writers and readers in the archive. Hypotexts may or may not appear directly in the positive text, but they are the formal and semantic fields where reading and writing as retexting take place, whether as base text in a commentary (Aeneid, Metamorphoses, Bible) or as an authoritative text (Psalms, Song of Songs) whose language is dis­ tributed throughout texts as an acknowledged or unacknowledged intertext or set of key words in an authoritative discourse or commentary. Glossed texts or sermons on scripture constitute explicit hypotexts in the literate archive, while thirteenth-century Dominican preaching concordances attempt to articulate the key hypotexts within religious discourse (for a splendid example of these well-thumbed texts, if only vol. 1 (A–M), see Concordantiae Bibliae, Chicago, Newberry Library, Vault Case, MS Folio 179, probably from Paris, 1280–1330). Foucault describes the archive as the ‘positivity of a discourse […] [d]ifferent oeuvres, dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive 68 

See Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry.

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formation — and so many authors who know or do not know one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea’. The archive is an historical a priori, the gathering of hypotexts for any discursive situation and the situation from which any communication, utterance, text, or performance derives, ‘a complex volume, in which heterogeneous regions are differentiated or deployed’. 69 Foucault’s concept of the archive is open-ended and resists totalization, yet theoretically it functions like Saussure’s langue: a structural segment and ‘positive’ ground for an utterance or text at a given historical moment. The archive is the condition, not the cause, for utterance, discourse, and retexting. As Michael Reddy puts it, ‘all that is preserved in libraries is the mere opportunity to perform [the] reconstruction’, by which he means the construction of meanings, which may be dominant, emergent, resistant, or transgressive.70 Derrida unpacks the ambiguous relation of Foucault’s archive to history and temporality. He suggests how we might read the tension between originals and copies, authority and reception, official Latin and differential Latin or vernaculars in medieval textuality. The Foucaultian archive contains a double drive for conservation and destruction: ‘there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive’. Difference is historical and experiential, and Derrida argues that the condition for open textuality is temporal as well as spatial: ‘what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way’.71 The archive names the accumulation of texts and textuality in the literate imaginary and discursive practice. Derrida’s rethinking of Freud in the archive of history is an important subtext in my argument: ‘Freud’s intention is to analyse, across the apparent absence of memory and of archive, all kinds of symptoms, signs, figures, metaphors, metonymies that attest, at least virtually, an archival documentation where the “ordinary historian” identifies none.’72 The following chapters can be read as essays in the symptomatology of literacy and literate consciousness. The archive is not stable, though like langue it seems to be fixed at any single moment. It is transformable and alterable by institutions or groups who claim or try to police a part of the archive for themselves (clerical Latin readers of scrip­ 69 

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, pp. 126, 128. Reddy, ‘The Conduit Metaphor’, pp. 309–10. 71  Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Prenowitz, p. 19. 72  Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Prenowitz, p. 64. 70 

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ture, professional critics, unruly peasants) and also by individuals or groups of writers and readers who produce new texts which become part of the archive’s ‘positivity’, for example, vernacular translations of scripture, new versions of old stories, new subjects for literary genres, or new ways of reading and interpreting. Textuality is more than a ‘communicative occurrence’73; it is never singular but always embedded in a network of hyperliteracy. Functionally and performatively, textuality includes the materials and forms which give rise to particular texts and the conditions under which writers and readers understand what they produce or engage with as text. Textualities — ways of perceiving, ordering, and engaging with writing and literate representations — constitute individual objects or arrangements or designs of language, pictures, graphs, and other signs ordered by textual conventions, formats, ways of reading, and institutional sites.74 Without producing an order of literate discourse, textuality does not exist. Textuality emerges in ‘en-framing’, or what I have called retexting.75 The enactments, performances, and experiences of textuality often exceed the boundaries prescribed in the order of discourse, especially when the text decentres itself, reveals its gaps, edges, or heterogeneity, or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s words, when the text becomes displaced or ‘deterritorialized’.76 Deleuze and Guattari use deterritorialization and reterritorialization primarily as geographical terms (the English spoken and written in Singapore, the French spoken and written in thirteenth-century England, Latin spoken and written throughout the later Middle Ages). But as discursive space, language use appropriates various ‘terri­ torialisms’ (geography, situation, genre, norm, standard language, grammar, official speech) and seizes them for other contexts, releasing them to new ‘lines of flight’ which create rhizomatic ‘alliances’, as in language contact situations where two or more languages are actively used in a social space such that the product of 1+1+1 is more than 3.77 Medieval drinking songs or romance lyrics recontextualize sacred Latin vocabulary or translations as irreverent parodies or romantic passion. So-called French ‘borrowings’ in English may have been heard or read more as Anglo-French than English by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century speakers and writers. Fifteenth-century readers such as Alice Colyns or Margery 73 

De Beaugrande and Dressler, Introduction to Text Linguistics, p. 3. See Bennett, Outside Literature; Fish, Is There a Text?, pp. 147–80, 322–37. 75  See Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. by Krell, pp. 294–305. 76  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, trans. by Polan. 77  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Massumi, pp. 10, 238. 74 

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Kempe internalized scripture texts and recited or interpreted them in different contexts to support their public arguments.78 Anticlerical readers in the south of France or lay men and women in England physically deterritorialized Latin scripture translated into the vernacular by holding it in their hands, speaking it with their mouths, and cogitating on it in their minds. Textuality draws together the conditions, modes of production, ideologies, metaphors, frames, and mental categories within a literate network and makes possible the assignment of actants and meanings to an otherwise inscrutable collection of marks. Textuality is the condition of readability and of resistance. Textuality also orders signs at many levels. The development of manuscript formats reflects writers’, readers’, and institutions’ ongoing concerns with hyper­ textuality. A late medieval manuscript is an inscribed matrix of visual and verbal signs: written characters, illustrations, book and page layout, and medieval forms of hypertextual markup (notae, abbreviations, cues, recall markers), glosses, indices, rubrication, engrossed letters, and so forth). Manuscript illustrations may explain or complement the written text they accompany; they can also subvert or retext it. Marginal notations, glosses, and illustrations may highlight parts of the text so readers can find them, question parts of the text, or reinterpret them. The typical manuscript page presents readers with multiple pathways for reading, inter­preting, improvising, and performing meaning, even as the written text linguistically guides a reader’s access to the text. Take, for example, the functions of letters as textual marks. Letters (litterae) are the minimal elements of manuscript literacy, minimal units of text and ins­ criptions on the page. Along with engrossed or decorated letters, scribes also used notae, puncta, and page position (central, margin, interlinear) to design or construct a text. General spacing was always part of manuscript textuality, but increasingly after 1050, words, grammatically and semantically distinctive groups of letters, were marked by word separation.79 Letters, puncta, illustrations, and marginal spacing are all visual signs with a complicated and ambiguous relation to speech and text processing.80 Among Imperial Roman grammarians (Donatus, Priscian, Servius, and others), littera was defined as ‘pars minima vocis articulatae’ (the minimal part of articulate/meaningful speech). A letter has three accidents or characteristics: ‘nomen, quomodo vocetur; figura, quo caractere signetur; potestas, quae vocalis, 78 

Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 201. Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 165–82. 80  See Rust, Imaginary Worlds, pp. 31–79, but with different theoretical questions regarding littera from the ones I raise here. 79 

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quae consonans habeatur’81 (a name by which it is called, a shape by which it is signi­fied, a speech sound by which it is a vowel or consonant). For Roman and some medieval grammarians, letters could be regarded not only as symbols but also as what Peirce (in ‘Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs’) calls indexical signs, maps, or schedules: ‘An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that Object […]. In so far as the Index is affected by the Object, it necessarily has some Quality in common with the Object.’82 But just what quality the written letter might be an index of was complicated by the medieval assumption that letters and sounds were related arbitrarily and by convention rather than naturally. Like modern linguists, most medieval grammarians and philosophers rejected pure iconicity in letters. What was more important was how and by whom written signs were produced and how they marked or implied prior speech or speech event. Did reading aloud or silently reproduce the original utterance (author controlled), or was reading an occasion, a performative rewriting, improvization, or retexting? Just what was a text’s intentio? And where is it located? For medieval grammarians, letters share with their corresponding sounds reference to an overarching linguistic system of meaningful speech. Struggling to come to terms with the phenomenology of writing and reading, medieval gram­ marians, writers, and readers more and more emphasized the absence of voice from letters and the page: ‘litterae autem sunt indices rerum, signa verborum, quibus tanta vis est, ut nobis dicta absentium sine vocem loquantur’83 (letters are the indices of things, the signs of words, in which there is such meaning/ semantic motivation/sound image [vis] that the words of absent persons speak to us without sound). What creeps into Isidore’s reworking of the Roman grammarians’ definition of littera is a stronger recognition of how the speaker or writer is absent for the reader. The empty space of the speaking position is then occupied performatively by the one reading aloud or silently. Do letters and the writer (which writer — scribe? compiler? author?) control the reader and the reading of a text, or does the reader improvize meaning with the letters and the text in performing literacy? Are the letters in a prayer book prompts for uttering sacred words or for understanding their semantics? After 1050, as silent reading became more normalized, grammarians began to foreground the role of littera as part of textuality and the silent text. John 81 

Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, ed. by Lindsay, i, 4. 16. Peirce, Philosophical Writings, ed. by Buchler, p. 102. 83  Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, ed. by Lindsay, i, 3. 1. See Amsler, ‘Premodern Letters’. 82 

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of Salisbury’s definition reframes Isidore’s indices rerum within indices vocum: ‘Litterae autem, id est figurae, primo vocum indices sunt; deinde rerum, quas anime per oculorum fenestras opponunt, et frequenter absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur’84 (Fundamentally, letters, that is, shapes (or perhaps, ‘shaped sound’), are indices of voices/utterance. Hence they represent things which they bring to the mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently they speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent). In John’s definition, letters, the minimal elements of textuality, displace Isidore’s things; letters are primarily shapes on the page, visual markers which may or may not be filtered through speech. John’s retexting of Isidore’s definition reveals the ambiguity of writing as text caught up in the changing rip curls of reading the manuscript page. Exploiting the space between oral and visual signs, scribes, and editors used manuscript letters in other ways. In northern Europe, Carolingian scribes had used old-fashioned Uncial and Rustic capitals to inscribe ‘old texts’ (Scripture, Patristic authors) as lemmata, while using contemporary Insular Minuscule script for interlinear commentary. The different scripts contrast visually on the manuscript page.85 By the eleventh century, scribes often spatially separated lemmata and commentary on the page rather than inscribe them in different scripts. Throughout the Middle Ages, scribes also used different scripts to signify the linguistic codes for different bits of text. Scribes used the Roman alphabet for both Latin and vernacular texts, but some scribes modified orthography locally according to the conventions of scribal pronunciation and written standardization. After the Conquest, Anglo-Norman scribes dropped many of the Germanic runes (þ, ð, wynn) from English writing, adopted the open yogh (ȝ) for palatals, and used the continental h as a supplementary mark for interdental or palatal pronunciations of English not occurring in Old French. But some postConquest scribal centres continued to use Old English orthography to mark contrasting sounds. For example, the scribe of the Ancrene Wisse (Middle English, thirteenth century) continued to use the graphemes ð and þ to systematically distinguish the conjunction oðer from the pronoun oþer. In hyperliterate textualities, letters representing speech sounds also served more global textual functions. Anna Grotans has recently shown how Notker Labeo used manuscript pointing and different letter configurations to teach 84 

John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, ed. by Hall, bk 1, chap. 13, ll. 24–25. Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 27. For early medieval manuscript examples, see: St Peterburg, Rossii’skaia natsional’naia biblioteka / National Library of Russia (formerly Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library), MS Lat. F. V. I.3 (Northumbrian, Book of Job+Philippus’s commentary); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 819 (Wearmouth-Jarrow, Proverbs+Bede’s commentary). 85 

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reading and performative reading aloud at tenth-century St Gall.86 By the late twelfth century, scribes throughout Europe used illuminated, decorated, enlarged, or engrossed letters to signify an element within a word, indicate stress, mark inflectional morphology, or note textual divisions. Illuminated capitals became multi-signifying textual spaces, sometimes marking in the same page space a part of a written word, a textual division, a visual gloss on the textual theme, and perhaps a portrait of the book or writer’s patron. Letters also became important aids for organizing reading. Engrossed letters helped organize alphabetical or topical indices and glossaries. Illustrated letters containing a donor portrait might also separate sections of a text. After 1200, individual letters could perform different signifying functions — phonetic, graphic, glossing, hypertextual — within a single text and at different places within a text. Thus, the multiple textual functions of manuscript letters exceeded the strictly object- or communicationoriented concept of textuality. Readers performatively engaged with a text by reading aloud, looking at the illustrations, touching sacred or transgressive images, or reading the original language in a transgressive translation (Latin or vernacular), style, or accent. Intertextuality and hyperliteracy constitute discursive practices within texts and the archive. Intertextual writing and reading displace the individual ‘author’ from the text (de Bury’s worst nightmare) and refiliate the text within the archive as a dynamic domain of potential, not fixed, meanings. The history of the concept of intertextuality exemplifies the intersection of medieval literacies and modern theory. In 1970, Julia Kristeva framed the critical concept of intertextuality, in contrast to source hunting, in her analysis of fifteenth-century French prose narrative.87 In the 1960s and early seventies, Roland Barthes’s theory of the ‘text’ and ‘open textuality’, as for Derrida and Foucault, was informed by models drawn from medieval manuscript textuality and reading practices, especially ‘the work’s legal discontinuity’ and blurred margins.88 Since the early 1970s, many critics have appropriated intertextuality as a critical concept, but the topic of medieval literacies returns us to the radically plural practice of intertextual reading and writing as assemblage and compilation, as writing and retexting in the margins. Like the procedures of Jakobson’s metaphor and metonymy, intertextuality semiotically denotes a new ‘signifying system […] produced with the same sig­ 86 

Grotans, Reading in Medieval St Gall, pp. 223–48. Kristeva, Le Texte du roman. 88  Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Miller; Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. by Miller; Barthes, Image‒Music‒Text, trans. by Heath. See now Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, pp. 114–94. 87 

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nify­ing material’.89 Retexting, bricolage, and assemblage are productive and inter­ pretive activities. In multilingual settings, speakers of different languages or one speaker using different languages combine the same syllables or phonemes in different ways for different purposes. Or speakers might combine elements from different languages in a counterhegemonic creole discourse, revising the very notion of grammaticality. Like sounds, like texts or bits of texts. Intertextuality signifies a wider multilingual field. Intertextuality as writing and reading strategies, retexting, displaces restricted textuality and the concept of a unified speaking position into a multiple, general discursive play of associations, echoes, inversions, and archival replacements. As Kristeva writes, ‘If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an intertextuality), one then understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves.’90 Intertextuality marks not so much the connection of one whole text with other texts but the displacement of an utterance away from individual writers or speakers into the hypertextual network of scraps and bits of language (morceaux), clips of utterance, and readers’ social interaction. Quotation and citation have long been features of textual culture, from Plato to Derrida and Searle. Kristeva, Barthes, and Foucault extend the notion of citationality and relate intertextuality to the archive, where the dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive formation — and so many authors who know or do not know one another, meet without knowing it and obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole.91

Intertextuality cannot be totalized or circumscribed just by citing a text’s explicit sources or allusions, although we should not overlook explicit citations as part of a text’s rhetoric. Anonymous codes and authorless texts, together with cita­tions, are typical of medieval manuscript literacy, and these features mark an open textuality and the possibilities for discontinuous, dynamic rewriting, resigni­ fication, and retextus. In a more embodied mode, intertextual retexting points to enactments of meaning and resignifying which exploit the temporal gap between a sign’s origin and its subsequent historicity. In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes 89 

Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Waller, p. 59. Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. by Waller, p. 60. 91  Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 126. 90 

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something like what I am calling retexting as a ‘continuous chain of reinter­ pretations and rearrangements’: a sequence of more or less profound, more or less independent processes of appro­ priation, including the resistances used in each instance, the attempted trans­for­ mations for purposes of defense or reaction, as well as the results of successful counter­attacks.92

The sign chain of open textuality is manifested not only in medieval rereadings and rewritings of old texts (Chaucer reads Berchorius reads Ovid, Waldes reads the translated Gospels) but also in the remixing of scriptural quotations, utter­ ances of official words in unruly mouths, and the visual filiation of text and gloss on the manuscript page. Medieval manuscript literacy is a concrete instance of intertextuality as temporal and subjective difference. Beyond citationality, intertextuality names the potential for rereading in the archive. Intertextuality encompasses a translated text’s source and target lan­ guages, along with the texts, fragments, genre expectations, and codes readers in different historical situations associate with a given text or use to make the text meaningful to them. Intertextuality is creative because it is productive, interpretive, and displacing. In the Middle Ages, literal and allegorical readings were framed within the intertextual archive. When medieval readers of classical myth allegorized pagan deities as oblique versions of Christian virtues and vices, their intertextual reading was only one kind of reading-As, prescriptive allegoresis, which associated antique stories with an authoritative master discourse. Other allegorical intertextualities associated pagan or scriptural narratives with historical situations. Intertextuality, then, was a literate strategy for displacing ancient texts — pagan or Christian — and recontextualizing them in a contemporary master discourse. In the Middle Ages, literal or historicized readings of classical poetry or scripture often disrupted the interpretive work of dominant reading by refusing to modernize older texts. Some literal scripture readers in the late Middle Ages (Richard of St Victor, Waldensians) posed significant challenges to the dominant Christian order by invoking the past as a model for present values, and behaviours, for which they were labelled ‘judaizers’ or ‘heretics’. Medieval discourses are radically intertextual and decentreing with respect to their vocality, writtenness, interpretation, and temporal materiality. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theories of textuality were very much in question because of changes to the literate situation, manuscript technologies, and trans­ 92 

Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ and ‘The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Golffing, p. 210.

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lations. We read these controversies in the scholastics’ conceptualization of four interrelated kinds of textus: the material object, the immaterial, interiorized Book of the Heart or Spirit, the Book of Nature, and the transcendental Book which authorized the other three. As the scribe writes on the page, God writes on the heart. The ‘text’ is both material and immaterial. So what ‘text’ does one read? What is the relation between text format, text language, and text meaning? What belongs to the text, and what to the commentator? We are just beginning to grasp how much the complex medieval idea of the book has permeated modern ideas of print textuality as well as postmodern ideas of digital textuality. Not to mention how medieval theories and textual practices inaugurated one kind of transformation of the Book into Writing. Derrida’s grammatology project is still getting underway in the modernity of the Middle Ages. Consider, for example, the twelfth-century question: Who authored the Book of Wisdom, Solomon or the Holy Spirit? St Bonaventure wanted to know whether Peter Lombard could be considered the auctor of his influential academic text Libri sententiarum (1250–52) — Foucault’s author-function avant la lettre. Bonaventure’s well-known taxonomy of the making of a book describes the text, its variants, supplements, glosses, and commentary as primary places (principalia), liter­ally and metaphorically. Bonaventure conflates the concept of hypotext with the physical and conceptual centre of the manuscript page. The auctor as primary wri­ter emerges only as the compilator and commentator functions recede in the text: There are four ways (modus) to make a book. A man might write (scribit) the work of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place (principalia), adding (annexa) his own for purposes of explanation (evidentia); and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator), not an ‘author’. Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding (annexa) others’ for purposes of confirmation, and that person ought to be called an ‘author’ (auctor).93

The compiler, along with the scribe (scriptor), illuminator, and rubricator, is more responsible than the designated ‘author’ for a text’s ordering, format, and hyper­ literate markup, especially in academic or presentation manuscripts. Parkes notes, ‘The compilatio derives its usefulness from the ordo in which the auctoritates were arranged.’94 In medieval texts, different material and linguistic emphases, such as 93  Bonaventure, In primum librum sententiarum, Proem, Q. 4, Conclusion, in Bonaventura, Opera omnia, ed. by Fleming and others, i, 14–15. 94  Parkes, ‘The Influence of the Concepts of ordinatio and compilatio’, p. 128; see Illich, In

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foregrounding a compiler’s ordinatio or an author’s writing or readers’ interpretive roles, mark variations within the play of open textuality and intertextuality. A compiler orders the texts, biography, citations, glosses, and commentary for an auctor or auctores (Virgil, Ovid, Bible, Augustine) in order to make the principal text and its annexa (supplementary discourses) available or useful to an ideal reader imagined by the compiler. A thirteenth-century compiler of a handbook for preachers might juxtapose representations of heretical beliefs and behaviours with citations from scripture and patristic writers so that preachers and clerics had strategies for disputation and orthodox proof texts with which to rebut heretics or counsel the faithful. Compilations, commentaries, and florilegia are inherently and materially contingent texts, hypertexts, with many kinds of writing intertwined, nested, and juxtaposed on the page. Such assemblages crystallize the contingency of all texts. Some twelfth-century theories of textuality exploited the openness of commentary discourse to question the nature and authority of auctoritas. Through manuscript arrangement and discursive reordering, Abelard’s Sic et non (c. 1122) performatively used intertextual compilation and hypertextual strategies to critique, even jam, the ideological machinery of a homogeneous tradition of exegesis which laid claim to a single truth or proper interpretation of hypotextual scripture. Abelard’s compilation shows not the plenitude but the underlying gaps and fractures within Christian commentary discourse: ‘With these prefatory words, it seems right, as we have undertaken to collect the diverse sayings of the Holy Fathers, which stand out in our memory to some extent due to their apparent disagreement as they focus on an issue.’95 In effect, Abelard used textual compilatio to argue that scripture and its readers themselves called into question the idea of interpretive homogeneity or harmony.96 It’s not me, he says, but the texts themselves that do it. Abelard’s Sic et non combines a proto-nominalist theory of multiple readings of scripture with the visible materiality of texts on the page to show as much as assert the heterogeneity within Christian community. Abelard juxtaposes passages and performatively intervenes in the exegetical archive by specifying the hypotexts which constitute the interpretive tradition as fractured and contested. Abelard elevated the contingency of language and text to a critical strategy for describing how enunciation and usage are governed by writers’ purposes and intentions the Vineyard of the Text, pp. 99–106. 95  Abelard, Sic et non, ed. by Boyer and McKeon, p. 103. 96  Abelard, Sic et non, ed. by Boyer and McKeon, p. 104.

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which the text mediates for subsequent readers while creating unresolved gaps and contradictions: The unfamiliar (inusitatus) manner of speech gets very much in the way of our achieving understanding, as well as the different meanings (significatio diversa) these words very often have when a given word is used with a particular meaning only in that particular manner of speech […]. Likewise, it is often appropriate to change the wording to suit the differences among those with whom we speak, since it frequently happens that the proper meaning (propria significatio) of a word is unknown or less familiar to some people.97

Meanings, even scriptural meanings, always occupy multiple historico-temporal positions. Citing Augustine and Priscian, Abelard outlined a theory of multi­ voiced commentary with different kinds of linguistic usage (usus). He tar­geted not the authority of scripture itself but the drive to reduce the textual hetero­ geneity of scripture and scriptural commentary to a single voice, single usage, single institutional truth. Abelard was committed to a dialectical search for Truth, based on disputation and the questioning of assumptions, terms, and inferences. In Sic et non his compilation of scriptural citations and interpretations produces a retext which exceeds individual commentaries and reorders other texts according to new quaestiones and rubrics. In effect, Abelard produces a critical hypertext of scrip­ tural commentary, much as Bernard Gui and other heresy hunters produced critical hypertexts of heretical discourses. As a metatext, Sic et non performatively suggests how commentary discourse is open-ended and unresolved rather than a closed text or a final, seamless master discourse speaking for and aft-er scripture. Sic et non’s 158 quaestiones reframe the received commentary tradition and expose through dialogic textual performance and manuscript spacing the discontinuity and heterogeneity within scriptural authority. The representation of hyperliteracy within Sic et non re-presents commentary as a set of interested and partial reading positions, morceaux, rather than a master discourse; the text replaces the auctor with a textual field of citations, auctores, and interpretations which readers must negotiate and resignify through dialectical inquiry and sceptical questioning. Abelard’s rereading and rewriting of sacred textuality struck at the discursive foundations of both the sacred and the textual. For Abelard, a text, whether by God or Ovid, was potentially corruptible or distortable by scribes or readers. A commentary was by definition late, situated, lagging after the text. Concrete texts were historicized, differentiated objects. Differences between individual 97 

Abelard, Sic et non, ed. by Boyer and McKeon, p. 89.

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interpretations cannot be resolved or harmonized by appealing to the ‘truth’ of the text. Abelard’s juxtapositions of citations uncovered the gaps and fissures in commentary discourse by bringing citations more directly in relation to one another in one textual location. The compilation highlighted commentary’s inability to resolve interpretive disputes within the archive. Although Abelard carefully distinguished between revealed scripture and commentary, his textual and philosophic strategies radically decentred the institutional network of scripture and orthodox interpretation (a supplementary semiosis) and foregrounded the conditions of historical change within the archive. Such a rupture was finally too much for the Church to bear. Copies of Abelard’s Theologia summi boni had been burned at Soissons in 1120. In 1140 the Council of Sens, at the instigation of Bernard of Clairvaux and other critics, condemned Abelard’s writings as heretical. Although Abelard was forced to recant Sic et non, its open textuality and disruptive retexting in the archive inform later medieval literacies. The complex textual performances of many anthology compilers, glossators, and writers such as Dante, Chaucer, Langland, Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, and the anonymous composers of drama, minstrel romance, and lyric suggest the fluidity of authorship and readership in the performative intertextuality of manuscript culture. Intertextuality links writers and readers as scriptores, compilatores, and commentatores, not to mention dictatores, in a network of making and remaking textuality. Manuscript textuality e(n)stranges modernist notions of originality, imitation, plagiarism, while resonating with material and cognitive aspects of open textuality, rhizomatic postmodernisms, and Internet-fuelled literacies. 98 Deploying something like Charles Olson’s ‘composition by field’, digital web textualities reiterate design aspects of late medieval manuscript technology, wherein page and text spaces are dynamic, constellated, heterogeneous, and sometimes incoherent. According to Hugh Silverman, ‘The text is what is read, but its textuality or textualities is how it is read.’99 But it is difficult to separate absolutely material from practice. How a text is written and how it is read and reread are intertextually entwin(n)ed and historically situated. The collaborative culture of medieval manuscript literacy added additional layers to a text’s concrete intertextuality, with marginal glosses, annotations, commentary, summaries, retelling, and editorial framing through accessus, page layout, and hyperliterate markup. For many moralizing and exegetical readers of the Aeneid, 98  99 

See Bruns, ‘The Originality of Texts’; Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, trans. by Wing. Silverman, Textualities, p. 81.

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Metamorphoses, and Laȝamon’s Brut, intertextual reading trumped an auctor’s historical context or a canonical text’s literal references. Rewriting an author or text’s ‘literal’ or ‘original’ meaning was a strategy for counter-reading, reading against the grain of the received interpretive tradition. Retelling or adapting a traditional biblical or classical narrative, such as Ovid’s story of Orpheus and Eurydice or Philomela, became a textual occasion for compilation, commentary, gloss, or counter-reading. Some writers and readers updated older texts with contemporary historical references, contexts, or com­mentary or they translated a text from Latin to a vernacular or from an older to a contemporary dialect to make the text newly relevant. Scribes sometimes re­for­matted older manuscripts to make them easier to use and more accessible, or just more ‘modern’, to contemporary readers. As I noted before, the Bishop of Exeter reformatted his late eleventh-century Norman text of the Gospels of Luke and John (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. bib. d. 10) with fourteenth-century style chapter/verse notations, cross-references, chapter headings, and a table of contents. Conversely, some late medieval writers and scribes reversed this modernization and made charters, saints’ lives, and chronicles look old or ‘Anglo-Saxon’, that is, newly original and historically displaced. Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde alienates the received narrative from contemporary readers with appeals to historical distance while at the same time contemporizing it with representations of male and female interiority, letters as private communication, and romantic trauma. Readers’ personal or affective responses to a narrative, prayer, or devotional image on the page intertextually mediated their constructions of significance or embodied affectus with a text. Whereas affective responses incorporate the text into a psychosomatic experience of understanding, commentary seeks to establish contexts or resituate texts for reading. Annotators and glossators’ writing was a necessary supplement (Bonaventure’s annexa), marginalized writing performed on the ‘page’ as textual knowledge and authority to complete the ‘text’. Bonaventure’s taxonomy of the modes of book making provides a vocabulary for supplementarity in hyperliteracy. Supplementing glossators destabilize the relation between Bonaventure’s principalia and annexa. In dominant discourse, glosses supplement and clarify the primary text (principal). But as utterances, the annotations or glosses can only be understood by supplementing them with the primary text or citation to which they are annexed as marginal performatives. Readers and writers negotiate the connections between principalia and annexa, citations and inferences, fragments and intertexts, Latin and vernaculars, that is, between a text and themselves, within the archive of open textuality. Materially and interpretively, the performative interplay of reader and page constitutes the immediate site of literate intertextuality.

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We can recover the Latin retextus to designate the fluid, multiple fields and filiations within the textual archive as social practice. Textual links and associa­ tions may be constructed through oral memory, through literate citations and rewriting, or through readers’ embodied engagements with texts. Retextus as tactics and hyperliteracy as fluid textuality challenge the view that many medieval texts, literary and nonliterary, represent versions of an uninstantiated ‘prior, complete text’ or totalizing interpretive archive to which medieval interpreters could appeal when reading a text ‘completely’ or ‘deeply’. The idealist assumption of a prior, complete text has been foundational for nineteenth-century philology and modern editions of medieval texts since Lachmann and Bedier. Despite new theories of editing in more contingent, socially situated contexts, those idealist assump­tions continue to govern many modern editors and critics’ reading of medi­eval texts. But, as Bernard Cerquiglini writes, ‘That instability of medieval works in the vernacular is a clear illustration of what is particular to both the writ­ten manuscript and, more generally, scribal culture.’100 As we shall see, what Cerquiglini says about vernacular texts also applies to the multiple uses of written Latin and multilingual writing in the later Middle Ages. The theory of hyper­ literacy out­lined here extends the concept of mouvance in manuscript culture as well as the historicity of reading formations. Mouvance has been deployed primarily to the redactions or variants of a single ‘text’ such as the Chanson de Roland, Tristan, or Mandeville’s Travels. But in the late Middle Ages, retexting was deployed as hyperliterate manuscript strategies for reading, composing, and re­reading in various literate communities, from aristocratic courtly contexts to universities and scholasticism to popular, devotional, and entertainment situa­ tions. Late medieval literacies constituted a domain of differends, retexts and versions with no ‘original’ authorized master text. Metaphors of textuality and writing supplement the materiality of texts, and could reinforce or disturb dominant concepts of literacy and writing. From Augustine to the present day, writers have used the ‘sentence’ (sermo), ‘text’ (textus), and ‘book’ (liber) as metaphors for human situations or celestial ex­ peri­ences, drawing on the rich symbolic language of the Book of Revelations or Ezekiel. Medieval poets and theologians imagined Christ as a text, stretched and pierced upon the cross (for example, Charters of Christ), or following the Psalms, they described the human heart or soul as a writing space upon which God inscribes mercy and grace. God was also described as keeping an account book of one’s virtues and vices. Other theologians, writers, and commentators metaphorized the book as food to be digested or ruminated on, as a treasure 100 

Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant, trans. by Wing, p. 34.

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chest or storehouse for remembering images, ideas, and experiences, or as a tableau or pictorial space.101 Rather than reproducing the antithetical images of the clothed and naked text (with and without commentary), medieval literacies were governed more often by images of the text as guarded and guided or open to readers. These images provided readers and writers with a vocabulary for imagining the field of open textuality in productive and resistant ways. These constructive and deconstructive metaphors are important markers in the hyperliterate social order, hypotexts which frame literate performances. Medieval texts are instantiated by material inscription and by readers who use their eyes, voices, hands, bodies, and cognition to perform literacy, whether in private or in public, aloud or silently. Hyperliteracy, the network of literacies and the archive at a given time, is framed and reshaped by different modalities: institutionally by writing, schooling, and normative reading; performatively by what readers and writers do and don’t do with texts; transgressively by readers — lay or clerical, men or women, learned or novice, moralists or adventurers — who construct counter textualities that work against the grain of dominant literate ideology. As we shall see, different literate modalities, competing textual ideologies, and hyperliterate metaphors constituted the multilingual network of late medieval hyperliteracy as a set of contested reading formations. With a fascinating and captivating oscillation of alterity and strange familiarity, the modernity of the Middle Ages bursts forth. Medieval literacies reveal acts of writing and reading as not ends in themselves but as triggers and products of desire. Cultural change occurs when specific literate practices are redirected or resituated within hyperliteracy. By 1400, more readers in Italy and England could also write something by hand than at any other time since at least the tenth century, yet the dominant definition of literatus still depended on whether someone could construe a Latin or vernacular passage and had attended higher schooling. Traditional criteria for literate social status did not match up with the more diverse practices of literate boys and girls, men and women, clergy and laity, whether for pious, legal, poetic, or parodic writing. The hyperliterate order was a network of affiliations and conflicts between ideologies and practices, between competing ideologies, between contested practices. When the definitions of literatus, illiteratus, and grammatica changed, or when the material production of manuscripts and readings changed, or when retexts overtook their hypotexts, the 101 

Curtius, European Literature, trans. by Trask, pp. 302–47 (pp. 310–32); Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 205–08, 274–337; Jager, Book of the Heart; Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire.

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hyperliterate order was transformed. Reading aloud or silently, reading alone or with a group connoted different values in different situations at different times. The social significations of literacies are marked not only in communicative purposes but also in the ideological contests, semiosis, and power of retexting.

Chapter 2

Language Ideology and Marginal Latins A bas le latin! (Alain Bosquet)

M

edieval multilingualism’s structuring element was the margin, the points of contact, around Latin discourse. In certain respects Latin in the Middle Ages was loaded as the remedy for the curse of Babel, that imposition of multilingualism as a counter to human pride and ingenuity. Latin writing and instruction, which has been part of western moral education for so long, was a humanist ideal of universal cultural value but was actually developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as part of grammar and lan­guage ideology. As Françoise Waquet argues, the dominant ideology of Latin was no mystification but medieval people’s sincere belief in the ‘powers of Latin’.1 Responses and reactions to that belief and the exercise of that power might be positive or negative, but the hegemony of Latin language ideology still dominates western institutional and social hierarchies, as the statements by Lugard and Korbin regarding Latin and English in colonial and global discourses suggest (Chapter One). Latin also stands in metonymically for dominant cul­ ture. During the Paris 1968 protests, Alain Bosquet famously deployed Latin ideology as a target for resistance. His streetfighting cry, ‘A bas le latin!’ (Down with Latin!), echoed Nietzsche’s claim that we believe in God (and the status quo) because we still believe in grammar.2 Bosquet’s cry also recalled the English rebels of 1381 who assaulted and perhaps killed grammar masters as well as Flemings in London. For centuries, those who use, teach and inscribe Latin have been touched by, implicated in and shaped by institutional powers and cultural histories for which Latin is both a prestigious medium of exchange and a dominant subject position. What happens, then, when Latin is not resisted but 1  2 

Waquet, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign, trans. by Howe, pp. 178–206, 271. Bosquet, ‘A bas le latin’, p. 1.

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deterritorialized and used by different speakers, writers, and readers away from the centres of the official speech community? In the late Middle Ages, Latin discourse, like literacy itself, was a contested space, configured as multiple sites of struggle for social, institutional, theological, national, and political power. In the first half of this chapter, I explore medieval multilingual literacies (Latin and vernaculars, especially in England and France) in a sociolinguistic frame. In the second half, I analyse some constructions and performances of Latin as language ideology within multilingual contexts: gram­ matica (language theory), Dante’s analysis of language and language change, and Latin glossography.

Sociolinguistics of Medieval Multilingualism Medieval literacies emerged within multilingual speech communities. After the Carolingian era, Latin and one or more regional vernaculars were used side by side in both speech and writing for official and learned or everyday functions and interactions. But the ideological and functional relations between different languages were often in flux. As Clanchy observes about twelfth- and thirteenthcentury England, ‘No one language could serve all the diverse purposes required because their struggle for dominance was still undecided.’3 Linguistic diversity can generate ‘imagined communities’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, ‘building in effect particular solidarities’.4 Medieval multilingualism opens another view onto medieval modernity. In twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, French, Anglo-Norman, and English all flourished as literary, elite, and everyday lan­ guages. But in both England and France vernacular literacy competed with Latin, the dominant language of written record, official discourse, liturgy, and learned writing. By the fourteenth century in England, Latin literacy and speech were even more contested within multiple vernacular communities. Rather than defining speech communities in general, written and spoken Latin, French, and English marked Primary and especially Secondary Discourse communities for specific, often different social, aesthetic, generic, and intellectual purposes.5 3 

Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 200. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 135 (Anderson’s emphasis). 5  Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 155–58. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 200–06; Berndt, ‘The Linguistic Situation’; Machan, English in the Middle Ages, esp. pp. 21–69, 73–80; Ingham, ‘Mixing Languages’. For a thoughtful survey of research on multi­ lingualism in later medieval England, see Stein, ‘Multilingualism’. 4 

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Some sociolinguists and historians of the English language have described post-Conquest England as a diglossic (or triglossic) community rather than a multilingual speech community.6 But distinctions among diglossia/polyglossia, bilingualism, and multilingualism can be fuzzy or misleading and finally not adequate to the dynamic situations of language contact and use, especially in the later Middle Ages. First, Ferguson’s strict definition of diglossia implies a functional distinction between genetically related varieties of a language which does not map onto many kinds of medieval language mixing. Second, we need to distinguish more carefully between a broad speech community and a discourse community, both of which can have variable degrees of homogeneity.7 Whereas a broad speech community constitutes a physically connected group of speakers of a language, a discourse community is grounded in ‘communicative competence’, rhetoric, and pragmatics in one or more languages and can be discontinuous across space and time. Medieval multilingual society was comprised of both speech and discourse communities. There is much evidence, historical and contemporary, of how speakers and writers in a multilingual environment mix languages across a variety of contexts and functions. Third, a multilingual speech or discourse community, whether geographically located (post-Conquest England) or ethnically or religiously identified (twelfth-century Ashkenazi Jews, Old Order Amish, Hasidic Jews), might maintain strict or relaxed diglossia, with or without bilingualism. In strict diglossia, the more prestigious variety (H) is used only in situations where the less prestigious variety (L) would be inappropriate; H and L are in complementary distribution.8 Fishman’s notion of relaxed or extended diglossia partly addresses this prob­ lem, but again, the medieval linguistic situation does not map exactly. In classic diglossia described by Ferguson, different dialects are ordered according to a ‘stable’ set of social conventions and institutional discursive norms where only the H language is written, taught, and promoted as elite discourse. In Fishman’s 6 

For example, Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’; Berndt, ‘The Linguistic Situation’; Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft; Kahane and Kahane, ‘Decline and Survival’; Parker, ‘The Rise of the Ver­naculars’; Iglesias-Rábade, ‘French Colloquial Loan-Words’; Dalton-Puffer, The French Influence, p. 6; Machan, English in the Middle Ages, pp. 105, 108–09; Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer, pp. 7–8. Ardis Butterfield, William Rothwell, and others use more appropriate terms such as multilingual(ism) and language mixing. See, for example, Butterfield, ‘Chaucerian Ver­na­culars’; Turville-Petre, Reading Middle English Literature, p. 13; Trotter, ‘The AngloFrench Lexis’, pp. 83–102 (and references there). 7  See Goffman, Frame Analysis; Swales, Genre Analysis; Santa Ana and Parodi, ‘Modeling the Speech Community’. 8  Romaine, Language in Society, pp. 35–49.

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relaxed diglossia, different dialects or languages are accepted as appropriate spoken or written modes for different discourses, each with its own conventions and highly valued functions.9 Bi- or multilingualism represents a variable set of competences among linguistically flexible individual speakers, but multilingual usage is not the same as functional distribution. Both strict and relaxed diglossia occur within the broader multilingualism of individual speakers. Neither Ferguson’s strict diglossia nor Fishman’s extended diglossia capture late medieval sociolinguistic practices and structures, since many vernacular speakers who also spoke or wrote Latin in some fashion did not acquire the language sufficiently to control a prestige and highly textualized language, as required by Ferguson’s idealized criteria for diglossia. Moreover, Ferguson’s account assumes that a ‘literate’ tradition is monolithic. In late medieval England and France, however, literate abilities varied widely among groups of readers and writers and we cannot assume that all those who read and write a vernacular or Latin could do so with similar skills or for similar purposes. Some speakers were illiterate, some readers and writers were officially regarded as ‘illiteratus’, many were monolingual, others clearly were bi- or multilingual with varying degrees of communicative competence in different languages. But everyone in the linguistic domain was part of a multilingual community and participated in one or more discursive regimes of Latin and vernacular textualities.10 A multilingual perspective changes the way we think about the emergence of a national language such as English. Medieval English literacy emerged within multilingual contexts. Berndt argues that within three generations after 1066, English had become the primary native language of all but the most elite classes.11 By 1300 English was poised to become the dominant language in the region. Prior Hs (Latin, French) were losing ground to L. Moreover, English was a critical part of the growing lay interest in religious discourse. Although Latin and French were still prestigious because of their associations with the rul­ing classes and their roles in learned or elite poetic discourses, fourteenth-century texts continued to be written in English and Latin while fewer texts were composed in French in England. Spoken French, on the other hand, was more widely used as part of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century language mixing in manorial, legal, and

9 

Fishman, ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossa’. See Mutilingualism, ed. by Trotter, esp. essays by Hunt, Jefferson, Schendl, and Wright; Fleischman, ‘Medieval Vernaculars’, p. 24, n. 16. 11  Berndt, ‘The Linguistic Situation’. 10 

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international commerce contexts.12 Gower composed texts in Latin, French, and English, but Langland wrote each version of Piers Plowman in English alliterative verse with Latin quotations from scripture, catechism, law, and classical literature, creating a dialogic text juxtaposing ‘lerned’ and ‘lewd’ religious life in the inter­ textuality of Latin and English. Chaucer’s English writings — original texts as well as his adaptations and translations of French and to some extent Latin texts — intertextually address a trilingual culture. He also explicitly translated part of at least one major French text, Roman de la rose. Many English religious texts, for example Ancrene Wisse, Lanterne of Liȝt, and Dives and Pauper, include ver­ nacular translations of Latin scriptural quotations. Latin and vernacular texts received Latin, vernacular, and sometimes mixed glosses, in no particular order. In addition, as more lay people gained wider access to individual or school literacy, they were becoming adept at or experienced with Latin as well as vernacular texts in several genres (devotional, legal, encyclopedic, fictional), and they engaged with written texts as individual readers or as groups of readers decoding or lis­ tening to texts read aloud and discussed. For many reasons, then, the broad diglossic description (H vs L) of later medieval multilingualisms does not sufficiently capture how different discursive practices and discourse communities valued individual languages and specific kinds of speech and writing according to different communicative, generic, and affective purposes. Latin, English, and French were unevenly distributed in English society. These languages did not all carry the same prestige at the same time. Different languages, users, and literate modes shaped both the power model and the marker model in the late Middle Ages. For centuries, Latin scripta was considered the highest achievement of medieval learning and literacy, the tradition of the clergy and a pan-European Christianity. In addition, students in grammar schools almost always began to learn to read by pronouncing Latin words and phrases. As we have noted, the ability to read Latin was a ‘dividing practice’ marking one’s status as literatus and/or clericus. Latin was the written language of official record and appropriated other forms of speech into text. In England, prior to 1300, a royal or ecclesiastical proclamation initially might be dictated in Anglo-Norman, the native language of many aristocrats, then trans­la­ ted into Latin and officially recorded, then copied, disseminated, and often orally translated by interpretatores into French or English according to the regional language of specific communities. In 1292, for example, John Balliol, king of the Scots, did homage to Edward I. John spoke the oath in French, but Edward’s 12 

See Ingham, ‘Mixing Languages’.

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notary, John of Caen, recorded it in Latin, a written act which made John’s act of homage ‘official’. Medieval court records in Latin conceal the actual vernacular dis­course of many English and French trials by re-presenting them literaliter in the authoritative written language of law.13 Chaucer used some Latin texts through French translations. Language ideology involves the power of particular languages, the forms (standardization) those languages take, and the kinds of people presumed to use particular languages or varieties. As a subordinating practice, dominant language ideology seeks to universalize and constrain language, disciplining linguistic practice through institutions and social power. As Foucault notes, struggles for discursive control are imbricated in discourse itself. Discourse is the power to be seized in discourse. Thinking is performative practice, not just a set of transcendent ideas or nonmaterial representations.14 In the late Middle Ages, different people could access Latin texts through Latin or vernacular competence, through indi­ vidual or group oral reading or instruction.15 Both orthodox and alternative (‘heretical’, dissenting) religious communities relied on oral as well as written vernacular translations of Latin scripture and commentaries. In fourteenthcentury England, the increasing uses of English in literary, administrative, and religious writing helped raise the status of English as a written language, but English did not displace Latin as the language of grammatica nor Parisian (as opposed to Norman) French as the privileged discourse in upper levels of English society. Rather, the improving status of English created additional pressures on the question of language status and new possibilities for seizing literate authority, in both Latin and the vernacular. After 1150, in the increasingly dynamic multilingual domain, Latin’s tradi­ tional position as the written language of authority and power was challenged in two ways. First, by new secular readers and writers of Latin; second, by ex­ pand­ing vernacular textualities in sermons, law, devotions, drama, and other 13 

For pre-1300 literacies in England and France, see: Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 197–223; Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences’; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin; Robertson, ‘“This Living Hand”’; Ormrod, ‘The Use of English’. On official medieval literacy, see: Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner; Fisher, ‘Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English’; Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record passim; Parkes, ‘The Literacy of the Laity’. 14  See Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p.  203; Silverstein, ‘Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology’; Silverstein, ‘Monoglot “Standard” in America’, pp. 284–306; Lippi-Green, English with an Accent, pp. 63–73. 15  Miner, ‘The Teaching of Latin’; Murphy, ‘The Teaching of Latin’; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 53–87.

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genres. Between 1150 and 1450, we find defenses of vernacular languages, calls for vernacular texts to improve community piety, attacks on the elitist power or obfuscation of Latin discourse, comparisons of the relative merits of Latin and vernacular for religious and official discourse, and criticisms of the clergy for relinquishing their traditional authority as Latin writers and bearers of intellectual and cultural standards. During this period, Latin literacy, or at least Latin reading ability, was becoming an accepted, even expected part of elite lay literacies. Some of these activities, rather than assimilating readers to a dominant culture, destabilized Latin’s presumed authority and caused more than a little anxiety among Latin’s traditional users. For example, around 1175, Philip de Harvengt expressed the concerns of many elite clergy about new modes of secular literacy and Latin usage and the resulting ‘improper’ expansion of the term clericus. Philip deploys normalizing Latin language ideology whereby literatus equals clericus and illiteratus equals laicus. But, according to Philip: A usage of speech has taken hold whereby when we see someone literatus [that is, able to read and write Latin], immediately we call him clericus. Because he acts the part that is a cleric’s we assign him the name ex officio. Therefore if anyone is comparing a literate knight (litteratum militem) with an ignorant priest (idiotae presbyterus), he will exclaim confidently and affirm with an oath that the knight is a better clericus than the priest, because it is obvious the knight reads, understands, speaks, and versifies [Latin] while the ignorant one [cleric], using Latin among clerics, is approved for solecisms [grammatical errors]. The priest not only doesn’t know grammatical [= proper Latin] speech, which is blameworthy, but he is not able to properly sing Compline by himself […]. This improper usage (improprii sermonis usus) has become so prevalent that whoever gives attention to letters, which is clerkly, is named clericus, even though there is absolutely no doubt he is not a cleric.16

In this passage, Philip lets the literate category clericus float above the social cate­ gories miles and presbyter, even as he questions that ‘modern’ deter­ritorialization. Also, Philip contrasts a literatus knight with an idiota, not an illiteratus priest. Latin linguistic competence is power and social status, but when situated with a knight, it is transgressive literate power. The proper name of Latina is clericus, but the Latin-using knight usurps that status marker. The priest, on the other hand, should know Latin by virtue of his office as clericus but doesn’t, so he loses the proper name he should have and becomes an idiota, an uneducated layman. 16 

Philip de Harvengt, De institutione clericorum, i, chap. 110; edited in PL, 203, cols 665D–1206A (cols 816B–C). See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 227.

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Philip’s complaint manifests two kinds of linguistic evidence: 1) ideological, the unmarked presumption that Latin literacy is the proper domain of the clergy, and 2) empirical, the awareness of increasing Latin literacy and general literate skills among the laity, in particular the knight class. Medieval critics of shifts in literate power, such as Philip de Harvengt, Richard de Bury, and Nigel de Longchamp, asserted that the weakened status and behaviours of the clergy left the domain of Latin literacy and textuality vulnerable to lay readers’ poaching on the clergy’s power. Such encroachments marked a breakdown in social order and also the clergy’s (especially the friars’) abdication of their responsibility for guarding book knowledge. Latin literacy was ideologically identified, or ‘mis­ recognized’, as literatus, that is, as the discursive space male clergy were entitled to occupy and the textual meanings orthodox clergy were responsible for construing and expressing. Therefore, Philip and others perceived the literate activities of aristocrats, lower laymen, unruly clerics, and women to threaten or challenge the proper literate order and the clergy’s status and power. Philip’s complaint suggests the contradictions between literate ideology and literate practices and many clergy’s interested suspicion of lay literacy, especially Latin literacy among nonaristocrats. In England after 1300, the debate about Latin literacy, vernacular authority, and language policy intensified. 17 Between 1375 and 1410, for example, censoring and burning seculars who possessed scripture translations was only part of the story. John Trevisa’s (c. 1342–c. 1402) Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk (probably 1387 but variously dated to 1370s or 1380s, and adapted from Ps-Ockham, Dialogus inter militem et clericem) inscribes a complex renegotiation of the boundaries of Latin ideology. The cleric argues that because Latin ‘is iused and understonde a this half Grece in alle the naciouns and londes of Europa’, it deserves special status as an intellectual and cultural lingua franca. The knight responds that English translations, rather than diminishing the significance of Latin ‘cronicles’, enable ‘so meny the moo men shuld understonde hem as al thoe that understonde Englisshe and no Latyn’.18 Moreover, the knight uses wider Latin literacy among the laity to contest the clergy’s power in administrative affairs and promote the king’s prerogative when supported by an educated baronial class. In the work of language ideology and discursive contests, language debates are never just about language. The knight debates the cleric with subtle scholastic argumentation and rhetorical strategies, and the text performatively retexts the 17  18 

See Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. In The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 132.

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traditional definition of ‘lewid’ as knowing how to read and write Latin, thus erasing Latin as a dividing practice.19 In Piers Plowman, contemporaneous with Trevisa’s text, lay Latin literacy is linked more with religious reform and lay people’s piety. Anima, quoting the Glossa ordinaria on Job, claims that ‘If lewed men knewe þis latyn þei wolde loke whom þei yeve, | And auisen hem bifore a fyue dayes or sixe | Er þei amortisede to monkes or [monyales] hir rente[s]’.20 In this passage, Anima (Soul) deliberately challenges dominant ideology’s sociolinguistic markers. If secular men and women had more direct access to Latin scripture and commentary, they would recognize the gap between religious ideals and clerical practices. Moreover, with more competence in Latin scripture, lay people wouldn’t be so ready to sign their property over to the Church, and they would be more careful to review the documents they signed. Anima implies that lay Latin literacy and scripture reading might trigger clerical reform and greater lay agency in property law, with potentially explosive social and political consequences. The linguistic heterogeneity of the late Middle Ages constituted what Fishman calls ‘societal multilingualism’.21 Latin occupies an ambiguous position within medieval multilingualism, with deterritorialized status. By 1100, Latin was no one’s native language, a situation which makes medieval multilingual practices very special cases of ‘classic’ bilingualism. Nonetheless, Latin continued to be the language of literate, religious, and advanced learned education, the model for grammatica, the spoken and written language of liturgy and private devotion, and the ‘language of wider communication’ in elite and learned networks. But as Anima’s speech reveals, by 1300 Latin literacy was no longer deployed only as a prestigious discourse, desirable for both clergy and some laity. Latin had become a transgressive discourse, depending on who was performing the literate act. The threat level of the sort of transgressive Latinity advocated by Trevisa’s knight and Langland’s Anima is indicated by the way Lollards and other dissenting religious groups were castigated, imprisoned, or burned simply for possessing, let alone preaching on, studying, reading, writing, or translating Latin scripture, commentaries, and other religious texts. In multilingual contexts, restrictions on using one language might actually increase the uses or status of another language. Criticisms of wider lay Latin 19 

For a different reading of this text in terms of vernacularity debates, see Somerset, Clerical Discourse, pp. 78–93. 20  Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, B. xv. 319–21; See Davidson, Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer, pp. 93–95. 21  Advances, ed. by Fishman.

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literacy or uses of Latin texts sometimes seem to have encouraged the use of the vernacular in public discourses, at least in England. However, the prestige and discursive power of vernacular texts did not necessarily follow or depend on their having Latin originals. Multilingualism always has the potential to transform the dominant ideology, in this case Latin’s regulation of the vernacular. Somerset notes that the Wycliffite ‘Petition’ (early 1380s), perhaps first composed in English, had a different cultural signification in the vernacular than it would have had in Latin: Whereas if presented in Latin as a justification of the views of the king or certain lords, the passage […] would have amounted to no more than an argument for the dis­endowment of corrupt clergy on which those few to whom it was accessible might or might not choose to act, the English version cast as exhortation carries the potential for a much further reaching redistribution, if not disendowment, of social power.22

Despite the Italian humanists’ debates whether Roman Latin was a ‘vernacular’ common to all or divided between vulgar and elite usage in a diglossic situation,23 lay Latin literacy in the later Middle Ages often constituted a transgressive, potentially transformative practice within multilingual hyperliteracy. Wider pragmatic literacies and vernacular schooling meant that primary education, learning one’s ABCs, and basic decoding skills were available beyond the trad­ itional Church schools. Children’s alphabet recognition and acquisition of basic literacy skills and experiences was structured through elementary Latin grammar, while advanced Latin schooling was culturally repositioned as a more elite experience, a higher, more selective level of literacy. After 1250, expanded lay literacy destabilized Latin’s identification with clerical power as some lay people created or handled religious, legal, and learned texts for everyday, official, and personal uses. Legal records, writs, devotional texts, medical texts, scriptural commentaries, and intellectual treatises were becoming more available and more useful to lay readers. Sometimes these texts were newly available in vernacular translations, but there were also lay readers of these Latin texts. In this context, we can reread Giovanni Villani’s account of the structure of Florentine schooling in the 1330s. As I mentioned in Chapter One, Villani’s chronicle shows us how wider vernacular schooling and expanded lay literacy could reorder Latin as a dividing practice: 22  23 

Somerset, Clerical Discourse, p. 5; see Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. Tavoni, ‘The 15th-Century Controversy’.

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We find there are eight to ten thousand boys and girls learning to read. Of boys study­ing abbaco [business accounting] and arithmetic, there are 1000 to 1200 in six schools. And those studying Latin and logic in four large schools number from 550–600.24

Allowing that some of Villani’s numbers for 1399 are for rhetorical effect to suggest proportions rather than census data, his use of statistics shifted the emphasis in historiography. In Villani’s Nuova Cronica we get a striking representation of the importance of literacy and schooling among mid-fourteenth-century Florentines and the new role of Latin literacy as a marker of civic identity, not just in terms of language attitudes but in terms of the growing numbers of people involved in vernacular and Latin literacies and literacy education. Other Italian city states had similar rates. However, literacy skills and access require nurturing, and literacy rates in medieval Italy, England, and elsewhere rose and fell depending on the availability of schools and the effects of plague, famine, war, and other factors on population and production. Still, historians estimate that as much as sixty per cent of Venice’s population was literate, based on 1450 and 1463 documents; the rates in mid-thirteenth-century England were similar.25 Despite fluctuations, lay literacy in Latin and the vernacular steadily increased in Western Europe from 1250 to 1500. Villani’s account of Florentine schooling also reveals different levels of Latin literacy education, Latin literacies rather than literacy, and different pathways to literacy within the city. At the elementary level, more than eight thousand boys and girls were learning to read by decoding and construing primary Latin texts in a city of approximately 115,000 men, women, and children living inside the city walls or just outside the walls in the new suburbs.26 Advanced Latin study, including the study of logic, and commercial literacy education, almost entirely for boys, enrolled fifteen per cent of all students in official schools. By the early four­teenth century, Italian was the language of instruction for all levels of schooling in Florence. Despite the centrality of Latin grammar in medieval literacy pedagogy, ele­ mentary literacy did not necessarily depend on Latin grammar. For example, evidence points to the fact that by the twelfth century some children coming to Latin grammar schools, monastic schools, and convent schools could already decode the Roman alphabet, probably because they had already received training in decoding written vernacular texts. Private tutors and dame schools also en­ 24 

Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. by Porta, bk 12, chap. 94 (iii, 198). Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, pp. 76–90. 26  Schevill, Medieval and Renaissance Florence, i, 211. 25 

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abled children to acquire basic literacy skills for decoding in the vernacular as well as Latin. Earlier, in Anglo-Saxon England, the Roman alphabet, modified to represent Old English sounds, was already known by literate Anglo-Saxons, when in the ninth century Alfred lamented that people could no longer read Latin texts and proposed his vernacular translation programme to make up the difference. In the twelfth-century Rhineland, Torahed Jews such as Hermann of Cologne could already decode texts written in Hebrew and German without necessarily knowing how to read Latin. Nonetheless, elementary Latin grammar was a prestigious, if not the only, means of teaching broad multimodal and alphabetic literacy skills adaptable for both Latin and vernacular reading and writing. Latin grammar inculcated in lay pupils and parents the belief that Latin was Language itself, grammatica, the source from which the structure of the vernacular derived and the gateway to lit­eracy as a universal practice. Latin grammar’s ideological work is embedded in practice. Villani’s chronicle suggests how Florentine society and commerce were propelled not only by traditional aristocratic families but also by the commercial classes, especially the cloth guilds and merchants, whose strong civic activism depended on and supported vernacular literacy for boys and girls under fourteen and Latin literacy primarily for elite males. 27 In other words, Latin literacy, which had served as a dividing practice among the clergy, was appropriated as a dividing practice by urban elites. Villani’s mercantile account may present too limited a picture of Florentine schooling. He does not mention private tutors and informal schools which were part of civic humanist lay schooling, nor does he indicate how many aristocratic young women were encouraged to become readers of Latin devotional texts as part of their cultural formation and domestic training. Florence was one of the strongest supporters of lay literacy, including Latin literacy, in the late Middle Ages, but as Villani’s account shows, schooling was still a stratified and stratifying regime, marked by gender and rank and apportioning privilege and access through different literate contexts and different reading experiences with vernacular and Latin texts. Nonetheless, within Florence’s distributed literacy and school tracking, the fact that more people had access to schooling meant that more lay people had at least some experience with basic Latin texts, usually moral, catechetical, or devotional texts and Latin 27  See Baron, The Crisis; Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, pp. 71–86, 403–10; Gehl, A Moral Art; Petrucci, Writers and Readers, ed. and trans. by Radding. However, Anthony Grafton, Lisa Jardine, and Robert Black have questioned and qualified mainstream claims for ‘humanism’ as unidirectionally innovative or progressive education; see Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, and Black, Humanism and Education.

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poetry by Horace, Theodulus, or Ovid. Wider dissemination of Latin as well as vernacular writing among the laity helped prepare the ground for detaching or deterritorializing Latin from clerical domination in religious, legal, commercial, and learned discourses. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, literacy levels were similarly buffeted by plague, population crises, and falling agricultural production. Nonetheless, the extent and range of lay literacies in the vernacular and Latin also increased across regions. As in Italy, English cities were more conducive to maintaining and expanding vernacular and Latin literacies among the laity. It was the urban commercial and merchant classes who most strongly supported lay literacy, which in turn meant that beginning readers (girls as well as boys) were exposed to elementary Latin texts as a means of teaching wider literacy skills.28 For example, in fifteenth-century London, the goldsmiths (mercers) and ironmongers, two of the most powerful guilds in the city, began to require young men to prove they could read and write at least English before being admitted to the guilds as apprentices. Such literacy requirements almost always presupposed some knowledge of elementary Latin as well. These new requirements may indicate that in fifteenth-century England some guilds were apprenticing young men at later ages. The requirements also coincided with the increased popularity of advice and courtesy literature as part of household reading, suggesting that employment and moral education were linked. Minimum literate standards for apprenticeship and the cultivation of moral virtue were part of a newly influential class ideology linking moral probity with nonaristocratic status.29 Expanding lay Latin literacy and growing, if uneven, availability of schooling destabilized Latin language ideology not only in literacy but also in religious and legal practices. It was one thing to identify a vernacular text as intended for a non-Latin reading audience. It was another to treat Latin and English as coeval languages in pragmatic terms. For instance, John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests (c. 1403, Lilleshall, Shropshire) includes an interesting section on how a priest should instruct a midwife in the sacrament of baptism in case of a difficult delivery. The manual asserts that the priest can baptize the child with the Latin for­mula or the widwife can do so using a Latin or an English word-for-word trans­lation of the baptismal formula: 28 

Thrupp, The Merchant Class, pp. 247–92; Moran, The Growth of English Schooling; Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education’; Barron, ‘The Education and Training of Girls’; Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, pp. 95–106; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 53–87; Bland, The Teaching of Grammar. 29  See Thrupp, ‘The Grocers of London’; Hanawalt, ‘“The Childe of Bristowe”’, pp. 157–58.

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Teche hem alle to be war and snel | That they conne sey þe wordes wel, | And say the wordes alle on rowe | As a-non I wole [þe] schowe; | Say ryȝt thus and no more, | For non othere wymmenes lore; | I folowe the or ellese I crystenne þe, in the nome of the fader & þe sone and the holy gost. Amen | Or ellese thus, Ego baptizo te. N. In nomine patris & filii & spiritus sancti. Amen. | Englysch or latyn, whether me seyþ, | Hyt suffyseth to the feyth, | So that þe wordes be seyde on rowe, | Ryȝt as be-fore I dyde [þe] schowe.30

In Mirk’s example, the priest delegates a certain kind of sacramental knowledge and power to the midwife, but the sacrament’s power precedes ontologically and structurally, transcends, both languages while the rite’s force depends on the speaker enunciating the words in the proper order (‘on rowe’). Syntax, not language choice, ensures the rite’s efficacy. Through subject raising, Mirk revises the traditional Latin formula into ‘natural’ SVO syntax to accommodate potential speakers’ English: ‘Ego te baptizo in nomine patri et fili et spiritu sancti’ becomes ‘Ego baptizo te […]’ The revised syntax makes Latin and English more grammatically aligned and equally valid realizations of the baptismal speech act. Latin vocabulary and English syntax disseminate the power implicit in performing the baptism rite in extreme situations to midwives, lay women whose literacy, power, and status were often contested in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Mirk also provides the excommunication formulae in English, which raises questions about which parts of religious authority the Church was interested to make available or applicable to the wider society.) Besides language mixing and multilingualism, other social and critical linguistic concepts are useful for investigating literate multilingualism in the late Middle Ages. We can juxtapose contemporary theory with medieval linguistic theory and usage, a kind of theoretical cross-reading as historical pragmatics, to catch the slippages and gaps in both metalanguages. In the late Middle Ages, the concept of grammatica, grammaticality shaped by Latin, was complicated by the norms and practices of different speech and textual situations, especially the different forms of language mixing and codeswitching in speech and writing. Many kinds of codeswitching occur in later medieval texts (literary and nonliterary). All are context sensitive; code switches and language mixes occur at the intersections of particular discourses and speech situations. In many cases, code switching is equivalent to style shifting, especially when language choice connotes the speaker or writer’s subject position.

30 

Mirk, Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. by Kristensson, ll. 121–34.

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We can distinguish four types of code switches and language mixes: lexical, calque, intersentential, intrasentential.31 Type 1, lexical codeswitching, is where a speaker or writer inserts individual words from one or more other languages into a matrix sentence. For example, in account records for London Bridge House (early fifteenth century), English nouns for tools are inserted into Latin matrix sentences: ‘Et p[ro] j vyle p[ro] acuacōe de leȝ Tide sawes empt’ & remañ xijd. Et p[ro] j noua serra empt’ p[ro] le Tidemañ & remañ in stauro pont’ iijs iiijd’ (And for one file for the sharpening of the tide saws bought and remaining 12d. And for one new saw bought for the tideman and remaining in the bridge store 3s 4d).32 In the London Bridge records, what language constitutes the matrix clause depends not on how many words are used but on syntactic governance (pro either heads an instrument or recipient prepositional phrase or governs a nonfinite clause). English or sometimes Anglo-Norman words are inserted into Latin phrases. Moreover, Latin and English nouns can be inserted interchangeably (sawes, serra). In Type 2 language mixing, calque, a speaker or writer reproduces the syntactic structure (phrase or clause) of one language with the words and inflections of a second language, as we saw with Mirk’s revision of the Latin baptismal formula into naturalis rather than artificalis word order. Late ME constructions such as ‘take a wife/husband/spouse’, ‘take (up) arms’, ‘take advice’, and ‘take heed’ reproduce OF prendre+N constructions (‘prendre mariage/espus’, ‘prendre armes/armur’, ‘prendre coroune’).33 Whereas Type 1 language mixing involves individual words, Type 2 involves the grammatical translation of phrases or idioms from one language to another. Types 3 and 4 codeswitching operate at the clause or sentence level. In Type 3, intersentential codeswitching, a speaker or writer switches between two or more languages from clause to clause or sentence to sentence. Macaronic writing, which juxtaposes sentences in different languages, is perhaps the most familiar kind of codeswitching in medieval literary texts, sermons, and vernacular devotional texts. For example, some Middle English lyrics use a Latin refrain, either in the speaker’s voice or a character’s: 31  On various typologies of language mixing and codeswitching, see: Gumperz and Blom, ‘Social Meaning and Linguistic Structures’; Romaine, Language in Society, pp. 55–58; Wright, ‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories’; Schendl, ‘Linguistic Aspects’; Machan, ‘Language Contact’; Voigts, ‘What’s the Word?’; Ingham, ‘Mixing Languages’. 32  Wright, ‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories’, p. 150. I have expanded some of the text’s abbre­ viations and suspension signs to clarify the matrix clauses. 33  See further examples in Iglesias-Rábade, ‘French Phrasal Power’, pp. 93–130.

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As I me walked in one morning, I herd a bird both weep and sing; This was the tenor of her talking: Timor mortis conturbat me.34

The Ancrene Wisse writer often follows a Latin scriptural or patristic passage with a vernacular translation, paraphrase, or explanation. For example, illustrating the spiritual value of shame and pain, he writes ‘he [David] clomb uppard & seide baldeliche to ure laured, Vide humilitatem meam, & laborem meum & dimitte universa delicta mea. Bihald, q[uo]ð he & sih min eadmodnesse & mi swinc; & forȝef me mine sunnen alle to gederes’ (David climbed up and said boldly to our Lord, ‘See my humility and my labour and dismiss all my failings’ (Psalm 24. 18). Behold, said he, see my humility and my toil, and forgive all my sins).35 The Ancrene Wisse writer then goes on to gloss in English the semantics of eadmodnesse and swinc. In Piers Plowman the narrative typically switches between English and Latin intersententially, for example, For Iames þe gentile [Ioyned] in his bokes That Feiþ withouten feet is [feblere þan nouȝt], And is deed as a dore[nail] but if þe ded[e] folwe: Fides sive operibus mortua est etc.36

These examples indicate how Latin-English intersentential codeswitching was usually linked to Latin scriptural, moral, or legal quotations as translation or authoritative citation in late medieval vernacular texts. In Type 4, intrasentential codeswitching, a speaker or writer switches between two or more languages within a single clause. Some late medieval English lyrics use both intersentential and intrasentential codeswitching between OF and ME: Bon jour, bon jour a vous! I am cum unto this hous With par la pompe, I say.37

The writer of an early fifteenth-century anti-Lollard sermon mixes English and Latin intersententially and intrasententially, perhaps to accentuate in English his criticism of heretics or the obstinate: 34 

Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354, fol. 176v. 35  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien. 36  Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, B. i. 185–88. 37  Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354, fol. 251v.

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Domini gouernouris most eciam be merciful in punchyng. Oportet ipsos attendere quod of stakis and stodis qui deberent stare in ista vinea quedam sunt smoþe and liȝtlich wul boo, quedam sunt so stif and so ful of warris quod homo schal to-cleue hom cicius quam planare. (The lord governors must also be merciful in punishing. They should take notice that of the stakes and supports that should stand in his vineyard, some are smooth and will easily bend, others are so stiff and so full of obstinacy that a man will split them sooner than straighten them out.)38

This sort of language mixing occurred not only in well scripted texts such as sermons or lyrics but in formulaic and everyday texts as well, such as account books and letters. We find a more complex example of inter- and intrasentential language mixing in a letter from Richard Kingston, Dean of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, to Henry IV (3 September 1403). Writing at a moment of crisis on the Welsh marches, Kingston shifts between AN and ME in ways which go beyond lexical borrowing and break down language boundaries: Please a vostre tresgraciouse Seignourie entendre que a-jourduy apre noone […] q’ils furent venuz deinz nostre countie pluis de CCCC des les rebelz de Owyne, Glyn, Talgard, et pluseours autres rebelz des voz marches de Galys […]. Escript Hereford, en tresgraunte haste, a trois de la clocke apres noone, le tierce jour de Septembre.39

Other letters to and from Henry IV around this time were written entirely in Anglo-Norman, as is the majority of Kingston’s letter. But in addition to inserting English words into French clauses, Kingston switches to English entirely in a highly emotional paragraph near the end of the letter, although we can’t be sure whether that is how he dictated the letter or wrote it himself or whether the manuscript preserves a scribe’s partial translation between languages. Kingston concludes his letter by mixing intersententially English and AN closings: ‘Je prie a la Benoit Trinite que vous ottroie bone vie ove tresentier sauntee a treslonge duree, and sende ȝowe sone to ows in help and prosperitee’40 Kingston’s syntax suggests that some words (please, noone, haste, clocke) may have rested comfortably for him within both English and AN constructions and that those words may have had a ‘French’ feel for him. 38 

De cello querebant, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649, fols 40v–48r. Also in Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons, p. 274. 39  Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry IV, ed. by Hingeston, pp. 155– 59; see Schendl, ‘Linguistic Aspects’, p. 81. 40  Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry IV, ed. by Hingeston, p. 158.

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Some linguists and medievalists analyse these multilingual usages in terms of language contrast or discourse marking, as when a text metalinguistically marks codeswitching with ‘that is/id est’ or ‘in english’ But that analysis accounts only partly for the dynamics of multilingual codeswitching. Some later medieval language mixing undermined or confounded language boundaries, especially between English and OF or AN or between Latin and the vernaculars, by rhyming across languages or transgressing accepted notions of grammaticality and reshaping subject positions for speakers, writers, and audiences. For example, a ME lyric about the writing devil, Tutivillus (more on the ‘Recording Devil’ in Chapter Six), combines Latin-English intersentential and intrasentential codeswitching in a poem about idle speech and female piety: Tutivillus, the devil in hell, He writeth her names, sooth to tell, Ad missam garulantes. Bet were be at home for ay Than here to serve the devil to pay, Sic vana famulantes […] For His love that you dere bought Hold you stil and jangel nought Sed prece deponentes.41

A lyric in the well known Vernon manuscript elaborates intersentential code­ switching with cross-language rhymes: I seigh a clerk book forth bring That prikked was in many a plas; Faste he soughte what he sholde sing, And al was Deo gracias.

The lyric also rhymes a Latin trisyllable with its anglicized monosyllabic borrow­ ing: Fader and Sone in Trinite, The Holy Gost, ground of our gras, Also ofte-sithe thanki we As we say Deo gracias.42 41  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 104, fol. 112 v, in The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse, ed. by Sisam and Sisam, pp. 484–85. 42  Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1, fol. 407r, ll. 5–8, 21–24 (my emphasis).

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The Vernon lyric’s rhyming and phonetic patterns appropriate and foreground grammatical and lexical relations, linking words materially (acoustically, graph­ emically) across languages within a single utterance. In modern times, standardization and national language programs often stigmatize mixed uses of language or dialects as illiterate, semi-competent, ‘creole’, ‘ghetto speech’ or ‘broken speech’. Despite the prestigious use of Latin or French phrases in dominant discourse, many writers using multilingual strategies are open to criticism from mainstream speakers and guardians of linguistic and social order, as indicated by the eighteenth-century controversy over Saxon purity and the 1996–97 Ebonics hysteria in the USA. But historically there are many positive, creative, and innovative practices deriving from local, situated multilingualism, functional codes, and language mixing. In the later Middle Ages, despite the heated debates about lay access to Latin and scripture, many people moved between languages within generic contexts or speech situations, such as in the religious lyrics mentioned above. In contemporary Nigeria, multilingual speakers refer positively to mixing Yoruba and English — ‘Won o arrest a single person’ (They did not arrest a single person) — as amulumala or adalu ade, ‘verbal salad’.43 Multilingual speech and writing are legitimate, complex, effective forms of social interaction and using texts, not linguistic pathologies. Finding appropriate metaphors and names to comprehend and rethink multilingual uses of Latin and vernaculars constituted in the Middle Ages and continues to inform today the social struggle to understand and negotiate language contact, language mixing, and wider multilingual literacies. All four types of codeswitching in late medieval writing, whether in multilingual texts, glosses, or hyperliterate manuscript markup, questioned accepted language usage and grammaticality and reveal the complex ideological functions of Latin in medieval literacies. What is meant by ‘competence’ or ‘literate competence’ when different communities use Latin discourse as a second or interlanguage? Which languages are privileged? Which control the organization of schooling, official discourse, written culture, and aesthetics? How does a language attain, seize, or maintain authority? What is the function of high-status Latin in an English, French, or Italian text? What is the role of the vernacular in a Latin text? A critical theory of language ideology, codeswitching, and language mixing practices needs to foreground the force and frisson of multilingual textual pragmatics and the intertextualities of power and resistance. Late medieval multilingual writing constituted an elaborate set of intertextual or 43 

Romaine, Language in Society, pp. 55, 57.

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intratextual dialogues with different languages and textual forms, from allegorical fiction to household charms and account books, from official discourse to lay piety, from anticlerical mimicry to vernacular punning. In the late Middle Ages, the ‘language question’ and the ‘literacy question’ were unstable, on the table for debate, struggle, and renegotiation. Language and literacy are public sites of social contest as well as instantiations of ideological discipline. In the remainder of this chapter, I examine a number of texts which construct and perform Latin language ideology or, conversely, use Latin discourse to challenge and subvert that ideology or mix Latin with vernacular styles and forms. Latin discourse was the ideological framework and also a contested domain for literate authority. As we shall see, Latina and grammatica in textual practice marked not a singular linguistic norm but competing or differencing literacies. Latin literacy presented transgressive as well as informational and ideological possibilities.

Latin as Grammaticality In the marker model, resistant literacies and retexting not only constitute alternative practices; they can also seize language ideology itself and redeploy it within discursive space as a disciplining intervention or resistant, unruly liter­ acy. Late medieval ideas about linguistic and textual authority derived from gram­matical discourse and from constructions of official language and proper speakers and writers, almost always in terms of Latin usage. As we have seen, the anxieties of Philip de Harvengt and others about cultural change and new, secular literate authority entailed a belief that Latin’s ideological primacy and the clergy’s correlative authority were under attack. After 1300 many lay people and clergy were becoming convinced, for various reasons, of the need for vernacular religious writing, and English parliament was beginning to use English or French as its working or official language. But knowledge of Latin continued to be an important marker of power, authority, and grammatica. Knowledge and use of Latin were deeply embedded in medieval orders of discourse, language ideology, and literate practices: What is language? What is grammaticality? Who is literatus? How and for what purposes is Latin or any written language to be used? Questions about grammar and grammaticality are intertwined with language choice, attitudes, and users, ways we make people up. In practice, Latin discourse was how a language myth based on theories of language and universal grammar was deployed. Theories of grammaticality among philosophical grammarians and the modistae were structurally and conceptually

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linked with uses of Latin to teach elementary literacy, decoding, and reading. Thus, Latin language ideology was embedded in a set of theoretical practices distributed across a range of literate contexts, including the trivium arts, exegesis, glossing, and translation. As the object language of the ars grammatica, Latin was the basis for medieval literacy and literate education. Typically, children and adults used elementary or pedagogical grammars to learn to pronounce and construe written language by learning to pronounce the letters of the alphabet and then Latin words and sentences. But Latin’s position as object language, grammatical discourse, and often the language of instruction was continually bouncing against theoretical discourses of grammaticality, the ars grammatica. One of the most through-going accounts of Latin as Langage or Grammatica is found in philosophical and modistic grammar. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century philosophical grammar was a concrete ins­ tantiation of the broader discourse of Universal Grammar (UG). The UG project and the question of language universals and grammaticality have explicitly or implicitly underwritten linguistic theory, pragmatics, language reform, and language ideology since the ancient Greeks. Aristotle argued that written symbols (as words) are signs of spoken forms, which are signs of mental impressions; ‘what these are in the first place signs of — affections of the soul [pathemata] — are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of — actual things — are also the same’.44 Aristotle thus presents a mediated realist theory of language and signs.45 In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe, philo­sophers and grammarians read Aristotle’s text through Boethius’s (c. 480–524?) or Ammonius’s commentary. These two translations and commentaries established the vox-intellectus-res scheme which inserted mind between language and things. The problem was that Latin vox could mean speech sound or meaningful utterance, a distinction which Boethius did not always make in his Latin translation of Aristotle. Thus, the difference between UG and individual grammars was elided in translation. Likewise, Roman and early medieval grammarians wrote descriptions of Latin and texts for teaching Latin literacy which took little account of other languages, even though late imperial and Carolingian grammarians sometimes noted the differences between Latin usage of the antiqui and their own. At times medieval philosophers and theologians were preoccupied with and productively used the problem of universals, mainly with reference to Aristotle, the neo-Platonist Porphyry (third century), and Boethius. But beginning in the late eleventh cen­ 44  Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a3, in Aristotle, ‘Categories’ and ‘De interpretatione’, trans. by Ackrill, p. 43. 45  I discuss this more fully in Amsler, ‘Philosophy of Language’.

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tury, new debates over universals shaped language theory, logic, theology, reading procedures, and even anatomy. This new debate shifted the ideology of Latin as gram­matica to a more theoretical level, which had enormous implications for the status of vernaculars and literacy. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Robert Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1279), Roger Bacon (d. 1292/94), and Modistic grammarians argued that the study of grammatica focused properly not on how speech or writing conforms to the explicit rules of a given language but on how speech or writing conforms to the rules of language as such (Saussure’s Langage, Chomsky’s UG or I-language) abstracted from different languages. In contemporary theory terms, many of these philosophical grammarians were ‘structuralists’ or ‘ UG theorists’, and I suspect they might have willingly adopted either name. In his commentary on Priscianus minor (Institutiones, Books 17–18), Kilwardby stated that grammar is a general science only if its object of study is that which is common to all human beings, like geometry: ‘Sic autem manet subiectum gramatice idem omnibus; et sic intellige de voce literata ordinabili propter congruum’46 (So the subject of grammar remains the same (is consistent) for all: namely, what can be written from intelligible speech ordered according to congruence). Kilwardby’s comparison with geometry is instructive. Geometry as a discipline is concerned with magnitude in the abstract, not with the magnitude of a line or other figures. Siger de Courtrai (early fourteenth century) wrote that ‘Grammatica est ser­ mocinalis scientia, sermonem et passiones eius in communi ad exprimendum principaliter mentis conceptus per sermonem coniugatum considerans’ 47 (Grammar is the science of language, considering universal (in communi) discourse (ser­monem) and its affects (passiones) as principally for expressing a mental concept in well-formed discourse/sentences (sermonem)). The anonymous writer of a De modi significandi (thirteenth century) distinguished ydiomata (individual lan­g uages) from grammatica and argued that grammar proper is only concerned with those activities of signifying, construing, or uttering which are common or uni­versal: ‘Utrum omnia ydiomata sint una grammatica’48 (Each individual lan­g uage possesses one and the same grammar). Allowing for differences among twelfth- and thirteenth- century speculative grammarians, late thirteenth- to fourteenth-century modistae and the nominalists, we can say that during the late 46 

Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, MS 900, fols 1–37v (fol. 1), in Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins, p. 127. 47  Siger de Courtrai, Summa modorum significandi, ed. by Pinborg, p. 1. 48  Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, MS 1334, fol. 131, in Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins, p. 125.

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Middle Ages philosophical and modistic grammarians theorized their analyses of Latin word classes, syntax, and modes of signifying as universally applicable to all languages, regardless of whether grammarians actually analysed any language be­sides Latin. Latin, the object language, was a metonym for Language, as well as the archive for the metalanguage of universal grammar theory and exemplary utterances. Many, but not all, philosophical grammarians believed vernaculars had partial or corrupted grammars, or perhaps no underlying grammar at all.49 Roger Bacon, however, is a special case. His definition of grammatica resists the typical UG model and actually challenges Latin’s ideological prestige. According to Bacon (Grammatica Graeca), ‘grammatica una et eadem est secun­ dum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur, tum quia grammatica latina quodam modo speciali a greca tracta est, testante Prisciano, et sicut auctores grammatice docent evidenter’50 (grammatica is one and the same secundum substantiam in all languages, although/even if it varies in accidents, and because Latin grammar in a certain way is derived from Greek grammar, as Priscian testifies, and as authoritative writers on grammatica openly teach). Bacon argued that a broad knowledge of languages (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, and ideally Chaldean, as well as Latin) was essential for any legitimate scholar or theologian. Although Bacon’s definition is often cited as an example of UG in the Middle Ages, Bacon was more concerned with languages than with Language as the pro­ per object of grammatical study. Bacon repeatedly criticized Latin as inferior to the scientific and philosophical rigour of Greek and Arabic, and he cagily pointed out that Latin had never been a language of divine revelation. Bacon’s philosophical and linguistic work offered a specific critique of Latin language ideology. He used the word grammatica to indicate the discipline or study of language rather than the underlying system of language in Universal Grammar.51 Bacon’s view of grammar helps clarify why medieval philosophical gram­ marians debated whether grammatica was a singular or a plural category, something like Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘family resemblances’. This debate had profound implications for medieval concepts of language and unintentionally disrupted Latin language ideology. Bacon emphasized a multilingual and contrastive linguistics, one which revealed Latin to be decidedly inferior for many literate tasks. Taking a more universalist approach, Guillaume de Conches (master of the School of Chartres from 1125–40) in his Glosae super Priscianum 49 

See Fredborg, ‘Universal Grammar’. Bacon, The Greek Grammar, ed. by Nolan and Hirsch, p. 27. 51  See Thomas, ‘Roger Bacon and Martin Joos’; Hovdhaugen, ‘Una et eadem’. 50 

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(early version: 1120–30, later version: late 1140s) argued that the grammars of Latin and Greek articulate one and the same universal grammatica in different words.52 Appealing to the authority of Aristotle and Boethius, Guillaume wrote: Et ideo non consentimus eis, qui volunt quod grammatica in Latina lingua et gram­ matica in Graeca et cetera sunt species huius artis. Sed tunc nos et Graeci diversas haberemus artes, quod esse non potest. Sunt enim artes generales et eadem apud om­nes, quamvis diverse Graecus eas per diversas expliceret voces.53 (We cannot agree with those who believe that grammar in Latin and grammar in Greek and other languages are species of this [same] art. But [if so] then we would have different arts for us and for the Greeks, which can not be. Arts are therefore general and the same for everyone, although Greek explains them differently with different voces.)

For Guillaume, Greek, Latin, and French have superficial differences (sounds, sylla­ble structures, inflections) which mask their underlying grammatical unity. Universal grammaticality conceives of Language, realized as Latin, as an auto­ nomous concept and an ordered discourse. Other grammarians proposed different theories of UG with different ling­ uistic assumptions. In Paris, Peter Helias (c. 1100–c. 1166; Summa super Pris­ cianum, 1150) defined grammatica as ‘scientia gnara recte scribendi et recte loquendi’54 (skilled/expert knowledge of correct writing and speaking). Helias’s pro­fessionalized retexting of the traditional definition of grammatica (what kind of knowledge is gnara?) and reversal of speech and writing in priority put grammaticality (rectus, recte) and writing at the centre of language theory. Helias claimed that different languages have different grammars, each a species (appearance, instance) of a common grammar (UG). He posited that one could write (tractare) a grammar of French or another vernacular and that each ver­ nacular grammar would be a species of grammatica, for which Latin was the exemplar. Language itself is natural, while individual languages and artes are artifex.55 Intertextually theorizing against the Babel narrative, Helias developed a two-tier model of grammaticality: 1) a conceptually prior, ahistorical UG and 52 

See Jeauneau, ‘Deux redactions’; Hunt, Collected Papers, ed. by Bursill-Hall, pp. 1–38, 104–06; Fredborg, ‘The Dependence’; Fredborg, ‘Universal Grammar’. 53  Firenze, Biblioteca Medico-Laurentiana, MS San Marco 310, fol. 1 va, in Fredborg, ‘Universal Grammar’, p.7. In his later version, Guillaume omits the appeal to Aristotle or Boethius; see Guillaume de Conches, Glosae super Platonem, ed. by Jeauneau, p. 369. 54  Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 61. 55  Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, pp. 63–64.

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2) language-specific grammars. Latin exemplified UG, while the vernaculars were derived from grammatica. The space between the two remained to be explored. Does each species grammaticae contain within it all the elements of the UG (genus in each species), or does each species instantiate a subset of the UG’s elements in combinations unique to that language? In his De divisione philosophiae, Dominicus Gundissalinus (Toledo, second half of the twelfth century) similarly maintained that individual languages instantiated UG: ‘in unaquaque earum invenitur tota grammatica cum omnibus partibus suis’56 (in each of them [Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic] the whole of grammar with all its parts is found). Some medieval grammarians and Dante did have a theory of intermediate language families, but Helias and Gundissalinus were more interested in developing a theory of the unity of grammar (genus) while recognizing the integrity of individual languages. Is the name Robert (Fr) the same name as Robertus (Lat), or is it a name at all? Helias’s and Gundissalinus’s accounts of UG in effect claimed that vernaculars and other sacred languages were also rational. Questions about UG and Latin’s theoretical hegemony entailed new ways of thinking about the status of vernacular speech. For multilingual medieval grammarians, the speech and discourse contexts for grammatical theory were changing, one literate and one theory at a time. Thus, grammatical theory underwrote and rewrote language ideology. Latin was associated with reason (ratio), order (ordo), and stability in a power model of language and literacy. Latin was posited as the linguistic embodiment of systematic grammaticality outside Latin itself, beyond the material and pragmatic parole of voces latini. But within pedagogical grammars and theories of universal grammar, questions arose as to whether the analysis of Latin as a formal linguistic system could in fact account for all the available structures and uses of language. Helias’s two-tier model of universal grammar left open the possibility that by analysing vernacular languages, the species of grammar and the domain of grammatica or mental language could be expanded. That is, the concept of grammatica could be untethered from restrictive hegemonic Latin and become a more general linguistic concept. This fold in linguistic theory brings UG face to face (page to page) with individual languages. We glimpse here a problem of medieval linguistic modernity: How can autonomous Language be instantiated, materially embodied, in different individual languages without being substantially altered? What is the status of grammar as a universal? Not all philosophers and theologians agreed with these medieval assumptions for UG theory. Abelard and William of Ockham (died c. 1349) rejected the theory 56 

Gundissalinus, De divisione philosophiae, ed. by Baur, bk iv, §§ 1–69 (p. 50).

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of universals as a way of explaining syntax and semantics. According to Abelard, the actual referent of the word homo ‘does not lose the essence of its substance because of the diversity of language’, but the linguistic uses of different words for ‘person’ depend on individual grammars and different systems of speech sounds (see Abelard’s glosses on De interpretatione).57 Moreover, universal predication can be ascribed only to words, not to things in themselves (see Abelard’s glosses on Porphyry in Logica Ingredientibus).58 Initially, Ockham argued that a universal is a ‘thought-object in the mind’, ‘a kind of mental picture’, a fictum. A universal is not anything real having subjective being, either in the soul or outside the soul. Instead it only has objective being in the soul. It is a kind of fictum which has being in objective being like what the external thing has in subjective being.59

Ockham’s fictum has incorporeal but real being. Later, however, in his commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, Ockham gave up the mental picture or fictum theory but still critiqued realist universals in terms of mediating intellection and linguistic reference: ‘a singularity in the mind (passio animae) is the same as the act of knowing (actus intelligendi)’.60 By contrast, the noun homo is an ‘intellectio confusa’ because it refers equally to Socrates, Plato, and every other human being; such nouns cannot distinguish one singularity (or singular thing) from another. The spoken word is equivalent to a mental concept in that it can stand for either some/thing in the world or some/thing (a singularity) in the mind. For Ockham as for Abelard, one of Philosophy’s principal goals is to clarify linguistic reference in the mind. The act of intellection produces a ‘quality existing subjectively in the mind. It is the sign of an external thing just as much from its nature as a spoken word is the sign of a thing according to the will of the one who institutes it.’61 While many nominalists and philosophical grammarians accepted an under­ lying set of concepts and categories as the framework for language analysis, some used category analysis to distinguish grammatical from logical questions. Grammar and logic belonged to different discursive regimes. Abelard, for example, argued that the Latinity of the apparently contradictory sentence Homo est lapis (A person is a rock) must be construed on two levels: logical and 57 

Arens, Aristotle’s Theory, p. 147. Five Texts, ed. and trans. by Spade, p. 37. 59  In libros Sententiarum, bk i [= Ordinatio], d. 2, q. 8, in Ockham, Opera, ed. by Gál. 60  Expositio super librum Perihermenias, bk i, prol. 6, in Ockham, Opera, ed. by Gál; Opera Philosophicae, ii, 351–58, in Ockham, Opera, ed. by Gál. 61  Ordinatio, d. 2, q. 8, in Ockham, Opera, ed. by Gál. 58 

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grammatical. According to logic, the sentence is demonstrably false as to the being (essendi) of humans and rocks. But with respect to grammar, the sentence is well-formed and congruent according to Latin syntax and subject-predicate concord. To account for this difference, Abelard distinguished linguistic from categorical predication. In Latin grammar (linguistic predication), but not in logic (categorical predication), lapis can be predicated of homo. Thus, the sentence Homo est lapis can be considered Latina only in the linguistic sense.62 Like Abelard, the anonymous Note Dunelmenses stated that ‘Grammatica […] tantum considerat rectam coniunctionem vocum secundum regulas et usus acto­ rum; dialectica vero veritatem et falsitatem investigat’63 (Grammar […] considers only the correct joining of words according to the (grammatical) rules and usage of authors; dialectic examines truth and falsity). In the late medieval order of discourse, this division, at least for Abelard and the anonymous Note, privileged philosophical over grammatical discourse; a given sentence can have different senses according to a ‘simple’ grammatical reading and a ‘deeper’ logical reading or analysis. Taking a different approach, Helias and other philosophical grammarians posited congruence (congruitas) as a syntactic-semantic criterion for gram­mat­ icality, often by commenting on Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae, Book 17 (‘De constructione’). Helias argued that constructio, verbal congruence (‘congrua dictionum ordinatio’), occurs when the words [are] ordered in such a way the listener has something which he may rationally understand, whether true or false, as when one says homo currit or Socrates est lapis. Although this [latter] proposition is false, nevertheless through it the hearer understands something rationally [by means of reason].64

Medieval grammarians and philosophers of language adhered to Aristotle and Boethius’s framework in which truth or falsity could only be determined when there is combination and distinction, that is, syntax.65 Combination and distinc­ tion give rise to discourse. Any theory of congruitas must be formulated in terms of propositions, predication, and claims. Utterances, congruent or not, precede understanding on the part of a listener or reader. 62 

Abelard, Dialectica, ed. by de Rijk, pp. 155, ll. 5–11 and p. 156, ll. 22–30. In Hunt, Collected Papers, ed. by Bursill-Hall, p. 22. 64  Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 832. 65  Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a9, 16b19, 17a8–23, 19b5, in Aristotle, ‘Categories’ and ‘De interpretatione’, trans. by Ackrill, pp. 43, 45–46, 53–54. 63 

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Helias also distinguished utterance congruity (congrua voce) from conceptual congruity (congrua sensu), and the relation (congruence) between the two produces a theory of pragmatics. In Helias’s theory of grammaticality and con­gruitas, whether the spoken or written instantiation of the sentence Socrates est lapis is judged to be well formed Latin or ungrammatical depends on the prag­matics of how the perceiver makes sense of the utterance. For example, a listener or reader can interpret the sentence Socrates est lapis as false, but it is still Latina (a Latin sentence) because it is made up of Latin words and affixes, is well formed according to Latin syntax, and creates some understanding in the hearer or reader. Whether the listener or reader finally agrees with the utterance does not affect the utterance’s grammaticality as long as the utterance is accepted as something possible to say. For Helias, the condition of the sayable is that the utterance be congruent.66 Helias’s theory of grammaticality, like many theories of UG and understanding, depends on the mental activity connected with what the Stoics called dici­ bile, that is, with what is considered sayable or conceptually possible, although late medieval philosophical grammarians didn’t always use the term. Ammonius’s com­mentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione (translated by Guillaume de Moerbeke, 1268) defined dicibile as ‘medium inter conceptionem et rem’67 (the link between concept and thing). About fifty years later, the highly influential philo­sopher of language Thomas of Erfurt (early 1300s) used similar language to define linguistic reference as grounded in ‘entia positiva in anima […] et sunt entia secundum animam’ (positive entities in the mind […] and they are entities according to the mind), even if not all words refer to positive entities outside the mind (‘extra animam’) nor have referents locatable in the world. According to Thomas and other modistae, both active signifying (modus significandi acti­ vus, first imposition, naming) and active consignifying (modus consignificandi activus, second imposition, grammaticalization) are relevant to grammatica in that they are sign-making mental activities (chap. 3). Many grammarians argued we can only consignify what we can imagine, but what we can imagine exceeds what is. The concrete nouns planta (twig) and visio (apparition, concept), the idea of Deus as a passive concrete entity which can be acted upon, and the name of the concrete ‘figment’ chimera are all on a par semantically in that each refers to something we can call ‘real’ in that speakers, writers, listeners, and readers can ­associate the noun with ‘positive entities in the mind’ (chap. 2; see also chap. 5).68 66 

Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 834. Ammonius, De interpretatione vel Periermenias. Translatio Boethii, ed. by L. MinioPaluello in Translatio, ed. by Verbeke, bk 32, chap. 33. 68  Thomas of Erfurt, Grammatica speculativa, ed. and trans. by Bursill-Hall, chap. 2 67 

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The modistae associated the capacity to conceive of and name that which is only imagined or abstractly conceived with the modus habitus. Louis Kelly argues that the modus habitus substituted for modus substantiae in many thirteenth-century grammatical treatises.69 In philosophical grammar, the question What is Latin? is implicit in the question What is grammatical? and entails both formal and semantic criteria.70 Helias argues, apropos of the phrase cappa negativa (‘negative cloak’): There is no construction [constructio] unless it creates understanding in the hearer. And one asks if the expression habens cappa negativa [having a negative cloak] is Latin. This should be distinguished: it is true that it is a Latin expression [Latina locutio], i.e., made from Latin words; it is false that it is a Latin expression, i.e., that whoever utters it speaks Latin. One cannot be said to speak Latin, unless with his speech he generates some understanding in the hearer.71

Helias and others equated Latina locutio with intellectus (understanding), Reason, and Language itself.72 Utterance (locutio) is a construction if it is understood as meaningful by a listener or reader, that is, if it is intelligible in terms of a speaker or writer’s intention or in terms of how a listener or reader construes and makes sense of an utterance. Helias here extends Priscian’s definition of ordo, ‘ordinatio dictionum congrua’ (congruent ordering of words), i.e. syntactically well formed.73 Helias makes explicit how grammaticality depends on the congruence between interior mental thought, utterance, and reception. Like Michel de Marbais (thirteenth century), Helias maintained that grammar, even Language, had been invented by grammarians, philosophers, and authors, but that signification is determined by things themselves.74 ‘Pura’ grammar is formal linguistics, ‘mixta’ grammar includes the syntactic-semantic interface. Why does Helias accept ‘Socrates est lapis’ as a Latin expression, while he waffles on whether ‘cappa negativa’ is a Latin expression? The reason is the rela­ tion between formal congruitas (or congrua voce) and semantic congruitas (or (pp. 140–41), chap. 3 (pp. 140–43), chap. 5 (pp. 146–47). 69  Kelly, The Mirror of Grammar, p. 76. 70  Ebbesen, ‘Is canis currit Ungrammatical?’; Ebbesen, ‘The Odyssey of Semantics’. 71  Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 834. See Aristotle, De interpretatione, 16a3, 16a26, 17b17, in Aristotle, ‘Categories’ and ‘De interpretatione’, trans. by Ackrill, pp. 43–44, 46; Thomas of Erfurt, Grammatica speculativa, ed. and trans. by Bursill-Hall, chap. 53 (pp. 312–31). 72  Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 178. See Vineis and Maierù, ‘Medieval Linguistics’, p. 240. 73  Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. by Keil, bk xvii, § 187 (Keil, ii, 15). 74  Michel de Marbais, De modi significandi, in Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins, p. 123.

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con­grua sensu).75 Helias argued that cappa negativa is formally congruous and syn­tactically well formed but semantically incongruous, since he did not think the listener (or reader) could understand anything from the expression. By con­ trast, he argues, the syntactically not well-formed (incongruent) expression turba ruunt in Penelope’s letter to Ulysses, Book 1, line 88 from Ovid’s Heroides, ‘Turba ruunt in me luxuriosa proci’ (The mob rushes to demand my hand), is none­ the­less semantically congruent in that the listener can understand something from the construction despite the lack of subject-verb concord. (This example, often repeated in twelfth- and thirteenth-century grammatical writing, is a little misleading since Ovid’s line i. 88 is taken out of context. In Ovid’s complete sentence, ‘turba’ can be construed as a collective noun functioning as an apposi­ tive with the preceding two subjects, ‘Dulichii Samiique et quos tulit alta Zacynthos’, thus making ‘Dulichii Samiique et quos’ the immediate subjects of the plural verb.76) Helias’s analysis set the stage not only for later philosophical grammarians but also for critics of the modistae, who extended the theory of grammaticality to include pragmatics. The Latinity of an utterance first depended on the utterance’s internal syntactic and semantic relations, but speakers and readers’ discourse competence was necessary to complete the sense of an utterance according to grammar, possible meanings, and discursive contexts, especially if speech conventions clashed with grammar. The sentence Turba ruunt can be analysed as a solecism and ungrammatical, but the sense of a crowd as a collective entity and therefore Turba as a mass noun makes the sentence comprehensible. The utterance ‘Aqua, aqua!’ (Water, water!) might be regarded as formally, that is, syntactically, incomplete, even ungrammatical, because it lacks any linguistic predication, but when shouted by someone whose house is burning, the utterance is understandable and contextually effective. Functionally and in context, ‘Aqua, aqua!’ is a complete utterance even though it lacks an explicit verb to establish predication. In this enlarged definition of grammaticality, the meaning of a Latin utterance depends not only on the completed surface syntax but on the speech context and the speech act’s pragmatic uptake.77 In the late Middle Ages, Latin grammar remained the exemplar for theory and analysis of language discourses (grammar, rhetoric, logic). However, the status of grammatica was being redescribed in theoretical and practical ways which altered Latin language ideology and literate situations. In new models of philosophical 75 

Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, p. 832. Ovid, Heroides, ed. by Knox, p. 43. 77  See Kilwardby, In Donati artem maiorem iii, ed. by Schmücker, p. 97; see Magister Johannes, Sicut dicit Remigius, in Rosier, La Parole comme acte, pp. 194–98, 255. 76 

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grammar and increasingly important rhetorical models of language, in vernacular translation, heresy hunting, and increasing (if uneven) lay access to education, the equation of Latin or standard Latin alone with grammatica was becoming destabilized, while multilingual speech was more recognizable as grammatical. Changing presuppositions regarding grammaticality especially affected later medieval concepts of constructo and dicibile. Helias and other philosophical grammarians distinguished between vicium and figura in syntax. As part of constructio, ratio is the meaningful assemblage of syntax, dependent on both utterer/writer and listener/reader for creating signification and consignification: figura est diversarum dictionum in diversis accidentibus rationabili causa facta con­ iunctio. Si enim coniungantur dictiones in diversis accidentibus nec ratio­nabiliter, vicium est in constructione. Si vero secundum diversa accidentia con­stru­antur dictiones et habeat rationem illa constructio, non in ea erit vicium sed figura, ut ‘Turba ruunt’ singularis numerus cum plurali construitur. Habet tamen rationem con­structio quia ‘turba’ semper pertinet ad pluralitatem et iccirco cum plurali num­ero construitur.78 (Figura is the conjoining of different words with different accidents in a reasonable fashion. If the words are conjoined with different accidents without reason, it is a vice/error in construction. If the words are construed with different accidents and that construction is meaningful, there will not be an error in it [the construction] but a figure, as with Turba ruunt, the singular [noun] is construed with a plural [verb]. Nevertheless, the construction has reason [meaning] because turba always en­tails plurality [or perhaps, ‘is a collective noun’] and is construed with a plural verb.)

When Helias argues that such constructions are meaningful, he expands grammatical discourse to embrace figurative language. Modern linguists would analyse the grammar in terms of different agreement rules for mass and count nouns. Here, Helias includes both significandi (first imposition) and con­sig­nificandi (second imposition) as part of grammar and meaning, so that the poetic enlarges the grammatical. Grammatical and rhetorical commentators applied this theory of figurative syntax to the canon of Latin poetry. Matthew of Vendôme (before 1175) in his Ars versificatoria (before 1123?) distinguished ars, vitium, and figura: ‘We should imitate art (ars), we should banish fault (vitium) completely, and figura demands support.’79 Figura marks an elastic, fluid space in the linguistic domain, the possibility for new naming, troping, or transgressing. In allegorical exegesis, 78  79 

Helias, Summa, ed. by Reilly, pp. 1002–03. Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria, trans. by Parr, bk 4, chap. 9, p. 94.

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figura was the theoretical concept which made language opaque and therefore interpretable beyond the letter. In grammar, poetic and figurative discourse is artificial rather than natural construction. Figurative discourse enlarges the possible in grammatica by joining words in transgressive yet semantic, syntactic, pragmatically meaningful, affective, even elegant ways which readers and hearers understand, or claim to. By the late fourteenth century, Latin literacy occupied a pragmatically un­ stable position within different speech and discourse communities. While written vernacular discourses flourished throughout Europe, Latin continued to be privileged, institutionally and conventionally, as the textual language of official and clerical culture, as the language of written learning in treatises, glosses, and official records, and therefore as the language of social, political, and linguistic power. Lay Latin literacy was more and more taken for granted, an illustration of the changing social function of Latin’s ideological power, even as lay literacy exceeded Latin’s traditional boundaries. A dominant language’s authority and the power of its users are always in flux and must be actively maintained and policed, through literate standardization, enforced diglossia, or restricted access to literacy education. All these disciplinary practices were challenged in the late Middle Ages. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Latin’s traditional role as an authoritative discourse was increasingly challenged by new Latin readers and writers as well as by vernacular discursive conflicts which set people, institutions, languages, texts, and knowledges against one another precisely because greater access to Latin textuality meant more and different writers, readers, speakers, and audiences were entering and enlarging the domain of Latin literacy and the public conception of grammaticality. For philosophical grammarians, religious writers, social critics, and poets, the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical Latin was overtaken by that between grammatical language (Latin) and a-/ungrammatical lan­g uage (vernacular) and then by the even more complex distinction between gram­ maticality, including congruous and incongruous figural constructions, and ungrammaticality, which might include viciae as well as formally congruous nonsense utterances (like Colourless green ideas sleep furiously). The struggles over grammaticality in Latin were nested within wider social conflicts over literacy. For many, grammatica was no longer identified strictly with Latin or with clerical literacy. That is, grammaticality and well-formed language were becoming detached, deterritorialized, from Latin language ideology. Consider the following remarkable but not isolated example of vernacular grammaticality. During the Oxford debates on Bible translation, the anonymous writer of On Translating the Bible into English (c. 1401–07) clearly distinguished grammatica from Latina,

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putting Latin on a par with other languages whose grammaticality might be determined by usage: But yit adversaries of trewith seien, wane men rehersen that Grekis and Latyns han al in ther owne langage, the clerkis of hem speiken grammaticalliche and the puple understo[n]dth it not. Witte thei that, though a clerke or another man thus lerned can sette his wordis on Englische better than a rewde man, it foloweth not herof that oure langage schuld be destried. It were al on to sei this, and to kitte oute the tunges of hem that can not speke thus curiosly. But thei schulde understande that ‘grammaticaliche’ is not ellis but abite of right spekyng and right pronounsyng and right wryty[n]ge.80

According to the text’s recent editors and annotators, the writer of this passage paraphrases in English a Latin disputation by Richard Ullerston (d. 1423) on the value of vernacular Bible translation.81 Ullerston, like Wyclif, was an Oxford teacher. Although his writings were judged to be more orthodox than Wyclif ’s, Ullerston also supported vernacular Bible translation in terms which after 1401 were condemned as heretical.82 Before Arundel’s condemnations, a wider range of academics could embrace the idea of vernacular Bible translation without necessarily dancing with heterodoxy. The definition of grammaticality in the above passage repeats the traditional procedural definition of grammatica found in classical and early medieval grammar but omits the task of interpreting the poets, that is, artifice and figura. More important, the context of the passage makes it clear that the writer does not assume that grammaticaliche (grammatically, the condition of grammaticality) is equivalent with Latin grammar, nor with orthodoxy for that matter: ‘And to hem that seien that the gospel on Engliche wolde make men to erre, wyte wele that we fynden in Latyne mo heretikes than of ale other langagis.’ 83 The anonymous writer argues that ‘unlearned’ readers with access to grammatically literal vernacular translations of scripture do not necessarily misconstrue the text or produce heretical readings. The writer locates grammaticaliche not within a specific language or languages nor even in the categories of Latin grammar, but in 80 

The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 147. See The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 146. On Ullerston’s authorship of the Latin tract, see Hudson, Lollards and their Books, p. 83. 82  Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 152–54. 83  The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 147; see the Lollard tract, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS Ii. 6. 26, fol. 4v, in Hudson, Lollards and their Books, p. 158. 81 

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linguistic practice. ‘Right’ speaking and writing, oral and written utterances are determined to be ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ by audience or community pragmatics, what the audience or reader accepts as linguistically and discursively meaningful or discursively acceptable in any language. Translation, like other linguistic performances, deconstructs the autonomy of Latin as grammatica and the power it traditionally controls. Deterritorialized Latin produces a concept of grammaticality situated in usus and figura, in dis­ cursive and poetic practice, rather than in ars or scientia. Paradoxically, as these philosophical grammarians use Latin grammatical categories to articulate a theoretically discrete grammatica apart from any particular language, they deploy grammatica as a theoretical ground for discursive difference, multiplicity, and more fluid literate practices, a ground which destabilizes or subverts the authority and power of Latin as grammatica. Signification rather than formal congruence is the theoretical criterion for grammaticality. In language as practice, purus gram[m]atice always loses ground to mixtus gram[m]atice: ‘Sic est iste qui imposuit partes ad significandum non fuit purus gramaticus, sed mixtus’84 (So he who imposed the (grammatical) parts of speech on signification was not a pure grammarian but a mixed one). In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the concept of mixed grammaticality, coupled with deterritorialized Latin, generated not only new vernacular impulses but also new and different modes of Latin utterances, mixed languages and unruly literate performances.

Dante and Latin Grammar Dante Alighieri’s (1261–1321) grammatical theory and poetics reproduce the paradox and subversive hypotext in philosophical grammarians’ linguistic theor­ ies. In his often quoted essay on language, De vulgari eloquentia (c. 1305–09), Dante contrasts the vulgaris, Primary Discourse as home language, with Latina, Secondary Discourse, ‘secundaria’ language or ‘quam Romani gramaticam voca­ verunt’ (that which the Romans called ‘grammar’). The vulgaris is ‘noblior’ (more noble) not because it is the language learned first but because ‘it was first used by the human race; then because the whole world uses it, even if it is divided into different words and utterances; then because it is natural (naturalis) to us, whereas the other [Latin] is artificial (artificialis)’.85 That is, contemporary vernaculars, 84  Michel de Marbais, De modi significandi, in Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins, p. 123. 85  Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, 1. 1.3–4 (pp. 2–3), in Dante Alighieri, De vulgari

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despite their variations from one another, constitute something closer to the original Edenic language. Latin, on the other hand, is more difficult, alienated from speakers, something which few can achieve ‘complete fluency’ (ad habitum vero) in ‘quia non nisi per spatium temporis et studii assiduitatem regulamur et doctrinamur in illa’ (because knowledge of its rules and theory can only be developed through dedication to a lengthy course of study).86 Latin is disciplined and restricted; the vernacular is organic, universal, original, and naturally nur­ tured. Dante’s analysis here is consistent with both theory and practice in late medieval grammatical discourse. Other philosophical grammarians, for example, Gundissalinus, also distinguished between natural vernacular and artificial Latin in UG theory. Recall Mirk’s baptism instructions for midwives on how to use ‘natural’ (English SVO) syntax for both English and Latin ritual utterances. Some manuscripts of Horace’s Odes or Latin liturgical sequences contain construe annotations or marks which guide readers to construe ambiguous or difficult Latin syntax in SVO word order.87 However, Dante’s characterization of the ‘nobilior’ vernacular in De vulgari eloquentia clashes with his earlier contrast between Latin and the vernacular in Convivio (1304–05). De vulgari eloquentia was written in Latin, while Convivio, which privileges Latin, was composed in Italian. In Convivio Dante described the Latin language as more noble, virtuous, and beautiful than the vernacular (e per nobilità e per vertù e per bellezza). Latin is more noble because ‘lo latino è perpetuo e non corruttibile, e lo volgare è non stabile e corruttibile’ (Latin has a permanent form and is not subject to change, whereas the vernacular is un­ stable and is subject to change). Also ‘con ciò sia cosa che lo latino molte cose manifesta concepute nella mente, che lo volgare fare non può, sì come sanno quelli che hanno l’uno e l’altro sermone, più è la vertù sua che quella del volgare’ (since our mind conceives many ideas which Latin can express but the ver­ nacular cannot, as anyone with command of both languages can testify, Latin is more virtuous than the vernacular). Latin is more beautiful (i.e. materially and intellectually proportioned) since ‘Dunque quello sermone è più bello, nello quale più debitamente si rispondono [li vocabuli; e più debitamente li vocabuli si rispondono] in latino che in volgare, però che lo volgare séguita uso, e lo latino arte’ (That language, then, is more beautiful in which the words more properly eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill. I have modified Botterill’s translations slightly. 86  Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, in Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill, 1. 1.3 (pp. 2–3). 87  See, for example, Reynolds, Medieval Reading, esp. pp.  94–99, 101–05, 110–13; Kihlman, Expositiones sequentiarum, pp. 38, 356.

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accord with each other; and they more properly accord with each other in Latin than in the vernacular, since the vernacular is shaped by usage, and Latin by art).88 The contrasts between Dante’s juxtapositions of Latin and the vernacular in De vul­gari eloquentia and Convivio neatly summarize Latin language ideology, while mask­ing the social and political power Latin indexed. Dante was a strong advocate of the aesthetic, rational, and cultural values of vernacular writing, but his account of language change, language diversity, and vernacular poetics depends on Latin language ideology and grammatical theory based on Latin. To further complicate the picture, Dante’s account of language diversity and multilingualism is always framed by the Fall. Dante deploys Latin language ideology in two, often contradictory ways, one focused on linguistic history, the other on grammatical theory. On the one hand, he positions Latin historically as a native and then an artificial language. In the distant past, Latin had been a native, home language in Latium, a Primary Discourse, the historical and maternal origo, descendent of Adamic language, Hebrew, and Greek, and the immediate ancestor of southern European lan­ guages. But then Latin became grammatica, that is, a Secondary Discourse, a cultural and paternal dividing practice, a schooled practice which is elite, learned, pan-European, policed. Dante ideologically and theoretically constructs Latin as fixed, stable language, the direct linguistic ancestor of the Florentine dialect, and the embodiment of ratio, ordo, and grammatica. On the other hand, Dante’s paradoxical linguistic history and vernacular theory moved Latin to the margins of linguistic identity and installed a new antecendent vernacular, which he calls ‘vulgare latium’ (Latian vernacular),89 centred around Rome and fundamental to cultural and political order and civic sociability in mediterranean Christendom.90 Seeking the best speech to serve as 88 

Dante Alighieri, Convivio, 1. 5.7, 1. 5.12, 1. 5.14, in Dante Alighieri, Le opere, ed. by Rajna and others, i; English translations adapted from Dante Alighieri, Convivio, trans. by Lansing, 1. 5.7, 1. 5.12, 1. 5.14. 89  Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill, 1. 10 (pp. 22–25, esp. 1. 10.3). This is my translation of the phrase ‘vulgare latium’. Botterill and Marianne Shapiro translate ‘vulgare latium’ as ‘Italian vernacular’, while Robert Haller translates the phrase as ‘Latin vernacular’. If Dante had wanted in this passage to specify Latin as a language rather than Latium as a region, he would most likely have used Latina. On the other hand, translating ‘latium’ as Italian attributes to the medieval regional or hegemonic ethnic name for Rome and its environs either a modern national identity or a much broader geographical context which Dante explicitly refers to in DVE as ‘Ytalie’ (for example, 1. 10.5–6). See, Shapiro, Dante’s Book of Exile, p. 57; Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. by Haller, p. 16. 90  See Baron, The Crisis, pp. 344–45.

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the ‘vulgare illustre’91 (illustrious vernacular), Dante trashes all existing Italian dialects, including Tuscan, finding none adequate for the aesthetic and cognitive demands of panItalian poetry and prose. In effect, Dante collapses the opposition between Latin and vernacular and turns the ideal vernacular, descendent of the ‘vulgare latium’, into a form of Latina, an artificial language spoken and written everywhere and maintained by study and learned usage. Moreover, the ‘vulgare illustre’, he argues, is a form of speech and writing closest to Roman Latin, unmixed, yet more elegant and not located in any particular region or city: ‘Itaque, adepti quod querebamus, dicimus illustre, cardinale, aulicum et curiale vulgare in Latio, quod omnis latie civitatis est et nullius esse videtur, et quo municipalia vulgaria omnia Latinorum mensurantur et ponderantur, et comparantur’92 (So we have found what we were seeking: we can define the illustrious, cardinal, court, aulic, and curial vernacular in Latinum as that which belongs to every latian city yet seems to belong to none, and against which the vernaculars of all the cities of the Latins can be measured, weighed, and compared). This ideal Latin which is not Latin, while historically related to Latin on the Italian peninsula, has ‘in qualibet redolet civitate nec cubat in ulla’93 (left its scent in every city but made its home in none). Once again, Latin language ideology produces a deterritorialized ghost or trace in its own image. Dante’s allegiance both to a vernacular as lived natural linguistic experience and to Latin as an ideological, linguistic representation of universal knowledge, cultural unity, and social order, a materially utopian language, catches him in a contradiction created by the sociolinguistic situation in thirteenth-century Italy. In his De vulgari eloquentia, the Latin language becomes a mobile signifier, theoretically an originary language, primary natural utterance, and structuring cultural discourse, but simultaneously a measuring, authoritative, artificial dis­ course acquired through schooling and transnational Christianity (an incipient Europa) and deployed by intellectuals, clerics, and writers to validate and regulate language practices and differentiate mixed vernacular speech from pure vernacular, volgare illustre. For Dante, this ‘second Latin’ was a Secondary Discourse, a pure vernacular, volgare illustre, which existed nowhere and every­where, a grammatical utopia modelled on Latin and fortified by vernacular poetry. Dante’s reworking of Latin language ideology was partly founded on the historical development of the Romance languages and partly a cultural inheri­ 91 

Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill, 1. 16.6. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill, 1. 16.6. My translation. 93  Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Botterill, 1. 16.4. See Joseph, Limiting the Arbitrary, pp. 43–47. 92 

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tance from the Roman empire. While Dante deployed Latin language ideology as an historical reference point, he struggled, as did other medieval writers, with whether to write in Latin or the vernacular. In fact, Dante, like Boccaccio and John Gower, used Latin as well as his native vernacular for both learned and fictional or poetic texts. For many writers and translators, writing in the vernacular was and is a political act of religious, national, or class identity. But to some extent a writer’s language choice is path-dependent. When the classical scholar and poet Giovanni del Virgilio wrote a poem requesting that Dante write Latin poetry, Dante responded with his Eclogue II, to Giovanni del Virgilio, a Virgilian-style, genre-driven Latin poem in which the poet argues that he prefers to write in the vernacular, the more humble language of ‘shepherds’, the ‘natural’ language of all people.94 Choosing to continue the poetic discourse Giovanni initiates, Dante repositions classical Latin poetic discourse to argue for vernacular poetic subjectivity, for the ‘natural’ and general rather than the artificial and restricted. Dante slyly turns Latin language ideology and poetics against Giovanni by composing a Latin text praising vernacular poetics with the rules for Latin verse composition. Whereas Virgil’s eclogues represented rustic shepherd speech in native, albeit literate and educated, Latin, Dante’s thirteenthcentury Latin is alienated, deterritorialized, from the vernacular and even from the volgare illustre. In his eclogue as well as in De vulgari eloquentia, Convivio, and Commedia, Dante’s textual practices and representations of Latin question while trying to maintain the ideological associations of Latin with learned writing and the vernaculars with humbler poetic discourse. Pragmatically and structurally, the volgare illustre partakes of both Latin and vernacular speech. Dante’s linguistic theory is mixed and creolized in practice.

Latin as Margin, Gloss, and Text Latin literacy was disseminated among lay readers not only through schooling or religious practices but also through the use of specific guides and strategies for reading. Latin language ideology was the hypotext underwriting multilingual glossing and annotating practices. The semiotics of glossography link manuscript arrangement, translation, and Latin language ideology and reveal how literate technologies can serve different, contesting functions. Vernacular glosses in Latin texts mediate readers’ engagements with texts in a second language. But what 94 

Dante Alighieri, Ecologa 1, Dantes Aligherii Iohanni de Virgilio, in Dante Alighieri, Le opere, ed. by Rajna and others, i, ll. 9–23, 36–44.

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about Latin glosses in Latin or vernacular texts? What role did Latin as marginal discourse play in constructions of medieval hyperliteracy and authority? In Convivio, Dante struggles with writing in Latin and the vernacular. As we have seen, Latin, he argues, is a more comprehensive language and ‘can express many things conceived by the human mind which the vernacular cannot, as anyone knows who has the facility in both [languages]’.95 Dante assumes that Latin is cognitively a more comprehensive language and therefore can’t be subordinated to the vernacular. But on the manuscript page the gloss is marginalized and technically subordinate to the primary text. As a result, Dante worries that the mat­ erial manuscript format might conflict with the ‘proper’ status of Latin in a text: Having proved that a Latin commentary would not have been an understanding servant, I will tell why it would not have been obedient. He is obedient who has that good disposition which is called obedience. True obedience should have three things, without which it cannot exist: it should be sweet (dulce) and not bitter (amara), entirely under command (interamente) and not self-willed (spontanea), and within measure (misura) and not beyond measure. These three things a Latin commentary could not possibly have possessed, and therefore it would have been impossible for it to be obedient. That this would have been impossible for Latin (lo Latina), as has been said, is made clear by the following reasoning (per cotale ragione): everything that proceeds by inverse order is disagreeable, and consequently is bitter and not sweet, as, for example, sleeping during the day and lying awake at night, or going backwards and not forwards. For the subject (lo subietto) to command the sovereign is to proceed by inverse order (da ordine perverso) (for the right order is for the sovereign to command the servant); so it is bitter and not sweet. And since it is impossible to obey a bitter command with sweetness, it is impossible for the sovereign’s obedience to be sweet when a subject commands. Therefore, if Latin is the sovereign of the vernacular (volgare), as has been shown above by many reasons, and the canzoni which play the role of commander are in the vernacular (sono volgare), it is impossible for its obedience (sua ragione) to be sweet.96

Here, ‘Latina’ and ‘vulgus’ are more like agents than mediums or conduits for writ­ing and reading. Latin’s ‘nobilior’ status as the language of primary text and written commentary makes it unsuitable for marginal commentary on vernacular poetry. In Dante’s view, a Latin commentary to the four Italian canzoni, written in the manuscript margins, would denigrate Latin as a primary language. Dante doesn’t argue that a Latin commentary would increase the status of the ver­nacular poetry, so his problem is with contamination. 95  96 

Dante Alighieri, Convivio, trans. by Lansing, 1. 5.12. Dante Alighieri, Convivio, trans. by Lansing, 1. 7.1–4.

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Also, he says, written Latin commentary will ‘disobey’ and disrupt the textual order of which it is a part. Latin discourse doesn’t understand the vernaculars because its universalizing, eternal, and incorruptible characteristics make it blind to the local, changing aspects of vernacular languages. Furthermore, Dante, unlike Trevisa, argues that as an elite literate discourse, written Latin commentary is accessible to fewer readers than is a vernacular commentary. Dante’s unusual justification for writing poetry as well as poetic commentary in the vernacular simultaneously deploys and displaces Latin language ideology. Dante proposes an alternative vernacular grammatical model in place of the traditional Latin model whereby Latin poetry is construed, glossed, and interpreted in Latin grammatical discourse. But Dante’s anxiety about mixing Latin and the vernacular foregrounds the tension between material literate culture and the imagined relationship between primary and secondary writing, writing in the centre and in the margins of the page. Dante’s master/servant trope for linguistic status in Convivio complicates and destabilizes his notions of reading and writing practices. In the middle of the page, the canzoni occupy, literally and figuratively, the primary textual position, whereas the commentary to the poems is regarded as secondary or subordinate. This is hardly a surprising position for any medieval or modern commentator to take with respect to text and textual commentary. But Dante’s writing and text composition are haunted by the authority of Latin language ideology. Where Latin is inscribed is part of its status as a dominant language. Dante fears that displacing Latin discourse to the textual margins would subvert Latin’s privileged temporal and cultural position and that Latin commentary to his poems would overtake them but not be adequate to them. So Dante uses manuscript textuality to argue for maintaining Latin’s ideological priority by not writing vernacular poetic commentary in Latin. Rather than shift Latin writing to a textually subordinate position, Dante refuses to use Latin at all in Convivio, even though he acknowledges that Latin, the language best suited to complex thinking, could clarify the canzoni’s poetic structures, allusions, tropes, contexts, and pro­fun­dior senses. Dante treats different languages as extensions of two writing/subject positions, auctor and commentator. Thus, his vernacular canzoni structure manuscript space and textuality so that if Latin were to appear in Convivio, it would force the poet to risk having the commentary (part of Secondary Discourse) overtake his poems (located between Primary and Secondary Discourse). Furthermore, if Latin were inscribed as marginal commentary to vernacular poems, the Latin gloss would diminish Latin’s authority in manuscript space. Language ideology is embedded in material textual practice. In Convivio, Dante projected his conflict with his various roles

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as auctor and commentator onto the manuscript page and into the structural hierarchy, authority, and linguistic forms of text space. The twelfth-century development of the authoritative glosae on scripture and canon law established the principal features of the glossed page, but the abilities and status of those who read the glossed page were controversial. The glossed page presents a heterogenous text with multiple points of entry. Heavily glossed texts demanded different kinds of textual competence. In Paris in the 1130s, Robert of Melun criticized university ‘masters of the glosses — for this is the name they have known’ because they lack understanding of the glosses as much as of their text, even though they can distinguish glosses and divide them with full stops and assign a gloss to the text to which it belongs (per puncta dividere ac cuique textui queque subserviat assignare).

While university teachers may be able to distinguish glosses syntactically and con­nect glosses and lemmas (basic skills of reading a glossed manuscript page), they don’t understand the meaning of the text to which the glosses are added, even though they are supposed to be expert, deep readers (‘magistri’). In part, Robert was responding to public readings of Abelard’s Theologia and to what he perceived as a textual world turned upside down, but his criticisms were directed more to the glossators responsible for the Glossa ordinaria, who Robert claimed made glosses more important than scripture: For there [among the Paris masters] the text (textus) is spurned, the gloss is wor­ shipped with devout veneration, the text is read for the gloss and the gloss not explained for sake of the text (Nam ibi textus spernitur, glosa cum devota veneratione colitur, textus propter glos­am legitur et non glosa causa textus exponitur).97

Robert defined reading competence as being able to understand and discuss the Sentences without the aid of glosses. Glosses, he argued, detract from close reading and understanding. Like Dante, Robert worried about the consequences when educated readers used ‘modern’ academic literacy and textual tools to shape their reading. Nonetheless, Robert provided in the text of his commentary on the Sentences an elaborate table of contents, topical subheadings and other hyper­ literate apparatus which facilitated a kind of skipping reading whereby glosses became equal to the primary text (Scripture or Peter Lombard’s Sentences). 97 

Robert of Melun, Sententie, 1:10–12, in Robert de Melun, Œuvres, ed. by Martin, iii/1, quoted in Mews, ‘Orality, Literacy and Authority’, p. 498, nn. 54–55.

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Both Abelard and Robert assume that medieval manuscript glossing was first of all a kind of writing, a textual practice. Glossing was sometimes inscribed at the time of composing or arranging the original text, but more often it was performed by readers temporally, historically, and physically distant from a text’s initial instantiation. Among modern theorists of textuality, many aspects of Barthes’s theory of writing (écriture) as multivoiced textuality resonate with the material and conceptual structure of medieval glossed manuscripts and glossing discourse (glosso­graphy). Barthes contrasts the concept of the ‘Author’ as centre and source of meaning in the text with the ‘modern scriptor’, ‘born simultaneously with the text’: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ mean­ ing (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.98

Manuscript glossing enacts Barthesian textuality as writing itself in ‘multi­dim­ en­sional space’, with gaps, erasures, multiply-authored or multiply-written juxta­ positions, additions, textual frames, illuminations, rubrications, punctuation, historical interventions, and so on. Glosses fulfilled different textual functions: lexical definition, syntactic rela­tions, annotations, commentary, or citationality. Using layout, glosses, and markup features, the hyperliterate apparatus and arrangement of medieval glossed manuscripts establish multimodal, frequently multilingual textual spaces and reading situations. Glosses were often linked to the principal text with coloured inks, underlining, repeated keywords, and annotating symbols (forerunners of the modern footnote). For example, a twelfth-century glossed manuscript of Statius’s Achilleis includes both interlinear glosses and marginal glosses shaped in inverted triangles and edged in red or green to set them off from the poetic text. Individual glosses are keyed to the principal text with alphabetic and non-alphabetic symbols (.i., Ø, f, 8, e, •, ◊, ∫).99 The interactions of multiple writers and readers (or writing and reading functions) in and with a text over time rendered the manuscript page an unstable, layered textual field. Different writing and reading strategies interacted, supported one another or contested 98 

Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Barthes, Image‒Music‒Text, trans. by Heath, pp. 142– 48 (pp. 145, 146); see Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Barthes, Image‒Music‒Text, trans. by Heath, pp. 155–64. On Barthes’ theoretical ‘medievalisms’, see now Holsinger, The Premodern Condition, pp. 152–94. 99  Oxford, Lincoln College, MS 27, fols 62ra–84va; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, i, 32–35.

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for authority and interpretive control, as Baswell has carefully described in the historical layering of glosses in English manuscripts of Virgil.100 Medieval manuscript culture and textualities rewrite poststructural textual theory before the letter by foregrounding the dynamic relation between material and ideational ‘text’, between page and text. Rather than being autonomous, writing in the gaps, margins, and interstices of manuscripts actually produces new gaps, margins, and edges of intertextuality.101 Glossography is multilingual writing. Many medieval manuscripts, with hyperliterate page layout and multiple levels of writing, also problematize Barthes’s notion that the reader or listener, the destination, replaces the author as the controlling unity of the text.102 A reader of a glossed text in a multilingual manuscript represents a much more heterogeneous ‘destination’ than even Barthes might allow. In the early Middle Ages, glosses, mostly in Latin, provided etymologies and lexical definitions, translations, com­ mentary, and sometimes syntactic information. After 1100, glossing moved from interlinear to mostly marginal locations, while vernacular glosses indicate the dynamics of bilingual or trilingual speech and literate situations. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore other uses of Latin as marginal or interlinear glossing, ‘marginal Latin’, that is, Latin as the sort of Secondary Discourse Dante refused to provide for his vernacular poems in Convivio because it threatened Latin language ideology. Studies of medieval glossing and glossed manuscripts do not usually address the role of Latin in annotating strategies nor how glosses often produced unruly Latin discourses, hybrid or creole Latins in the margins. Many medieval manuscript glosses reveal more than just readers’ responses. They are part of the ongoing questioning of Latin language ideology in the later Middle Ages. In Convivio, Dante was concerned with Latin in the margins as commentum rather than glosa, but the question of marginal Latin is relevant to both literate strategies. Some medieval writers and text theorists distinguished glosa from other kinds of utterances in manuscript texts. In the twelfth century, Hugh of St Victor in his Didascalicon contrasted glosa, which clarifies the textual or grammatical littera, with commentum, which elaborates a text’s profundior intelligentia.103 Hugh left sensus, reading and interpreting the literal, ‘obvious’ meaning of the text, ambiguously resting somewhere between surface syntax 100 

Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 41–83, 136–67. See Wieland, The Latin Glosses; Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly; Hunt, Teaching and Learn­ing Latin, i, 3–55; Camille, Image on the Edge; Camille, Mirror in Parchment; Huot, ‘The Romance of the Rose’; Bryan, Collaborative Meaning. 102  Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in Barthes, Image‒Music‒Text, trans. by Heath, p. 148. 103  Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, bk 3, chap. 9 (LLT, p. 58, ll. 16–19). 101 

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and deeper meaning. Guillaume de Conches distinguished glosa, marginal and inter­linear annotations which help readers construe syntax (continuatio) and basic meaning (expositio litterae), from sententia, which encodes deeper, more profound textual meaning.104 Modern scholars such as Carruthers and Baswell follow Hugh and Guillaume’s lead and identify glosa as ‘pedagogical’ and commentum as ‘interpretive’ discourse.105 Using these labels, they privilege interpretive over pedagogical glossography, commentum over glosa. But Latin gloss and commentary, the pedagogical and the interpretive, are not so clearly disentangled in medieval glossed texts. With respect to Latin language ideology, the key question is, how was Latin used in marginal discourses by different readers and writers within literate culture? Scholars have unpacked some of the complexities and sophistication of medieval glossing strategies.106 Dante’s anxiety over marginalizing Latin in a manuscript with vernacular poetry was at odds with the pervasive use of both Latin and vernacular glosses in many different kinds of late medieval texts. The medieval glossed page is ubiquitous, from formal manuscripts which compile the Bible or the Aeneid with authoritative commentary to manuscripts of Horace’s Satires, Laȝamon’s Brut, and the Canterbury Tales which contain several layers of individual readers’ annotations or teacher’s notes. Learned writers, commentators, and teachers used written Latin to control or guide reading or to reinforce language ideology and clerical authority among both clerical and lay readers. Other readers and commentators used Latin glosses to disassemble and reorganize the manuscript layout according to different interpretive interests or to comment on a text or to clarify its intertextual sources and contexts. That is, Latin glossing could serve multiple, sometimes conflicting purposes or literate practices within the same text. Latin usage varied among glossators, further differencing Latin language ideology in textual practice. Taking glosses as textual enunciations, we find that post-1100 writers, scribes, annotators, and readers used glosses in various code­ mixing and language mixing ways. There are Latin glosses to Latin or vernacular 104 

Guillaume de Conches, Glosae super Platonem, ed. by Jeauneau, pp. 57, 67. For example, Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 12. 106  For example, for the early Middle Ages, see Schwarz, ‘Glossen als Texte’; Page, ‘The Study of Latin Texts’; Lapidge, ‘The Study of Latin Texts’; Wieland, The Latin Glosses; Wieland, ‘Interpreting the Interpretation’; Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse, pp. 108–18; Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly; Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture; for the later Middle Ages, see Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, i, 3–55; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 41– 167; Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 73–120. 105 

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texts, vernacular glosses to Latin or vernacular texts, and mixed language glosses and texts.107 Several English manuscripts of Virgil’s Aeneid include layers of glosses and annotations in Latin and English which situate Virgil’s epic in fourteenth-century political and ethical debates. Twelfth-century manuscripts of Horace’s Satires for classroom teachers and individual readers glossed with Latin and vernacular annotations and commentary reveal the annotators’ use of Latin poetry for grammatical as well as ethico-rhetorical instruction. Tony Hunt has assembled a wide array of vernacular (Anglo-Norman, Old French, and early Middle English) and Latin glosses of school and other texts for Latin instruction and household use in thirteenth-century England.108 These and other studies show the extensive dissemination of knowledge of Latin texts and hypertextual discourse among lay and clerical readers in the later Middle Ages. Latin glossing is textual performance which alters the status of Latin as grammar. Wieland identifies four functions of manuscript glosses: authoritative trans­ lations or interpretations (lexical definition, translatio, interpretatio); keys to prosody; notes to help readers construe syntax and grammaticality; brief com­mentary. Stork sorts glosses in an Aldhelm manuscript into six semantic categories: word glosses, commentary (including etymologies), quia glosses (rationales), source glosses, ‘interpretative’ glosses, and encyclopedic glosses. 109 In addition to these semantic and pronunciation functions, we find in post-1000 manuscripts other marginal and interlinear Latin glosses which guide readers to read a text discontinuously (devotional regimes, text divisions, indexing) or provide citations and sources for the object text (citationality) or add counter­ commentary and reader responses to the object text (for example, Latin glosses by fifteenth-century readers of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue). As marginal text, Latin glossing could seize the glosa’s institutional and cultural authority and control, explain, or validate the text in the middle of the page; conversely, Latin glossing could displace or counter the principal text and establish different reading contexts. Latin was variously deployed in glossography as a regulating or unruly literate practice. Michel de Marbais’s mixtus grammaticus interrupts language ideology. Multilingual glossing and annotating were marginal textual practices within mixta Latina, complex literate activities of intersentential, intrasentential, and hyperliterate codemixing. 107 

See Rothwell, ‘From Latin to Anglo-French’. See Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 146–49; London, British Library, MS Additional 27304 and the glossator’s Norwich emphasis, in Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 136– 67; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, ii. 109  Wieland, The Latin Glosses, passim; Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly, pp. 54–69. 108 

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The glossed or illustrated medieval text is a key aspect of the hypertextual organization of the manuscript page, which Michael Camille theorizes as pre­ modern modernity’s ‘regime of signs’ ‘producing, not reflecting, reality’.110 Here, I focus on mostly verbal marginal writing and page arrangement, although as Camille reminds us, medieval writing, whether centre page or marginal often entail visual as well as verbal signifiers and codes.111 Keeping in mind twelfthcentury Victorine concepts of textuality and the scholastic distinction between forma tractatus and forma tractandi, we can sharpen our understanding of a text as both a dynamic object and an experience by distinguishing between page space and text space in reading practices.112 The two are not really opposed to one another; rather, the page in a sense ‘presents’ the text. Glosses and other hyper­literate markers (rubricated or engrossed letters, illustrations, citations) can be said to occupy simultaneously page space and text space. Glosses and commentary inscribed interlinearly or marginally are also ‘text’ on the page. As we have seen, the hyperliteracy of medieval textuality includes various Latin or vernacular textual markers which structure writing on the page as part of scribal or authorial composition or part of readers’ negotiations of the text. Twelfthcentury literate innovations — greater use of incipits and explicits, running titles, chapter and verse divisions, illuminated capitals to mark sections, interlinear and marginal glosses (whether ad hoc or integrated with the text) — present readers with a multi-authored, multi-tiered textuality, whose materiality is the condition and site of interpretive intertextualities.113 Derrida’s theory of the parergon addresses the question of what functions glossing as writing might perform and how glossing structures different kinds of reading, especially discontinuous reading: A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation, from a certain outside. Neither simply outside nor simply inside. Like an accessory that one is obliged to welcome on the border, on board (au bord, à bord). It is first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er) (Il est d’abord l’à-bord).114

110 

Camille, Mirror in Parchment, p. 46. Camille, ‘Seeing and Reading’; Camille, Image on the Edge, pp. 11–55. 112  See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship; Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, pp. 97–101. 113  See Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons. 114  Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. by Bennington and McLeod, p. 54. 111 

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Glossing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Derrida notes that in the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle had cautioned that the parergon should never overtake or dominate the ergon, that first principles and what is essential should always in­ habit the primary position. As we have seen, Dante similarly worried that Latin’s status as grammatica and authoritative discourse was threatened when it was used in the parergon. Unlike Dante and Kant, Derrida reads the parergon as the necessary supplement, the framing, the ‘philosophical quasi-concept’ which is rule-governed but unruly. The parergon can affirm, reform, or deform a predicate structure or text into other fields. As a necessary supplement (retext), the parergon in the margin defines the centre of a concept, domain, or text. Some Latin glosses, written by scribes, authors, or more often compilers, guide, control, or reorder how a text might be read and provide textual markers so that readers might more easily skip around in the text using predetermined topics or categories. Abelard deployed a similar strategy to compose Sic et non. Some scribes or later readers of manuscripts foregrounded the devotional structure or the speakers in vernacular texts by inscribing notations in the margins. Books of hours included marginal Latin tags to indicate the liturgical contexts for prayers and devotions. The ‘Commonplace Book’ of the Franciscan friar John Grimestone is a compilation of sermon materials, Latin lyrics, and narratives arranged alphabetically by topic (‘De Abstinencia’, etc.), together with some English texts, phrases, and annotations. Grimestone’s preaching aid also includes a table of contents. The margins are filled with Latin annotations and topical glosses to help Grimestone and later readers skip around in the text and locate specific materials for devotional reading, sermons, and exempla.115 Grimestone copied the English lyric ‘The Hours of the Cross’ into his book and added in the margins Latin references to the liturgical horae (‘Hora matutinalis’, Hora prima’, etc.). He noted the interlocutors Ihesus and Maria in the margins of ‘Dialogue between Jesus and the B.V. at the Cross’.116 Deploying scholastic hyperliterate markings, Grimestone’s Latin glosses and topical apparatus in manuscript space shape, but do not determine, readers’ experiences of the lyrics by fitting individual vernacular poems into a set of moral and devotional categories. Other examples of marginal Latin glosses provide different indices for dis­ continuous reading. A mid-fourteenth-century English translation of the hymn 115 

National Library of Scotland, Advocates Lib., MS 18. 7. 21 (c. 1372). Friar Nicholas de Roma and William Broin (‘quem dues amat et deabolus odit’) are identified as owners/readers, probably at different times, in the manuscript (fols 9v, 108v). See Religious Lyrics, ed. by Brown, pp. xvi–xviii. 116  Fols 2v, 121r, col. 2; in Religious Lyrics, ed. by Brown, pp. 69–70, 85–86.

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‘Veni creator spiritus’ includes in the margins the Latin version of the first line of each stanza.117 In a thirteenth-century manuscript of Laȝamon’s Brut, the scribe and early readers wrote in marginal Latin glosses the Latin or Briton names of British and English kings (for example, ‘Rex Coel’). Some scribes/readers added nota markings and other thematic annotations to highlight key figures in the political genealogy and providential narrative which Brut represents.118 In the two centuries after the manuscript was composed, other readers added more royal names in the margins to index the poem. These glosses occur in four clusters in the manuscript, suggesting a particular emphasis or thematic interest on the part of one or more readers. Fifteenth-century manuscripts of English and French plays (for example, Macro plays) regularly mark stage directions and identify characters with marginal annotations in vernacular, Latin, or Latin+vernacular (intersentential codeswitching) phrases. The Latin marginal glosses, derived from earlier scholastic hyperliterate marking of classroom texts, use simple formulaic syntax and vocabulary to facilitate stage production or discontinuous reading and help readers memorize and recover key passages of a text. Marginal Latin glosses are authoritative metatextual or performative commentary discourse. A third glossing function, one perhaps most familiar to modern readers of scholarly texts, provides authoritative translations and lexical interpretations. As the authoritative language for metacommentary, Latin’s central role in medieval language ideology is clearly displayed when Latin is used in the margins to frame vernacular translations and lexical interpretations, textual supplements. However, Latin and vernacular glossing could also subvert dominant language ideology by presenting hybrid or mixed code utterances rather than monolingual utterances. Typically, a Latin text received marginal or interlinear vernacular glosses to translate key words or, as in a manuscript (c. 1050–1100) of Ælfric’s bilingual Grammar and Glossary, glosses by different hands provided Anglo-Norman equivalents of Latin paradigms: ‘amo: jo aim / amas: tu aimes’.119 In the Ælfric manuscript, the glosses translate not word for word but grammatical paradigm for grammatical paradigm. However, many medieval Latin school texts (grammars, Disticha Catonis, Horace, Statius, etc.) were annotated with Latin glosses which included vernacular translations. That is, the gloss itself is multilingual; Latin 117 

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 425, fol. 93r–v, in Religious Lyrics, ed. by Brown, pp. 57–58. 118  London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C. xiii; Bryan, Collaborative Meaning, pp. 117–28. 119  London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina A. x; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, i, 100–01.

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glossing discourse frames the intrasentential mixing of two or more languages within a single gloss text on the manuscript page. Consider the intrasentential codemixing in interlinear glosses in some English manuscripts. In a thirteenth-century grammatical manuscript containing works by John of Garland, Alexander Neckham, Eberhard de Bethune, and Alexander de Villedieu, we find: ‘turtur: gallice turbot’, ‘crupe de equo’, ‘biblus: gallice bible’, ‘forceps: scisurs’, ‘mandibula: anglice chanil’, ‘largior: je done, je su dune’.120 Some of these glosses mark in Latin the language of translation, others simply juxtapose words in different languages. Other thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English manuscripts deploy trilingual glosses, such as ‘lactis: letense, anglice makcroune’ or ‘cos: cheuz, anglice weston’.121 Most glosses in these manuscripts do not use common Latin glossing formulae (such as dicitur, interpretatur, id est). Rather, as parerga, the glosses frame the lemmas by visually juxtaposing words or by linking lemma and gloss with a language label (anglice, gallice) or icon. These Latin language categories identify not so much different languages as different registers within the multilingual discourse community of thirteenth-century England. Glosses establish different marginal discourses within the text, constituting a multi­lingual textual semiotics. In the Dublin grammatical manuscript, glosses on forceps and largior are Latin-to-English vernacular translations, reader’s notes that overwrite the Latin word (hypotext) with a more familiar English one (retext). The largior gloss also reveals grammatical subject raising (je done) required by the French translation and the difference between Latin and French verb inflections. The biblus, crupe, mandibula, lactis, and cos glosses in these two manuscripts deploy Latin language ideology as authoritative discourse by creating a particular kind of parergon, a metalinguistic hinge. The Latin lemmas biblus, mandibula, lactis, and cos are rewritten in the margins in a Latin translation discourse (‘gallice’, ‘anglice’) which identifies the linguistic domain governing the Latin word in translation. The crupe gloss simply translates Latin for Latin. Other glosses link lemma and translation with nota or notate hinges. The multilingual gloss on cos combines spatial juxtaposition with metalinguistic hinging. As metadiscourse, Latin glossing uses spatial signs or metalinguistic labels to create reading hinges, borders between the Latin text and the vernacular translation. Glossators and multilingual readers use Latin metacognitively to identify their specific vernacular context (‘gallice’, ‘anglice’) for reading the Latin text. While none of these Latin 120  Dublin, Trinity College, MS 270 (thirteenth century); Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, ii, 16–17. 121  Durham, Durham Cathedral Library, MS C. vi. 26 (1250–1300); Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, ii, 16.

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usages is syntactically or lexically complex, they are cultural signifiers, literate markers of multilingual reading positions and codemixing practices. These Latin inter­linear or marginal glosses, part of the manuscript parerga and metalinguistic hinges, create linguistic borders and new multilingual texts with other borders. Latin glossography is a literate technology which creates open multilingual textuality in manuscript margins, even if that was not the glossators’ or readers’ intention. A fourth use of Latin as authoritative yet marginal discourse occurs in syntactic or construal glosses of Latin writing. Interlinear syntactic exegesis and glosses were a staple of grammatical and pedagogical commentaries at least since Roman Imperial times.122 Often, readers and glossators wrote individual letters, numbers, or icons above the text to indicate the syntactic order, usually ‘natural’ SVO word order, of a passage or grammatical relations. After 1070–75, scribes and readers began using the syllables of the Latin metalinguistic term for grammaticality, ordo, to show agreement or grammatical relations in syntactically complex Latin texts and to translate Latin syntax from ordo artificialis to ordo naturalis. Reynolds believes these glosses were pedagogical devices intended primarily for Latin learners.123 That Reynolds’s examples appear in school manuscripts containing Latin poetry suggests a pedagogical context, but there is no reason to presume such glosses were intended only for beginning readers nor only as pedagogical discourse. Teaching people to read and helping people read or read competently are not the same thing. Using the OR-DO glosses, a reader can reorder the Latin syntax (ordo artificalis) of Ovid, Horace, Statius, Theodulus, and other canonical writers and then construe the sentences as ordo naturalis, typically SVO. Or marks the first part of a construction (for example, subject NP), do the second (for example, verb or VP). Construing the NP+VP produced written ‘ordo’, congruent, meaningful utterance. Some OR-DO glosses indicated the head subject noun and head verb, while others marked dependent clause relations or other syntactic structures. OR-DO glosses are tied to Latin constructions as authoritative yet secondary, artificial language, but they instantiate an active, marker model of literacy, writing on and into the text. Given the SOV structure of much Latin writing and the syntactic variation in Latin poetic style, OR-DO glosses metalinguistically frame the sentence within a bilingual reader’s comprehension. The Latin poetic text is marked as linguistically 122  See, for example, Ruff, ‘Misunderstood Rhetorico-Syntactical Glosses’; Robinson, ‘Syntactical Glosses’; Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 88–120; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 50, 54, 68; Kihlman, Expositiones sequentiarum, p. 188. 123  Reynolds, Medieval Reading, p. 119.

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unnatural (‘ordo artificalis’), while Latin glosses in the manuscript margin or interlinear space provide mediating marginal (interlinear) graphemes which enable the reader to rewrite the sentence as ordo naturalis, that is, to construe or translate the sentence in natural vernacular syntax. In OR-DO glosses, marginal Latin is materially differentiated on the page and in the vernacular translator/ reader’s multilingual negotiation of the Latin text framed within the manuscript page. Reynolds, inferring reading strategies from glossing strategies, believes that the ordo naturalis glosses grow out of a sense of difference between the plain and correct (recte) nature of the language of commentary and exposition, and the ornate or crafted (bene) language of rhetorical composition […]. But when grammatica does its work by glossing the auctor’s text, and particularly when it starts to address stylistic issues of word order and figuration, this division is increasingly hard to sustain.124

As I have argued, the distinction between ordo naturalis and ordo artificialis is further complicated by readerly differences and intersections of manuscript space and textual space, manuscript technologies which actually destabilize Latin lan­ guage ideology. Latin grammaticality is authoritative and primary, yet also arti­ ficial or crafted, that is, secondary. Latin grammar is a divided discourse: or-do. OR-DO glosses and other syntactic glosses in post-1150 manuscripts of classical texts suggest how Latin discourse in the margins, literally on the margins of the page but also marginal in Dante’s sense of being subordinate (that is, a reading aid) to the ‘primary’ vernacular text, are not on a par discursively with Latin discourse in the middle of the page. As marginal discourse, Latin utterances signify not only referentially but also by their textual position on the page and in their relations to other elements of the text. OR-DO glosses materially extend the signification of Latin discourse even further. The syllables of the metalinguistic term ordo were divided on the page and redistributed as a metacognitive reading strategy. Through writing, the grammatical term was reproduced and semantically remotivated to designate syntactic elements and the grammatical connections between them. Thus, the grammatical theory of ordo was inscribed on the page, not as isolated nonsense syllables but as hyperreading indices in the manuscript apparatus keyed to readers’ ordo naturalis. OR-DO glosses are part of the material as well as ideational text. They constitute official Latin discourse in manuscript margins, along with layout notations (incipits, explicits, headings, verse markers and numbering), coloura­ tion, illuminated letters, icons for connecting lemma and gloss, and other hyper­ 124 

Reynolds, Medieval Reading, p. 120.

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textual markup. OR-DO glosses use linguistic marking (Latin grammatical metalanguage) to inscribe and guide grammatical competence into manuscript space. Thus, the Latin of the OR-DO glosses signifies differently than does Latin used in textual space. Latin OR-DO glosses mark a double space of translation, at once material and textual, and identify readers’ vernacular syntax as natural. As translation nodes, OR-DO glosses reverse the flow of ideological power in the structural relation between Latin and the vernacular. The glosses deconstruct Latin’s authority by deploying and then redirecting the name of grammaticality itself (ordo) to identify the vernacular as ‘natural’, thus completing the transference of Latin meaning (trans+latio) into the vernacular. Metalinguistic marginal Latin produces a visible performative mediation, a written hinge — the parergon — linking reader and manuscript text, one linguistic subject and another. Latin glossing is a complex kind of literate intervention, writing on and into the text. A fifth function of marginal Latin glossing identifies a text’s citations, contexts, allusions, and themes, either those intended by the writer or those produced by readers’ experiences and interests. Readers and annotators also used such authoritative Latin citational glosses to rewrite manuscript arrangement, assist readers in memorizing passages, and read a text discontinuously. For example, a fifteenth-century English text on the legitimacy of images quotes a Latin passage from a ‘wrshipful doctour in his book’ (Wyclif ) and then attaches a Latin citational gloss in the margin, ‘Oxon libro de mandatis mandato primo capitulo primo’, an explicit reference to Wyclif ’s De mandatis, I. 1.125 In itself, the citational gloss does not indicate whether the scribe or reader sympathizes or disagrees with Wyclif ’s argument regarding images. But with respect to Latin language ideology, what’s important here is the form of the marginal gloss and its placement on the page. The gloss indexes a reader familiar with academic citational formulae. The inscription of the scholastic textual citation system (li brary+title+chapter+subsection) into the margin of a vernacular religious text quoting a Latin text gives the passage a hyperliterate legitimacy derived from Latin language ideology and academic literacy. The detailed Latin annotation posits a learned reader engaging with a vernacular religious text and creating in the margin a hypertextual hinge between two literate cultures, the scholastic and the dissenting. A sixth function of marginal and interlinear Latin glossing is to rebut or qualify the argument in a text or provide a countercommentary. Latin glosses added to vernacular texts implicitly evoke Latin language ideology in the margins to 125 

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. th. fol. 39, fol. 7v, reproduced in Heresy and Literacy, ed. by Biller and Hudson, frontispiece.

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control readers’ interpretations of a text or to contain the text itself. Such glosses presuppose multilingual reading audience, but in fact they may only interpellate a portion of the text’s actual readership. These Latin glosses in vernacular texts are overt parerga, deliberately touching on or intervening in the object text and seizing, marking, and retexting the language of the object text as insufficient, problematic, or troubling. Selective Latin glossography not only can encode readers’ responses to texts; it also can be used to frame or overwrite the vernacular text. But medieval glossing, rather than being definitive and dominant to the ‘centre’ text, often materially and pragmatically reinforces the concept of ‘open’ manuscript textuality. For example, one of the most heavily glossed sections of the Canterbury Tales, along with the Man of Law’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee, is the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. In Ellesmere (San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9) and other early manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the Wife’s Middle English discourse is annotated with numerous marginal Latin citations or tags (e.g. ‘In Cana Galilee’ ( John 2. 1), ‘Crescite et multiplicamini’ (Genesis 1. 28)), quotations from Jerome or other sources, or a scribe or reader’s judgment (for example, Cambridge University Library, MS Cambridge Dd, on women’s swearing: ‘Verum est’).126 Different sets of glosses in different manuscripts reflect a pro- or anti-Wife stance. In Ellesmere, each Latin gloss in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue floats in the margin, marked with a blue or red rubric similar to the section rubrics in the Prologue text. The glosses look like the main text but are in a smaller-size script and are unmistakable as glosses because of how they appear to be separate bits of text on the page. Rather than providing citational context, as in the Wyclif text, many of these Latin glosses to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue complete or make explicit the Wife’s references to scripture and Patristic commentary, without necessarily supporting or correcting her argument, while others seek to refute or contain the Wife’s use of scripture. Sometimes, these supplementing glosses read as if the glossator is some medieval Dan Quayle disputing directly with a 126  See Caie, ‘The Significance of the Early Chaucer Manuscript’; Caie, ‘The Significance of Marginal Glosses’; Caie, ‘The Manuscript Experience’; Schibanoff, ‘The New Reader’; Tinkle, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Marginal Authority’. Some of the Wife’s citations which Caie regards as hazy, distorted, or ‘selective’ are in fact consistent with medieval strategies for scriptural citation. Going further than Schibanoff, Caie has argued that most of the Latin glosses in the early manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are authorial and therefore integral to the original work, but he does not propose a theory of multivoiced textuality adequate to multilingualism and citationality on the page. If Chaucer glossed his vernacular text in Latin, the author’s role is dispersed among different languages, discourses, and subject positions — Chaucer as a protoNabokovian?

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fictional female character. Supplementary glossography opens rather than closes down manuscript texts. These six types of Latin glossography are active parts of a complex multilingual literate technology. Readers and scribes place Latin words, phrases, and tags in the textual margins to discipline and divide discourse, construct vernacular or Latin hinges as translations, identify speakers in the vernacular poem or the devotional regime, clarify the proper source for a citation or authority, summarize a textual theme or, in the case of the Wife of Bath and Dido in the Aeneid, write back to fictional female speakers. However brief or abbreviated or conventional, marginal Latin in manuscript space deploys Latin and linguistic otherness in subordinate textual positions in order to inscribe Latin’s discursive power, literate authority, or metacognitive grammaticality. Contrary to Bonaventure and Hugh of St Victor, the textual work of glosses is not restricted to the littera but is disseminated throughout discourse. As parergon, marginal Latin touches the grammar, arrange­ment, semantics, and readings contexts of manuscript textuality. The glossed page is semiotically configured as a multimodal, multilingual assemblage, a hypertextual ‘regime of signs’ which different readers can negotiate, assent to, reconstitute, resist, or simply skip over in different reading performances. Latin glosses construct marginal utterances within texts and create further margins, hinges, in the manuscript text. Marginal glosses are supplements which can be read as open texts, new textual spaces, which themselves become primary utterances in the ideological and cultural work of manuscript production and hyperliterate reading. Marginal Latin is discursively ambiguous. It reproduces, deconstructs, or resists Latin’s traditional ideological authority in multilingual, codemixing contexts. Marginal Latin displaces the authority of auctor, scriptor, commentator, or grammatica to the edges and interstices of texts. Inverting Dante’s anxiety, marginal Latins manifest the power of parerga and retexting as kinds of writing in other places within multilingual speech communities.

Chapter 3

Affective Literacies Here, all affection is accidental. ( Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’) I ’ve thought of you in far-off places. I ’ve puzzled over lipstick traces. (The Pogues, ‘Lorelei’)

L

iteracies are always situated and socially constructed. Brian Street, in his study of cross-cultural literacies, argues that literacy ‘is more than just the “technology” in which it is manifest. No one material feature serves to define literacy. It is a social process, in which particular socially constructed technologies are used within particular institutional frameworks for specific social purposes.’1 Street contrasts the technological determinism of Great Divide literacy theories (Street’s ‘autonomous literacy’) with the marker model’s (‘ideological literacy’) critical attention to literacies as social activities framed within institutions and practices. Alphabetization or inscription cannot in themselves account for literate consciousness. But too often, Great Divide theories and even some Social Interaction theories such as Street’s skip past the embodied force of literacies as performative activities. Literacies are enacted in the present by performing bodies and knowing subjects in social and textual spaces. In this chapter, I explore how later medieval readers embodied normative, institutional, and counterhegemonic literacies in performative ways and contexts. Medieval reading practices and ideas about reading occurred not only within a network of technologies and textualities but also as part of a semiotic matrix of acts and bodies. Writing and reading practices create a cross-matrix of embodied technologies. Quills, styluses, brushes, printing presses, pages, page layout, codices, keyboards, and display screens are malleable technologies. Different lit­ 1 

Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, p. 97.

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eracies can deploy the same technologies in different, sometimes contesting ways as part of devotion, political action, or entertainment. Literate technologies and immediate reading contexts are not instrumental cognition, but the material situations and experiential contexts for shaping literate activity as meaningful. Literate power and authority are challenged and retexted in those gestures of reading, verbal and visual representations of reading and performance which do not fully cooperate with dominant literate ideology. Somatic technologies are key parts of literate practice and political and ideological struggle in medieval literacy. Looking more closely at the politics and counterpolitics of bodies, acts, and objects in medieval reading and writing, we can begin to recognize and revalue alternative kinds of reading and transgressive literate agency. Gestures of medieval reading and representations of those gestures in medi­ eval texts reflect the physical, somatic interplay between readers and texts and mark where the borders of bodies and texts were transgressed or maintained in reading practices. Readers traverse a space, coordinating eyes and voice when reading aloud, running fingers or hands across the page to note words and lines, gesturing with hands or eyes or bodies while reading aloud, articulating phonemes, morphemes, and syllables clearly and expressively or rapidly running them together or slurring and omitting them with lips, tongue, and voice. Some of these performative techniques were anxiously cultivated and regulated throughout the Middle Ages, others were proscribed. Together, they functioned within a semiotic space of socially constructed, mediated textuality, performance, and affect. Certain gestures toward the text — kissing the page or, conversely, not touching the page, moving one’s body (or not) when reading — indicate how later medieval reading gestures and behaviours could challenge norms of acceptable reading or blur the edges between orthodox and heterodox literacies. Sometimes, the reading gesture itself was transgressive, as when reading silently was regarded with suspicion. More often, the person performing the gesture or their status (lay person, woman) was considered transgressive. These acts and their interpretations are all produced within literate ideology, just as monolingualism signifies precisely by what it is not, multilingualism. It is important to emphasize this because literacy studies often focus on cognition, interpretation, and exegesis in reading, but pay less attention to depictions of, anxieties about, and endorsements of ‘affective literacy’. I use the term ‘affective literacy’ here to describe how we develop physical, somatic, and/or activity-based relationships with texts as part of our reading experiences. We touch, sense, or perceive the text or vocalize it with our eyes, hands, and mouths. Affective literacy also involves the emotive, noncognitive, paralinguistic things we do with texts or to texts during the act of reading —

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for example, when a pious reader touches or kisses a prayer book in a particular way. Stephen Nichols refers to the ‘manuscript matrix’ to indicate how medieval handmade books ‘contain different systems of representation’, including various textual modules, illuminations, rubrication, script, and so forth. 2 Nonetheless, Nichols focuses primarily on the book as a discrete object to be interpreted. Adopting Nichols’s concept of the ‘manuscript matrix’, Martha Rust gets closer to the notion of affective literacy when she extends the concept to include readers’ cognitive and affective interactions with the page, especially ‘involved reading’ and ‘double [verbal, visual] literacy’.3 Robert Mills, working in a Deleuzean way mostly with manuscript images rather than verbal text, offers a persuasive reading of medieval and contemporary responses to and appropriations of depictions of pain, punishment, martyrdom and torture in medieval devotional images.4 Here, I am using the term affective literacy to denote a range of emotional, spiritual, physiological, somatic responses readers have when reading or perceiving a text, such as crying, laughing, imagining, or becoming aroused. Affective literacy also entails the temporality and traces of reading, reading as marking which then transforms the book’s material ‘object-ness’ and produces a variant object for later readers. While the idea of affective literacy is associated with late medieval affective piety, affective reading was not entirely delimited by religious or devotional experiences. In medieval theories of the mind, affectus referred to the emotional and experiential (feeling) aspects of knowing, whereas intellectus, ratio, or cogitatio referred to cognitive or reasoned knowing. Heart vs head. But as we shall see, things were, and are, more complicated, more fluid, more embodied, than that. Affective literacy names the life principle, messy and complex, threading through various reading activities — the phrase gestures toward bodily economies of reading and transacting texts. These activities and affects signify how some writers, readers, and reading groups in the late Middle Ages acquired literate power by transgressing or disrupting traditional, orthodox literacy frameworks organized around clerical exegesis and authority. Affective literacy marks the semiotic space within which literacy as ideological practice was recoded as performative reading and ‘extensive’ textuality beyond the page. Affective literacy challenges those ideologies of reading, in the Middle Ages and in our own time, which fix reading as unidirectional consumption and the text as a discrete, stable object to be known. In this respect, affective literacy, like marginalia and glossing, 2 

Nichols, ‘On the Sociology’, pp. 7–8. Rust, Imaginary Worlds, p. 9 and passim. 4  Mills, Suspended Animation. 3 

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sites reading as a hinge rather than a conduit. The hinge of reading opens and closes the gap between reader and text, between the skin of the page and the reading body. As we have seen, reading often provokes anxiety. In the ancient and early medieval worlds, the gestures and affects of reading aloud were sometimes described as nodes of literate anxiety. Augustine described the intermixture of page, voice, eyes, and heart as silent inscription on the heart or in the soul, but other writers were suspicious of silent reading or reading without ostensive affect.5 The rhetorician Quintilian (first century ce) developed a semiotics of reading by distinguishing between lectio or private reception and auditio or public reception. Sometimes, Quintilian uses lectio and auditio interchangeably in his Institutio oratoria.6 More often, he uses lectio to mean reading to memorize. In memorial reading, one should discipline the mind by reading aloud with a subdued voice, ‘more of a mumble’, in order to keep the mind focused on the text (Sed haec vox sit modica et magis murmur).7 Auditio, or listening, on the other hand, refers to the aural reception of public oratory, but could also be a more public kind of reading performed at a distance from the text where the listener is caught up in the sound, gesture, and atmosphere of being read to.8 Lectio is a more judicious (iudicio) kind of reading which enables one to reread and ponder a text. Lectio is privatized reading; it is ‘libera est nec ut actionis impetus transcurrit, sed repetere saepius licet, sive dubites sive memoriae penitus adfigere veils’ ([Reading] is independent; it does not pass over us with the speech of a performance [i.e. oral delivery], and you can go back over it again and again if we have any doubts or if you want to fix it firmly in your memory). By associating public reading/reception (auditio) with dramatizing performance, Quintilian locates textual control more with the oral reader than the reader/listener. He associates private reading (lectio) with rereading, solitude, memory, silence, and ruminating. Quintilian figuratively represents judicious, private reading and memorizing as chewing the written words before swallowing them as internalized text and cognition.9 Both private reading and public performative reading are vocalizations, but unlike auditio, lectio is an active, reader-centred mode of text reception which supports writing and memorizing speeches. 5 

See Augustine of Hippo, De dialectica, ed. by Pinborg, 5. 11 (pp. 86–89); Augustine of Hippo, De magistro, ed. by Daur, xxix, 4. 18 (pp. 165–66). 6  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 10. 1. 10. 7  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 11. 2. 33–34. 8  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 10. 1. 16–19. 9  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 10. 1. 19.

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One of the difficulties, Quintilian notes, of reading a text aloud is that the eye and the voice move at different speeds and do not always function together: For to look forward to the right (as is universally taught), and to foresee what is coming, is a matter not only of theory (ratio) but of practice (usus), since we have to keep our eyes on what follows while reading out what precedes, and (most difficult of all) divide the attention of the mind (dividenda intentio animi) the voice doing one thing and the eyes another.10

The well-known problem Quintilian describes here applies not only to reading aloud in public and to oneself but also to different manuscript formats and writing systems (word-separated and unseparated writing). At the physiological level, human optical processing and miscues — for example, eye skip — have not changed in the past two and a half millennia, although human cognitive pro­ cedures probably have. Elsewhere, Quintilian critiques inappropriate voice in reading and the errors of articulation or comprehension which a reader reading aloud might make. Quintilian’s account of the experiences of reading helps us grasp the framework for affective literacy by opening up the semiotic interplay bet­ween eyes, voice, and mind, which constitutes the reader’s somatic relation with a text. The dynamic or, in Quintilian’s account, unstable connection between eyes, voice, and mind or heart or soul is crucial to late antique and medieval ideas of literacy and reading. The voice (vox) constitutes a person’s capacity to produce linguistically meaningful sound with lips, tongue, teeth, and breath. Ancient Greek and later Arabic grammar and physiology described how these organs functioned together to produce utterances which may or may not emerge as comprehensible human speech: ‘The voice (teî phonê) is the sign of passions (pathēmata) of the mind.’ Any vocal utterance produced by the speech organs is voiced. In De anima, Aristotle tried to account for the physiology of utterance and speech, but in Latin commentaries on his text the relation between utterance and speech was muddled because Latin vox can mean either.11 Following Aristotle, Galen tried to clarify the distinction between speech and utterance: ‘Voice (phonê) and speech (dialektos) are not the same thing; but rather, the production of voice is the function of the vocal (phonetikon) organs, but the production of speech (dialektikōn) depends foremost on the tongue, while the nose, lips, and teeth support speech considerably’.12 This fundamental distinction between the 10 

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 1. 1. 34. See Wollock, The Noblest Animate Motion, esp. pp. 1–47. 12  Galen, De locis affectis, 4. 9; in Galen, On the Affected Parts, trans. by Siegel, p. 124. I have modified Siegel’s translation slightly. 11 

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production of sound and the production of speech was carried into the Middle Ages as a principle of grammatical semiotics, the production of vox. In literacy contexts which privilege reading aloud, attaching one’s voice to a text was an unstable but necessary supplement. Medieval readers normally vocalized a text (lectio), and the quality and skill of the vocalization was assumed to indicate the reader’s comprehension (narratio) and appreciation of the text. But the voice also opened the writerly, in Barthes’s sense, dimension of the text to unlimited semiosis. Modern pedagogies for early literacy still deploy reading aloud to assess young or first-time readers’ comprehension, while more open modes of reading aloud constitute performative irony, literate parody, and the possibility of multiple textual interpretations. Vox makes the visible but silent text manifest and intelligible in the public oral domain. Supplementing writing with the voice constructs the text off the page and creates an extensive textuality. For the Greeks, voice (phonê) differed from sound (psophos), even though it emerges from that material, just as voice and speech are different. Following Galen or his medieval transmitters, some medieval grammarians and physiologists defined vox as meaningful speech or the capacity to vocalize and produce meaningful linguistic sound, in contrast with sonus, audible sound produced by the mouth. Errors or affectations of voice, such as lisping or weakly articulating the r phoneme, were differentiated from errors of speech. After the first century bce, Dionysius Thrax and other hellenist grammarians stressed the importance of punctuation and diacritics on the page to assist oral readers unfamiliar with the variety of Greek or Latin in older texts. In the early Middle Ages, diacritical marks, spacing, and capitalization were used to enhance voiced reading. Aldhelm (c. 640–709) used the affective term passiones (‘feelings’, ‘responses’), rather than the more common grammatical term prosodiae, to refer to graphic signs such as the diastole and hyphen which helped readers voice texts aloud with more expression and accuracy. 13 In a culture of oral reading, vox is a textual gesture. But the production of speech derives from a linguistic ‘deterritorialization of the mouth, of the tongue, and the teeth’.14 Speaking and writing depend on distantiation from the body as much as on embodiment. Speaking or writing are reconnected metaphorically with eating and chewing by reasserting the materiality of language. 13 

Aldhelm, Epistola ad Acircium sive liber de septenario et de metris et enigmatibus ac pedum reguli, in Aldhelm, Opera, ed. by Ehwald, p. 200. See Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 84–85. For examples of St Gall scribes’ use of manuscript punctuation and diacritics to guide reading Latin and Old High German aloud, see Grotans, Reading in Medieval St Gall, pp. 249–50. 14  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, trans. by Polan, p. 19.

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This increasing textual self-consciousness complicated the earlier authority of voice and writing and brought about many literate conflicts in the later Middle Ages.15 But other, more positive ideas about writing and affective literacy also emerged from the growing self-consciousness about language, reading, and textuality. Augustine’s theories of language and signs established one context for later medieval literacies, including affective literacy. Specifically, Augustine dramatized the interactions of page, voice, and body throughout his writings and especially in his Confessions. One of the most famous scenes of reading in the Confessions occurs when the disgruntled Augustine, having left Carthage for more serious-minded students and the chair of rhetoric in Milan, comes upon Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, alone and silently reading a text. Augustine, whose mother desperately wanted him to convert to Christianity, was eager to engage with the learned Bishop, but he was troubled by what he observed about Ambrose’s reading: For I did not have the opportunity to press my demands on him, what I wished to ask, the way I wanted to ask them; for that multitude of people full of business, whose problems he devoted himself to, kept me from hearing and speaking with him. When he was not occupied with them (which was but a little time altogether), he either refreshed his body with necessary sustenance or his mind with reading (lectio). But when he was reading, he drew his eyes over the pages, and his heart searched into the sense, but his voice (vox) and tongue (lingua) were silent. Often, when we were present (for no one was prohibited from coming to him, nor was it his habit to be told of anybody that came to speak with him) we saw him reading silently (eum legentum vidimus tacite), and never otherwise: so that having long sat in silence (for who dared to be so bold as to interrupt him when he was so intent on his study?) we decided to depart. We conjectured that with the small time which he had for restoring his mind, he took himself away from the clamor/confused noise (strepitus) of other men’s business, being unwilling to be drawn away for any other employment: and he was careful perhaps too, lest for an uncertain and eager listener (auditore suspenso et intento), if the author he read [aloud] should put forth (posuisset) anything obscurely, he [Ambrose] should have to explain (exponere) it or discuss some of the harder questions; so that spending his time with this task, he could not turn over so many volumes as he desired: but perhaps preserving his voice (which a little speaking used to weaken) might be a more appropriate (iustior) reason for his reading to himself (tacite legendi). But for whatever purpose he did it, that man certainly (utique) had a good reason for it.16

15  16 

Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 197–223, 253–327. Augustine of Hippo, Confessionum, ed. by Skutella, bk vi, chap. 3 (my translation).

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Augustine puzzles over Ambrose’s silent or subvocal reading, his reading body without voice. Augustine’s questions have to do with how he understands reading as technology and ideology as much as with Ambrose’s motives. Ambrose’s intense, private reading makes him seem unapproachable, closed off to the world. Augustine’s questions about silent reading, a practice hardly unknown in the ancient world, also prompt him to offer several rationales for Ambrose’s mode of reading: perhaps Ambrose wishes to withdraw from public interpretation, or he needs to read quickly, or he needs to preserve his preaching voice. But Augustine can’t be sure. Without voice, he writes, reading’s purpose is opaque. In late antique and medieval culture, reading aloud was normative. So a reader’s immobile or silent tongue was perceived to be severed from language. Augustine observes Ambrose reading with only some of his senses. Ambrose draws his eyes across the page (Augustine’s transitive syntax is important), but his lips, tongue, and voice are still. It is likely that Ambrose is running his finger across the pages, guiding or pulling his eyes over the text. We don’t know exactly what sort of reading Ambrose is performing here, nor what sort of text he is reading (scroll, codex, scriptura continua, word-separated manuscript). Is he leafing through the text quickly? reading selectively? reviewing a single page? reading prayerfully? ­Augustine doesn’t know either. Later, he associates Ambrose’s meditative, silent reading with ruminatio and the Eucharist, thus reconnecting Ambrose’s silent reading with a different kind of orality, ingestion rather than vocalization. While Augustine the spectator wonders about Ambrose’s motives for reading without voice, the narrative emphasizes the silence of Ambrose’s reading and the way only his eyes seem to be engaged with the text. Ambrose’s absent voice, the missing necessary supplement, is the structuring element in this semiotic scene of reading. Without the voice of the reader, Augustine is left to speculate on Ambrose’s motives and the signification of affect and its lack. Is Ambrose a good reader or a bad reader? In this scene of reading, when Augustine constructs Ambrose’s good motives for reading without the customary gestures and vocalization, his interpretive behaviour resembles C. S. Peirce’s abduction. Peirce defines abduction as an inference that begins by adopting an explanatory hypothesis which the perceiver posits to account for what is perceived as anomalous: The form of [abductive] inference, therefore, is this: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course, Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Peirce calls this ‘guessing’ or hope. At the moment of perception, abduction prod­uces in the mind or discourse a prior situation, motive, intention, or

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‘reason’ for an observed behaviour or phenomenon. In abduction, the perceiver chooses a hypothesis which is neither a premise nor derived from the immediate perceptual field.17 According to Peirce, abduction, unlike induction and deduc­ tion, which deal with is and must be, ‘merely suggests that something may be’. That is, truth emerges over time and only contingently and is accumulated with sustained scrutiny. Abduction ‘is the process of forming an explanatory hypo­thesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea’.18 Abduction is an approximating interpretive strategy, motivated by the hope for under­standing. The interpreter or reader, situated in a specific context but not firmly grounded in an interpretation, makes provisional assumptions about the meaning or significance of what is perceived or read. The reader then continues to gather further contextual evidence and frameworks to bolster or modify the initial interpretation. When encountering Ambrose, Augustine uses abductive reasoning to account for the fragmented sensory constellation of voice, body, and mind normally perceived to be integrated in oral reading. Besides vocalized or silent reading practices, other aspects of textuality and reading shaped medieval affective literacy. Manuscript page layout and multi­ lingual glossing structured text interpretation for writers and readers. The arrange­ ment of the page disciplined reading practices and affect in other crucial ways. Saenger has argued that by the eleventh century, in the wake of the Benedictine reforms, ‘writing practices shifted toward word separation and enhancing the clarity of the written page […]. Devotional practices, and with them, reading practices, changed as well.’19 Devotional and reading practices did change beginning in the eleventh century, but word separation alone did not produce that shift. Before 1000 ce, in scriptoria mostly filled with Anglo-Saxon and Irish scribes, word-separated religious and intellectual books were disseminated among Norman abbeys. By the beginning of the eleventh century, writing technologies and religious programs were intertwined, and word-separated texts helped foster silent, devotional reading practices. Monastic reading had long been identified as a form of prayer or meditation, but the idea received new emphasis in eleventhand twelfth-century religious writing and discourse. Ambrose’s devoiced or suppressed-voice reading, a puzzle in Augustine’s abductive gaze, became more normalized in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through interiorized modes of monastic spirituality deploying quieter, often silent, contemplative individual 17 

Peirce, ‘Abduction and Induction’, in Peirce, Philosophical Writings, ed. by Buchler, p. 151. Peirce, Pragmatism as a Principle, ed. by Turrisi, p. 230. 19  Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 202–03. 18 

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reading and study. Saenger identifies John, Abbot of Fécamp (990–1078) as the first writer ‘to employ the term meditatio for a written text intended for private spiritual use’, in his discussion of mental prayer linked to private reading (De vita ordine et morum institutione). For Saenger, John of Fécamp is an early example of spiritual reading ‘centered on individual, silent reading’.20 But private, silent, or sub-vocal reading wasn’t necessarily without movement. The English Ancrene Wisse (c. 1225–40) also inculcates a devotional literacy program, this time for devout lay women, and illustrates the relations between reading and affective movement. The text is an early example of the dissemination of vernacular literate devotions advised by the Council of 1215. It also contains features of academic manuscript ordering. A prologue divides the work and individual chapters into ‘destinctiuns. Þ[æt] ȝe cleopieð dalen’ (distinctions, which you call parts).21 The writer also uses visual and book cues that imply a page-turning, skipping reader moving between chapters: for example, Chapter Four, ‘turneð þruppe þer ich spec. hu he wes ipinet in alle his fif wittes’ (Turn back to where I said how he was made to suffer in all his five senses), referring to Chapter Two.22 Geoffrey Shepherd has argued that the Latin rule the English Ancrene Wisse was based on was written around 1200, given the writer’s aversion from at least some forms of mysticism, his looser regulation of unattached religious, especially women, and his advice to use reading to counter excessive prayer.23 However, the English text also refers to ‘Vre freres prechurs [and] ure freres meonurs’, Dominicans and Franciscans, who only came to England after 1221. The writer of the English text is also familiar with some of the literate meditational practices of Bernard of Clairvaux (sermons on the Song of Songs) and Anselm of Canterbury.24 Ultimately, the precise date of Ancrene Wisse remains uncertain., but is probably 1225–40. 20 

Saenger, Space between Words, p. 203. See Law, ‘From Aural to Visual: Medieval Repre­ sentations of the Word’, in Law, Grammar and Grammarians, pp. 250–59; Grotans, Reading in Medieval St Gall, pp. 20–21. 21  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 11. For all Ancrene Wisse citations, I have compared Tolkien’s EETS edition of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Shepherd; Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Millett and Wogan-Browne, pp. 110–49; and Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Hasenfratz. All these editions are based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402. 22  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 97. The writer is referring to the passage on p. 56. 23  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Shepherd, pp. xxiii–xxiv. 24  For the writer’s knowledge of the coming of the friars to England, see Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 36, 213. For his knowledge of meditational schemes, see, for example, Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 55, 221.

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Within the continental tradition of devotional reading, the writer of the English Ancrene Wisse associates reading with prayer and perhaps encourages fe­male religious to adopt some form of private or silent reading, especially of vernacular texts. The text explicitly notes the anchoresses’ ‘Readunge of englisc oðer of frensch’ meditations and psalters and repeatedly advises that the anchoresses write down on a ‘scrouwe’ (scroll) whatever prayers they can’t remember. 25 The vernacular Ancrene Wisse includes Latin prayers and scriptural quotations, usually followed by vernacular paraphrases or translations (intersentential code­ switching.) Several times the text advises the anchoresses to make provisions for women who cannot read.26 Unlike some other devotional texts (and the Book of Margery Kempe), the writer of the Ancrene Wisse doesn’t highlight which texts the anchoresses should read or recite. Rather, he foregrounds proper reading practices and embodied performance for affective devotional literacy. The theme of reading and textuality is more complex in the Ancrene Wisse than many modern readers have usually acknowledged, although a few recent critics have addressed reading practices in the text.27 The description of reading practices in the Ancrene Wisse depends on a theory of somatic reading and affective literacy. Reading, like physical work and prayer, was a useful kind of spiritual labour linking body and soul, and the male writer identifies proper meditative reading as a remedy for accidie (idleness): ‘salue […] Accidies ./ Redunge’ (The remedy […] for Sloth [is] reading). The writer quotes and translates Jerome’s letter (no. 22) encouraging religious women to ‘Redunge is god bone […] “Ieronimus. Semper in manu tua sacra sit lectio”’ (Reading is good prayer […] Jerome: ‘Let holy reading be at all times in your hands’).28 The linguistic density of this passage is marked by the stitching together of the Anglo-Norman noun for Sloth, Jerome’s Latin instruction for women, an English translation of Jerome, and the writer’s English advice to the anchoresses. He directs the anchoresses to Of þis boc redeð hwen ȝe [ . ge as is iseid þruppe.] beoð eise euche dei, leasse oðer mare. Ich hopie þ[æt] hit schal beon. ow ȝef ȝe hit redeð ofte, swiðe biheue, þurh godes muchele grace, elles ich hefde uuele bitohe mi muchele hwile (Read from this book each day, when you are at leisure, less or more. I hope that, if you read it often, it will be very profitable to you through God’s great grace — otherwise, I have wasted the long time I spent on it).29 25 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 25, 27. Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 218. 27  Robertson, ‘“This Living Hand”’; Robertson, ‘Savoring “Scientia”’; Kalve, ‘A Virtuous Mouth’. 28  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 142, 148. 29  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 221. 26 

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The writer links his own labour and spiritual reward with that of potential readers. The clause ‘hwen ȝe […] beoð eise’ might seem to contradict the trope of reading as labour. But I think the writer is referring more to the anchoress’s reading environment and the kind of text she is reading (‘Of þis boc’, a guide for religious devotion). Elsewhere, the writer stipulates, ‘Ȝe ancres ahen þis leaste stucche. me nawt blisse. reden to ower wummen euche wike eanes. aþet ha hit cunnen’ (You anchoresses ought to read this last section [the Outer Rule] […] to your women once each week until they know it).30 Other manuscripts containing late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century English devotional lyrics include similar rubrics or annotations inscribing reading performance: ‘In seiynge of þis orisoun stynteth & bydeth at every cros & þenketh whate ȝe have seide. For a more devoute prayere fond I never of the Passioun who-so wolde devoutly say hitte’; ‘This prayere here folwyng schold be sayd bifore the levacion devouteli kneling’.31 Glossing and annotating include performative as well as hermeneutic and syntactic codes. The Ancrene Wisse’s text and metatext situate reading within a wider discipline of bodily regulation (governmentality) and spiritual reflection. A devotional book or the guide for anchoresses links the various intentiones of the anchoress’s eyes, ears, and mouth as she reads, aloud or silently: Þeos þrealles beoð þe eðele fif wittes. þe schulden beon et hame [and] seruin hare leafdi. þenne ha seruið wel þe ancre hare leafdi, hwen ha notieð ham wel in hare sawle neode. hwen þe ehe is oþe boc. oþer o sum oðer god. þe eare to godes word. þe muð in hali bonen (These servants are the five native senses, which should be at home and serve their lady well. Then they serve well the anchoress their lady when she employs them well about their soul’s needs, when the eye is on the book or on some other good thing, the ear to God’s word, the mouth at holy prayers.32

Here, the act of reading draws the senses not directly inward but onto an external material object, verbal and pictorial signs on a page or a sacred image, and to linguistic sound: eyes-book, ears-words read aloud. Pious reading focuses the female body’s senses on an inward, contemplative experience mediated by the text. These somatic and dramatic experiences are located in the body but oriented to the soul or heart. Thus, spiritual texts and reading practices are assigned to the Inner rather than the Outer Rule: ‘ancre ne ah to habben na þing þ[æt] utward 30 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 220. Brown and Robbins, The Index of Middle English Verse, pp. 1761, 2512. 32  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 90. 31 

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drahe hire heorte’ (An anchoress ought not to have anything that draws her heart outwards). Writing, by contrast, is assigned to both the inner and outer rules, depending on the context.33 The sensory receptors employed in reading link the body with the soul. The Ancrene Wisse writer thus locates the sensing and sensible flesh liminally between the inner and outer worlds. Deploying this spiritual and literate technology, the reader perceives the pages of a devotional text and creates and participates in an interior experience. The reader and the page are hinged. In the Ancrene Wisse, reading is active rather than passive, especially when a religious reader creates images and affects of devotion while engaged with the text or listening to or contemplating it: ‘Redunge is god bone. Redunge teacheð hu [and] hwet me bidde, [and] beode biȝet hit efter. Amidde þe redunge hwen þe heorte likeð. kimeð up a deuotiun þ[æt] is wurð monie benen’ (Reading is good prayer. Reading teaches how and what I should pray, and prayer obtains it after­ wards. During reading, when the heart is pleased, a devotion rises up which is worth many prayers).34 By connecting reading and affective devotion, the Ancrene Wisse retexts a long tradition of devotional reading, from Augustine and Jerome to Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux, in a more embodied mode. In the Ancrene Wisse, reading English, Anglo-Norman, and perhaps Latin books is part of a disciplining literate technology. Following monastic and twelfth-century meditational traditions, the writer contrasts the disciplined with the undisciplined mouth (esp. Chapter Four). Sinful, foul, or hurtful words (contentio) can pass through the undisciplined mouth and ‘mahte hurten alle wel itohene earen. [and] sulen cleane heorten’ (can hurt well-disciplined ears and sully pure hearts).35 The Ancrene Wisse writer associates an undisciplined mouth with other behaviours and gestures, often coded as feminine: wið semblanz [and] wið sines. as beoren on heh þ[æt] heaued. crenge wið swire. lokin o siden. bihalden on hokere. winche mid ehe. binde seode mid te muð. wið hond oðer wið heaued makie scuter signe. warpe schonke ouer schench. sitten oðer gan stif as ha istaket were. luue lokin o mon. speoken as an innocent. [and] wlispin for þen anes (with airs and graces, with expressions and gestures, such as carrying the head high, arching the neck, pursing up the mouth, making derisive gestures with hand or with head, throwing one leg over the other, sitting or walking stiffly as if she were staked up, giving men love-looks, speaking like an innocent and putting on a lisp).36 33 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 213, 216–17. Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 148. 35  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 106. 36  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 102–03. 34 

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By contrast, devout speech and silence and the body’s well-disciplined sensory devices are associated with reading practices. Prayers are written elsewhere in the text, but whatever prayers an anchoress does not know or cannot remember she should write separately on a ‘scrouwe’ (scroll).37 Personal, private, memorial writing guides the heart and the mouth. At the beginning of the Ancrene Wisse, the writer prescribes a schedule of daily prayers and readings. Throughout Chapter One, individual Latin prayers are punctuated with directions prescribing which gestures the anchoress should make in the room or with her body. For example, after the Latin and English versions of a prayer to the Virgin, the writer directs the female reader to ‘ant fallen to þer eorðe. [and] cussen hire wið þis leaste uers. hwa se is hal iheafdet. [and] tenne auez tene [and] tene togederes […] [and] cusse þe eorðe on ende. oðer degre oðer bench oðer sumhwet herres …’ (and fall to the earth and kiss it at this last verse, whoever is in good health, and then Aves, in tens together, […] and kiss the earth at the end, or a step or bench or something higher ). But the writer also advises anchorites to adjust the regime of prayer according to their abilities circumstances, illness, memories, and internal sense of time: ‘as pater nostres [and] auez on ower ahne wise’ (such as Pater Nosters and Aves in your own way); ‘ant hwa se ne con þeos fif ureisuns, segge eauer an. Ant hwa se þuncheð to long, leaue þe salmes’ (And whoever does not know these five orisons may say the same one each time, and whoever thinks these prayers too long may leave out the psalms).38 Finally, this matrix of gesture, prayer, and vocalized reading can be deployed as penance for careless errors of pronunciation during devotion: ‘Ȝef ȝe þurh ȝemeles gluffeð of wordes. oðer misneomeð uers, neomeð owe venie dun ed ter eorðe wið þe hond ane. al fallen adun for muche misneomunge. [and] schawið ofte i schrift ower ȝemeles herabuten’ (If through carelessness you get words wrong or mistake a verse, make your Venie [pardons] with only your hand down on the earth. Fall right down for great mistakes and often make plain in confession your carelessness about this).39 Performing these prayers, with written aide memoires, constituted a flexible regime of embodied affective literacy. The anchoress’s body, especially her mouth and eyes, is a contested site, in need of regulation and locking up, direction and reward, in the anchorhold and on the page she gazes on. Women’s bodies are also sites and means for creating powerful spiritual experiences through, among other things, affective reading: 37 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 25. Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 22, 26. 39  Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 29. 38 

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mine leoue sustren witeð ower heorte. þe heorte is wel iloket, ȝef muð. [and] ehe. [and] eare. wisliche beon ilokene. for heo as ich seide þer, beoð þe heorte wardeins. ant ȝef þe wardeins wendeð ut, þe ham bið biwist uuele […] þah nis nawt speche þe muðes wit. ah is smechunge þah ba beon i muðe (my dear sisters, guard your heart. The heart is well locked up if the mouth and eye and ear are locked up sensibly; for they, as I said there, are the heart’s wardens, and if the wardens go out, the home is badly protected […]. However, speech is not the mouth’s sense, but taste is: however, both are in the mouth).40

Reading and pious speech organize and discipline the heart’s guardians. Speech meanders between the mouth as a sense organ and the soul, while the anchoress’s physical connections with the world forever clash with her desire for heightened spirituality. In the Ancrene Wisse, individual books and self-inscribed texts in English, French, and Latin are places for the spiritual regulation of the senses and religious discipline as well as for devotional imagination: ‘Amidde þe redunge hwen þe heorte likeð. kimeð up a deuotiun þ[æt] is wurð monie benen’ (During read­ ing, when the heart is pleased, a devotion rises up which is worth many prayers).41 The Ancrene Wisse deepens our understanding of affective literacy in the later Middle Ages. The writer’s prescriptions for regulating and enabling the anchoress’s senses with the page, for the gestures accompanying reading, and for reading as both a solitary and group activity characterize the enclosed female’s textual discipline. The material page and visible language are part of a spiritual discipline, a linguistic governmentality, which draws inward, interiorizes, the potentially wayward and worldly (female) body. At the same time, the female body is configured as essentially more receptive to sense experience and affective response, making a woman a particularly apt, acute, and active devotional reader. The devout female reader in the Ancrene Wisse is represented as handling a text, reading both quietly and aloud, with a range of gestures which supplement, accompany, or perform the text. Just as reading is situated between the body and the heart/soul, between the Outer and Inner Rules, writing is situated between the inner and outer worlds, but in a distinctly gendered way. As social activity, male writing constitutes the framework for instruction and discipline, whereas female writing is located with the Outer Rule. The writer of the Ancrene Wisse cautions the anchoresses not to become teachers (scolmeistre) or active writers, lest worldly textuality distract them from the world of spiritual textuality: ‘Ȝe ne schulen senden leattres. ne underuon leattres. ne writen bute leaue’ (You should 40  41 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 55. Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, p. 148.

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not send nor receive letters nor write any).42 This passage is significant in that it presumes that at least some literate religious women could and did open schools in the early thirteenth century and that they were likely to participate in literate circles by exchanging letters. The writer of the Ancrene Wisse urges the anchoresses to care for the spiritual and literate needs of their maidens in confinement but not to extend their hands to the wider world. The tension in the Ancrene Wisse is not so much between anchorite spirituality and worldly literacy as between different modes of literacy within the spiritual life. Such devotional reading wasn’t entirely new to the Ancrene Wisse. Affectus and studium were connected more than a century earlier when Anselm of Canterbury (1033–89) composed his Orationes sive meditationis to be read in private. The Orationes also textualizes the relation between the absent writer and a reader.43 The way Anselm frames the act of reading is full of conflicts, especially in terms of affective literacy. On the one hand, the meditating reader supplements and performs the writer’s voice by reading aloud. But in the Preface to the Monologium, Anselm distinguished between images and writing as well as between inner mental speech and external oral speech.44 Anselm’s theory of mental language destabilizes the multisensory semiotics of medieval writing and the idea that the reader’s voice completes or supplements the text the writer writes. He often describes the reader as looking (videre, inspicere) on the page as one would gaze at a painting — the spectating reader. In his Orationes sive meditationes, Anselm designed a text whose punctuation and paragraph divisions allowed a reader to pick up the text at various points, to skip around and dip in and out as the reader’s devotional experience directed: The purpose of the prayers and meditations to follow is to stir up the reader’s mind (ad excitandam legentis mentem) to the love or fear of God or to self examination […]. The reader should not trouble about reading the whole of any prayer, but only as much as, by God’s help, she/he finds useful in stirring up the spirit to pray (valere ad ascendendum affectum orandi) or as may give her/him pleasure. Nor is it necessary for her/him always to begin at the beginning, but wherever the reader pleases. Thus, sections are divided into paragraphs, so the reader can start and stop wherever she/he chooses.45 42 

Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Tolkien, pp. 216–17. Anselm of Canterbury, Orationes sive meditationis, in Anselm of Canterbury, Opera omnia, ed. by Schmitt, iii, 3; See Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 338–40. 44  Anselm of Canterbury, Monologium, Preface, in Anselm of Canterbury, Opera omnia, ed. by Schmitt, i, 24–25 (my translation). 45  Anselm of Canterbury, Orationes, in Anselm of Canterbury, Opera omnia, ed. by Schmitt, iii, 3. 43 

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Guillaume de Saint-Thierry in the twelfth century continued Anselm’s program of affective reading. Anselm’s explicit concern with meditative reading and the form of the material text points to wider changes in manuscript conventions and mise en page in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including more complete indices, tables of contents, page numbers, cross-references, diacritical marks to assist readers, rubrics, and so forth.46 But because he regarded reading as a kind of meditation or contemplation and therefore still within the ruminatio tradition, Anselm also questioned some consequences of emerging, more academically oriented manuscript formats. For instance, Anselm was concerned that monks not read too fast. The technique of silent reading, fostered by the spectating reader, created performance anxieties within monastic literate communities: ‘Non sunt legendae in tumultu, sed in quiete, nec cursim et velociter, sed paulatim cum intenta et morosa meditationes’ (They are not to be reading in a busy place but in a quiet one, nor reading superficially or hastily but slowly [paulatim, ‘a bit at a time’] with attentive and careful [stubborn?] meditations).47 In itself, silent or rapid reading were probably not thought of as sinful or wrong, especially given the complex requirements of monastic administration, multiple readers’ proximity to one another, and the practical need to find information quickly within documents. But this passage also suggests that anxieties about reading practice prompted Anselm and other ecclesiastical authorities to discipline monastic readers to slow down, even as new manuscript formats facilitated reading through a text more quickly and discontinuously, skipping from passage to passage. Anselm associates fast reading with haste and worldly attention, while he regards reading a text more slowly as a sign of deeper spiritual attention, ‘deep reading’, ruminatio. Increasingly, meditative reading was associated with visually perceiving text, with silent reading and rereading. Three centuries later, Guillaume Fillastre (c. 1470) reiterated this literate practice by preferring deep reading over speech at the Burgundian court: Knowledge is not acquired by hearing alone, but is also acquired and increases by study, by reading and by subtly thinking and meditating on what one has read and studied […]. For the sense of sight is much firmer than hearing […] speech is transitory but the written letter remains and impresses itself more on the reader’s understanding.48

46 

See Rouse, ‘Statim inveniri’; Rouse and Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons. Anselm of Canterbury, Orationes, in Anselm of Canterbury, Opera omnia, ed. by Schmitt, iii, 1. 48  Toison d’or, cited in Saenger, ‘Books of Hours’, pp. 167–68, n. 76. 47 

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Studium and affectus are merged in Guillaume’s textual consciousness. Anselm’s anxiety about hasty, skipping reading suggests how people’s different physical, somatic connections with books informed medieval understandings of literate practices. Saenger reads Anselm’s remarks as evidence for how word-separated manu­scripts were integral to new devotional practices in the eleventh and twelfth centuries as well as being part of literate technology fostering private, often silent reading.49 However, word-separated manuscripts and the rapid, quieter, more efficient reading they enabled also disrupted social expectations for slow, careful reading aloud, meditative reading, or performative, emotive reading. New manuscript formats and technologies were closely linked with more interiorized devotion, discontinuous reading, and less overt, but no less affective, performative literacy. These more privatized reading practices were positioned differently within different literacy frameworks for how a reader’s voice and body are, or should be, connected when reading. A marginal doodle in a manuscript from the Abbey of Fécamp containing Gerbert’s Regulae de numerorum abaci rationibus (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 489, fol. 65r, c. 1050-1100) presents an intriguing image of medieval reading. The figure has sometimes been interpreted as a monk holding a book outward for another to read, but Paul Saenger has argued the drawing depicts a motionless reader staring at a book.50 The marginal image of a medieval reader is ambiguous, but I think Saenger’s reading is plausible. Read as a motionless reader, the doodle depicts the reader’s body withdrawn from the book before him, his head bent down slightly, his eyes seemingly directed at the page. The clerical-looking reader appears to have his arms folded across his chest, so he is not obviously gesturing as he reads. Nor does the shape of his mouth suggest he’s reading aloud. Like the imagined readers in Anselm’s Meditationes and the Ancrene Wisse, this doodled reader gazes (inspicere) at the page, but is he reading the page, ruminating on it, unable to read it, or simply ignoring it? While Anselm and the Ancrene Wisse writer explicitly describe a reader guided or disciplined by the physical book, the Fécamp image of a non-gesturing reader’s body is disengaged from the text, like Ambrose before Augustine’s gaze. The Fécamp marginal image represents reading as an act without discernible affect or context. The reader’s cognitive and affective behaviour is invisible and presumed to be internalized. Eleventh-century Benedictine devotional practices challenged customary modes of Christian religious and devotional reading. In particular, the cultiva49  50 

Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 203–04. See Saenger, Space between Words, p. 207.

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Figure 1. Christine de Pizan, Cent ballades, London, BL, Harley MS 4431, fol. 4, Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, Paris. c. 1410–11. © The British Library Board.

tion of silent reading encouraged privatized, isolated readers. The sil­ent reader, with­out ostensive breath, voice, or gesture, became a new model of spiritual contemplation. This shift in the imaginative construction of how a reader’s body engages with a text destabilized earlier links between the sanctity of the spiritual text and readers’ exterior performances and affects. The new Benedictine construction of reading also altered the index for what counted as good, bad, or troubling reading. With­out regulated or discernible expression, a motionless and voiceless reader, like the one in the Fécamp doodle, whether in public or private, eluded recognition. The silent reader could be thought to be misreading or im­ properly reading a text, reading on the down low, as it were. Con­versely, the privatized reader could be thought to be reading with greater dis­cern­ment or deeper spiritual rumination. New manuscript technologies and silent or private reading challenged the normalcy of ostensive, performative reading.

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Figure 2. Christine de Pizan, Proverbes moraux, London, BL, Harley MS 4431, fol. 259v, Master of the Cité des Dames and workshop, Paris. c. 1410–11. © The British Library Board.

The challenge of Benedictine literacy reforms is marked against the continuing dominance of oral, largely public reading formations in the later Middle Ages. Most medieval visual representations of literacy, even when picturing individual books, continued to emphasize the somatic, gestural, and oral aspects of reading, whereas literary texts such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain or Chaucer’s T ­ roilus and Criseyde or Merchant’s Tale some­times represented solitary, private, or sil­ent reading. Later reading prac­tices with­in devotional contexts further pressured the

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boundaries of appropriate or ‘legitimate’ somatic, affective literacy. Mills claims that some later medieval images of torture, punishment, and martyrdom selfconsciously perform experiences of the body as a ‘potentially threshold entity’, com­plicating and making ambiguous audiences’ responses.51 As I shall argue, affective literacy as setting and practice trans­gressed and blurred distinctions between texts, bodies, and responses. Later medieval affective lit­eracy hinged texts and bodies to emphasize som­atic performative relations among readers’ senses, cognition, and feelings. Moreover, in affective literacy, some kinds of language were thought to evoke more physical, extravagant, de­stabilizing reading practices, for better or worse. In many late medieval visual repre­sen­tations of literacy and textuality, the reader is often shown with one or both hands on the book, handling the book or pointing to a word or line. Alternatively, someone reading aloud to instruct an audience was often depicted with one hand on the page and the other (usually right) hand gesturing toward the audience. For example, illustrations of Christine de Pizan the writer depict her alone or with her dog in her study (fig. 1). But illustrations of Christine the reader depict her in public with one or more listeners (fig. 2). Annunciation scenes were particularly important for disseminating images of affective female literacy; those images also open for us ways of understanding reading gestures and hinged reading. Images of model female readers such as St Ann or the Virgin Mary often show the woman reading with one or both hands on a text, usually a prophetic or Gos­pel text announcing the birth of Jesus, or else de­pict her as interrupted from her reading with one or both hands removed from the page (Plate 1). The mom­ent when the Holy Spirit impregnates Mary’s reading body is fused with Mary’s gesture of touching holy words on the page. These gestures and postures, along with others — the reader’s body pos­itioned over or close to the text, the text nestled in the reader’s lap or hands — contrast sharply with the open, writer­ly minimalism and ges­tural absence of the doodle of the Fécamp reader, motionless, staring at the text from a distance. The association of Mary with reading, writing, Incarnation, and the Word is implicit in many illustrations in fifteenth-century books of hours depicting Mary holding the infant Jesus in her arms and a book. A divine writer before speech, the holy infans (Word without speech) is first engendered in Mary’s body, nurtured there, and then ejected at the Nativity. Mary’s reading body is a kind of fleshly scriptorium whose maternal fluids (milk and blood for ink) sustain the production of the Word. Manuscript images of the Madonna with Child and reading link Mary with the book of hours readers in a visual and somatic 51 

Mills, Suspended Animation, p. 61.

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metonymy. Christine de Pizan especially appropriated this association of female impregnation, conception of the Word, and literacy throughout her writing.52 The association of Word and word was fundamental to medieval theories of the Trinity, language and writing, primarily through Augustine’s De trinitate. Many books of hours instantiate the Word/word metonymy as part of their somatic textuality and visual signifiers. The well known patron illustration in Mary of Burgundy’s book of hours (Flanders, late fifteenth century) depicts Mary reading in an alcove (Plate 2). Behind her, the chapel window opens onto a nave/ altar scene of Virgin and Child, which reproduces the mental image supposedly stimulated by Mary’s reading. The image in Mary’s devotional book textualizes the mental image which the meditating reader is presumed to construct as part of her construal of the text and literate affectus. The reader is projected (doubled) into the scene of her reading with the Virgin and Child, and the devotional text’s materiality directs the reader by making explicit the ‘proper’ meditative image. Besides these representations of somatic, feminized sacred reading and writing, medieval affective literacy was also visually represented in more secular, dialogic contexts. For example, in manuscripts of Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, the auctor is explicitly shown gesturing while reading to an audience, some of whom are performing different gestures as listeners. The incipit to Christine de Pizan’s Proverbes moraux is typical (fig. 2). Christine the auctor is shown seated and reading her book, her left hand on the corner of the page while she gestures authoritatively with her right hand. She is reading aloud to an audience of secular and religious men (monk, friar, knight, courtier, or bourgeois). Her gesturing right hand signifies she is reading with moral authority to her male audience. The gesture of the authoritative right hand in the scene of reading aloud is common among medieval illustrations of authorship. The reader’s gesturing right hand, always depicted open rather than clenched or closed, contrasts with the prayerful gestures of the Virgin Mary or St Ann with their hands on the book. In the Proverbes illustration, the male audience’s hand gestures, at angles to one another, suggest they are discussing the reading they are listening to. Perhaps the illustration combines the time of reading aloud and the time of discussion in the same frame. But many depictions of medieval preachers and their audiences also show the audience with these ‘discussion’ hand gestures. So the audience’s gestures in the Proverbes moraux incipit may be conventions signifying both listeners’ attention to the reader and their interior engagement with the sententious text Christine is reading aloud. 52 

See Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Fondements et fondations’.

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The illustration of Christine de Pizan reading her Proverbes moraux aloud to a male audience constitutes a complex visual sign of affective literacy. The men in the scene seem to be discussing or debating, perhaps about the proverbs and moral opinions in Christine’s book. But we can’t know exactly how they are responding. The illustration is prominently positioned as a manuscript incipit, thereby connoting the social and moral authority which the female writer/public reader presumes for her text. Moreover, Christine’s reading gesture represents an important connection between the writer Christine and her embodied role as oral reader and disseminator of her own work. The illustration inserts the text of the Proverbes moraux, authored by a woman, partly inscribed by a woman and read aloud with a female voice, into the more male-dominated moral discourse. Within the semiotics of illustrated gesture, the manuscript illumination frames Christine’s moral text as circulating orally, attached to the body of a female writer who publicly reads her text aloud with performative gestures of authority. Other visual and verbal representations of reading, especially those associated with directed female reading and worship in books of hours and devotional images, construct different images of the interplay between affective literacy and affective piety in the later Middle Ages. As both scene and theme, the Nativity had long been an occasion to reflect on the meaning of language, the Word in the context of embodiment, in an intensely woman-centred experience. The Annunciation and the Nativity were imaginary intertexts for later medieval constructions and consumptions of textuality. Other pictorial images situate Mary and the Christ child within different scenes of reading. In some paintings and illuminations of the Annunciation, Mary is interrupted in her reading by the arrival of the angel Gabriel. In the leaf from the book of hours produced in the Master of the Gold Scrolls Workshop (Flanders, 1410–15), the Virgin turns away from the book in front of her to hear/see the angel’s proclamation presented on a banderole: ‘Ave, Maria, plena […] dominus’ (Plate 1). In this image, the act of reading ambiguously signifies Mary’s pious devotion and prophecy as well as her engagement with the world which the announcing angel disturbs. At the moment of the Annunciation, when Mary is being spoken to, Mary’s divine maternity and attention to God’s speech competes with her active literacy. Not facing the angel directly, Mary’s body is twisted, oriented in two directions. Rather than seeing Mary and the pious female reader as images of one another, we find Mary as a devotional reader dramatically interrupted by the speaking angel Gabriel and caught, suspended, between two worlds. She can’t quite withdraw her hand from the page she is reading. The image she makes for the reader is the text she is reading. It’s as though she will lose her place if she takes her place in salvation history. As in the Ancrene Wisse

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and the Book of Margery Kempe, reading here can signify worldly distraction or pious absorption. The centre panel of Robert Campin’s Merode Altarpiece (c. 1425–28), a trip­ tych, complicates this motif further by presenting not the moment of inter­ ruption/annunciation but two images of reading in the same frame (Plate 3). On the right side, Mary reads intently, her eyes focused on the open book she holds with both her hands. To the left and behind her, the book lying on the table, a mirror image of Mary’s own book, is being leafed through, but no human reader or hands touch the pages. The divine breath which has blown out the candle on the table is perhaps also the divine breath (voice) of God silently entering the voiceless, material text. Campin’s painting contrasts Mary’s engaged, silent reading, focused on a single page, with the Bible on the table, opened to multiple pages — the image of discontinuous reading and the fuller text. God penetrates Mary’s body and the text all at once, not line by line, to engender the Living Word. Campin also links Mary’s maternity with discontinuous reading in his ‘The Madonna and Child with Saints in the Enclosed Garden’ (c. 1440/1460) (Plate 4). The painting depicts Mary with the Christ child, while St Catherine sits to the left intently thumbing through a large, open, double-columned illuminated book, probably a Bible. To the right, St Anthony looks at the infant Jesus (or does he look at St Catherine reading across the garden?) and holds a closed scroll. We can’t know which Biblical text Catherine is reading, but the painting foregrounds her manner of reading. Rather than simply touching or pointing at the page, Catherine’s fingers are stuck into the pages of the open book. She appears to be reading discontinuously, searching for and reading the story of Christ’s birth and perhaps earlier prophetic passages. In the painting, Catherine gazes on the codex pages, while the scene she is looking for, or perhaps contemplating, on the page is visually projected in front of her. Many viewers are struck by the painting’s naturalized domestic detail or by Campin’s revision of the aristocratic female scene of reading in the garden. But as a representation of affective literacy, I think the painting’s provocation ­sur­faces elsewhere. St Catherine looks not at the Nativity scene before her but at the book she is holding. Like the illustration of Mary of Burgundy reading or some Annunciation scenes in books of hours, the painting represents Catherine as a very engaged reader, her fingers stuck between the pages as she leafs through the book, skipping from section to section. The painting reproduces Catherine’s mental representation created by her reading as a scene of the Virgin and Child. But like Mary of Burgundy, it is the codex book in Catherine’s hands, a flexible material object of literate technology, not the mental representation signified by the text, which occupies her gaze and her spiritual attention. It’s also significant

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that the visual schema balances her discontinuous reading with St Anthony’s closed up scroll, an earlier literate technology which created a more strictly linear text, less available to skipping, discontinuous reading and hypertextual inter­pretation in which the reader compares disparate pas­sages or texts. Recall that in the ­Ancrene Wisse, Chapter Seven, Christ, the suitor wooing the female soul, contrasts ‘­leattres isealet’ carried by the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets with ‘lettres iopenet’, the Gospels, carried by Christ and written by him with his own blood. In Campin’s painting, sitting between the open codex and the closed scroll and the hands holding them, the Virgin’s hands are on the child and loosely Figure 3. Grandes Heures de Rohan, Paris, BnF, linked in a gesture of caring r MS lat. 9471, fol. 133 . 1430–33. By permission and praying. In the painting, of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. the martyred Catherine is reimagined as a devout, female, discontinuous reader. Unlike St Anthony, St ­Catherine’s posture and lit­erate gestures repeat the image of the ­ ious Virgin and child while re­coding the Christ child as a text, the Word/word. P read­ing, especially fe­male read­ing, visually doubles as mater­nity. This material maternity in Campin’s painting is rendered more directly in the well-known illumination in the Rohan book of hours (nor­thern France, c. 1430–33) (fig. 3). The in­fant Jesus lies in a man­ger formed from a closed book — the new born Word nestled with­in the writ­ten word as mat­erial object. In Anselm’s Orationes and fifteenth-century books of hours, the written text, prayers, and illustrations were arranged to foster devotional reading and prayer

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and help readers visualize and meditate on scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Books of hours and other devotional texts also have much to show us as texts about medieval habits of writing, reading, and seeing. Too often, medieval art historians, curators, and cultural critics interpretively remove the images in books of hours from their textual environments, treating the individual illustrations primarily as art objects divorced from their literate and performative contexts. Books of hours combined imaginative scenes of the life of the Virgin, the Nativity, and the Crucifixion (i.e. Hours of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross) with penitential prayers, Office of the Dead, additional prayers (to St Barbara and others), domestic or secular visual images in the textual margins, and hyperliterate manuscript apparatus. Books of hours and primers are multimodal texts created especially for lay reading publics. Through performative, often multilingual reading, such devotional texts connect female reading and piety with representations of female reading and piety.53 A book of hours concretizes prayer and reading as intimate, privatized activities by creating a space, inside and outside the book, where reading, vocalizing text, and imaginatively and actively gazing (inspicere) on the page enable predominantly lay readers to engage closely with aesthetically wrapped words and mostly feminized images of divine themes. The textuality of a late medieval book of hours brings us closer to the ­somatic-textual environment, the hinge, of affective literacy. Consider a provocative image (fol. 74r) in a late fifteenth-century Latin-French book of hours from Rouen, the Buchanan Hours (Plate 5). The devotional image situates the Virgin and Christ child in the centre foreground. The figure of the female worshipper/ patron is to the left and further back in the pictorial scene, in a discrete space visually marked off by the line of the tapestry and a shadow on the wall, suggesting a light source from the left. The women’s clothing further distinguishes them. Mary is dressed in her traditional brilliant blue, with green and gold; the female worshipper is in red. This brilliantly coloured illustration is placed above a vernacular prayer to the Virgin (‘Oraison tresdeuote a la vierge marie mere de dieu. Mere de dieu qui fustes mise. | Et assise | Lassus en throsne diuin […] Et sauuez | En la gloire pardurable. AMEN’). The picture is framed in gold with pearls and coloured shells, while the vernacular prayer is set within a field of flowers with a bird and snail. The Buchanan hours presupposes a bilingual dev­ otional reader, probably a lay woman. The image on fol. 74r is woman-centred and maternal and depicts the Christ child with an exposed penis. The facing 53 

See Saenger, ‘Books of Hours’; Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 210–32; Penketh, ‘Women and the Books of Hours’; Camille, Image on the Edge; Camille, Mirror in Parchment; Krug, Reading Families, pp. 65–113.

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page (fol. 73v) contains mostly verse French and Latin prayers to the Virgin, St Barbara and the guardian angel. The devotional image in the Buchanan Hours deploys the semiotics of affective literacy more directly than does either of Campin’s paintings. The image of Mary reading a codex book and cradling the Christ child on fol. 74r is the last full page image in the book of hours. It is symmetrical with the first full page image in the manuscript (after the calendar), that of John writing/reading his gospel on a scroll. Beneath John’s image is the famous opening to his gospel: ‘Secundum Johannem: In principio erat verbum et erat verb apud deum et deus’ (fol. 8r). On fol. 74r, Mary places one hand on the book (probably scripture, but the picture also suggestively reproduces the scene of reading in which the devotional image appears) while holding the infant Christ with her other. Mary’s lap is full of Words. The female worshipper to the left and rear holds her hands together in prayer and gazes at the Virgin. Mary’s body and embrace link her book, a codex on prepared dead lamb skin, with the body of the Infant Jesus, the living Word and Lamb of God. The Christ child gestures with one hand and holds a green parrot with the other. While the Infant Jesus looks at the parrot, Mary’s gaze is directed toward an undefined point between the book and female worshipper. Holding the Buchanan Hours, the reader — male or female — repeats Mary’s gesture of reading on fol. 74r. As the reader looks at the page and the image of reading on the page and voices prayers to the Virgin, St Barbara, St Margaret, and others, his or her gaze fuses with Mary’s gaze and activity rather than with that of the bookless patron-worshipper. Mary’s extended right arm, the book she reads, and the body of the Christ child she holds form a strong diagonal axis in the middle of the page. The reader’s gaze is drawn to the book which Mary, not the patron, is touching, then to Mary, then to the Christ child. The patron represented in the Buchanan illustration is separated from her book and the reading gaze, unlike St Catherine in Campin’s painting or the image of Mary of Burgundy in her book of hours, both of whom are specifically represented as reading codices. In the Buchanan hours, the book’s actual lay devotional readers link the text as material object with the devotional image of the Virgin and Christ child. On fol. 74r, the image of Mary, not the patron, is the focal point of literate identification. The image of the book nested within the image of Mary and the Christ child is performed and reproduced in a reader’s actual handling of the book of hours which contains the image. Mary’s readerly touch in the illustration locates the physical devotional text in a constellation of sacred objects, bodies, and affective practice.

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These representations of literacy and scenes of reading in paintings and illu­ minated manuscripts resacralize the materiality of the later medieval codex within a literate economy of mostly female bodies. Some kinds of affective literacy took this connection even further by blurring or dissolving the borders between texts and bodies, between one kind of skin and another. Affective literacy produces textuality and reading responses as a multimodal hinge, a working space, between material language and comprehension or imagination, between material writing and the reader’s reading body and affective life. To push this argument further, I ’ll discuss some material traces of affective literacy and scenes of affective reading in Dante’s Commedia, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the Old French romance Flamenca. How does affective literacy as eroticized and multiply-gendered reading blur, erase, or transgress the presupposed distinction between sacred and secular literacies and affective response?54 Earlier, I characterized affective literacy in terms of readers’ emotional, em­ bodied, physical, and gestural responses to texts or images. Reading responses might be pious or heterodox, loving or outraged, sacred or sexually arousing or some combination of these feelings or consciousnesses. Passionate sympathy is not the only kind of affective literacy. Medieval representations of readers savoring the language and feelings produced by reading a devotional text are counterbalanced by representations of outraged or abjecting readers. Two famous medieval readers reading with negative affect are Christine de Pizan and the Wife of Bath. At the opening of her Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405), the narrator Christine describes how when she sat down in her study to read discontinuously in Mathéolus’s Lamentations, a book recommended to her, she was disgusted by the writer’s misogyny: I had often heard that like other books it discussed respect for women. I thought I would browse through it to amuse myself (me pensay qu’en maniere de solas le visiteroye) […]. The next morning, again seated in my study as was my habit, I remembered wanting to examine (visiter) this book by Mathéolus. I started to read it and went on for a little while. Because the subject seemed to me not very pleasant for people who do not enjoy lies, and of no use in developing virtue or manners, given its lack of integrity in diction and theme, and after browsing here and there and reading the end (veu ancore les paroles et matieres deshonnestes de quoy il touche, visitant un pou ça et la et veue sa fin), I put it down in order to turn my attention to more elevated and useful study. But just the sight of this book (la veue de ycellui dit livre), even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men — and learned men among them — have been and are 54 

See Mills, Suspended Animation, p. 194.

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so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many devilish and wicked thoughts about women and their behaviour.

Reading around discontinuously in Mathéolus’s book and other misogynist texts initially throws Christine the reader into abject self-loathing (‘il sembloit que je feusse si comme personne en letargie’), but eventually her vision of the City of Ladies brings her out of that funk with renewed writerly purpose. Alisoun of Bath is more direct. Married to the clerk Jankyn, she listens to him night after night read from his ‘book of wikked wyves’, until finally in rage she tears pages from the misogynist miscellany and throws them into the fire. The Wife tells us this three times in her prologue.55 Some texts, especially Ovid’s Amores or the Song of Songs, posed problems for at least some medieval readers in terms of the unsettling power of affective reading. Guibert de Nogent described being aroused as a young man reading Ovid’s Amores in his bed at night. Medieval allegorizations of the erotic Song of Songs did not erase the text’s explicit and suggestive imagery and language. In Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, January quotes from the Song of Songs as he tries to sweet talk his young wife May into the garden, and the narrator distances himself from that discourse by describing January’s language as ‘Swiche olde lewed words’.56 How readers respond to Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs and Christ’s open-mouth kiss raises complicated questions about affective literacy. Readers’ responses to texts, whether they read silently or aloud or heard another read aloud or looked at pictures, could be intellectual or emotional, naive or sophisticated, conforming, appropriating, or transgressive, some combination of these responses, or something else again. While textual responses and interpretations are socially framed and psychically driven, they cannot be entirely closed or prescribed in advance.57 Affective literacy marks the somatic, emotional responses to reading sacred or secular texts, especially those which exceed institutional authority, prescription, 55 

Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame, ed. by Richards, pp. 40–44; Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. by Richards, pp. 3–4. Richards’s edition is based on London, British Library, MS Harley 4431, which also includes the illustrations of Christine the writer and reader reproduced here. Chaucer, ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, iii, ll. 787–93. 56  Guibert de Nogent, Monodiae, trans. by Archambault, i. 17; Chaucer, ‘Merchant’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, iv, ll. 2134–49. 57  On medieval debates about reading for pleasure and the medical or therapeutic effects of reading, see Olson, Literature as Recreation.

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or formulae. Devotional readers performed a range of interactions with scriptural or devotional texts. Readers’ literate gestures, somatic behaviours, and interpretive and emotional responses are linked to the functions and contexts within which they understand sacred writing, devotional reading, and prayer. Some readers regarded their prayer books and books of hours as necessary fashion accessories, others considered them functional texts, still others regarded them as fetish or sacred objects. The aesthetic view proposes that the more elaborate and decorated the manuscript book, the more the book might be regarded as a fetish object; more simply designed devotional texts for lay audiences were regarded as more functional. But, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter Six, simply or even roughly written Latin texts could themselves be fetishized as magical language objects. So could eroticized texts of whatever design. The materialist, somatic, and psychological contexts of reading complicate any sharp distinction between fetishistic and utilitarian functions or responses to a book. The fetish and util­ itarian functions are affective sympathies. As we have seen in medieval visual representations of reading, the reader’s touch is a key part of the gestural semiotics of reading and a locus of anxiety regarding silent or private reading. Participating in a literate technology as social practice involves understanding how simply holding the book implies a gesture of textual or writerly authority, in Barthes’s sense. The one holding the book — the grammar teacher, preacher, Christine de Pizan in her illustrations, the Virgin Mary, the female devotee — is also presumed to hold authority in the imagined textual community. The image of the private reader holding his or her own book of hours, prayer book, or Bible could also constitute a trope of resistant reading in later medieval devotional and fictional writing. Sometimes, the image of a reader thumbing through a book, reading discontinuously and skipping around in the text, prompted critics of wider lay literacy to question such readers’ motives and orthodoxy, as they questioned Margery Kempe’s collaborative reading and writing and heretics’ reading of Latin and vernacular scripture. Although Kempe claimed to be ‘illiterate’ or unable to decode the written page, she nonetheless carried an authoritative sign of her evolving text, the ‘Book’ of her spiritual life and struggles. But Kempe’s literate touch and affective literacy were more narrowly circumscribed. She could dictate her text, but once written, she could not inspect or touch it with comprehension nor revoice it. To read her text as text (meaningful material object of language, ink, and skin), she had to hand over her book to other hands, to male clerical readers or scribes, who opened her book to her as they did other books in their reading circles. Kempe’s conflicted literate authority depends on the authority of her own book and her participation in the circulation of devotional and spiritual texts which her clerical

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readers made available to her. Kempe’s aural perception of the text, her weeping and moaning, faintings and ‘roarings’ depend fundamentally on her participation in a literate community which enables her to engage with a narrow range of devotional, affective texts. Nonetheless, unlike many other representations of real and imagined scenes of reading, Kempe’s affective literacy is located in her desire to textualize her spiritual story and in her responsive body rather than in her physical contact with texts themselves. As Karma Lochrie argues: Kempe situates her own failed speech in a Latin mystical tradition, at the same time drawing upon it and leaving it behind. Hers is not an enterprise of instruction, but one of desire. This desire, in turn, seeks out the hearts of her readers where it longs to make an impression like that of written characters upon the sight. Her voice charges the boundaries of uncharitable hearts and textual traditions.58

Yes, but so does Kempe’s affective literacy. Inscribed textual interventions — scribal and writerly (scriptible) marginal glosses, annotations, doodles, written narratives, etc. — are critical strategies of medieval literate technology and also recognized traces of medieval reading, the writing on and around the edges of writing. But affective literacy shifts the focus of the scene of reading to a point beyond the page and fashions an interpretive, reading hinge with the book and readers. The embodied reader leaves behind traces of the touch of reading and textual response, traces which complicate our understanding of reading response, the object-ness of a text, and the range of somatic textual engagement. In her essay on reading medieval reading, Catherine Brown describes her complex engagement with a manuscript of Augustine’s Confessions and with its earlier readers: Like Fabian’s fieldworkers, readers and the objects they read are, as long as reading happens, cotemporal and cospatial. When I read Newberry MS 12.7 [Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 12.7], I shared an object and the space it created with earlier readers of the same object. The ‘same’ object: this at once is, and is not true. I can say that this is the ‘Augustine’ the commentator read: his fingers warmed this piece of parchment that mine warm now; I see the red initial that he saw. Yet there are now annotations on that page that he never knew, ownership marks he couldn’t imagine. The book’s been rebound, and it must smell differently than it did when he read and wrote; the chemical composition of its pages and the ink and sweat upon them has certainly changed over time.59

58  59 

Lochrie, Margery Kempe, p. 126. Brown, ‘In the Middle’, p. 554.

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Figure 4. Leaf from a Book of Hours, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection, 58, Cleveland, Cleveland Art Museum. Amiens [?], c. 1490. By permission of Jeanne Miles Blackburn and the Cleveland Art Museum.

Brown disturbs the comforting objectivist fantasy that when we read medieval texts in situ or with the manuscripts before us, we do so in their ‘original’ textual environments. Look around. Of course we don’t. Nor can we retrieve or wholly reenact fifteenth-century consciousness. Every historical sympathy is already hybridized, a crossing, a transference located in the present of historicizing.

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Brown’s account has also caused some manuscript curators more than a little worry about the textual objects in their care. Manuscripts and books are part of temporal, historicizing reading hinges. Brown pushes further the idea of marginalia and glosses as parerga, those historicizing and framing textual signs which guide but sometimes establish a new point of departure for reading the text they supplement. She detaches the authority of reading medieval texts not only from the philological idealization of the original manuscript but also from the theoretical regulation of interpretive control. Brown cannily addresses how medieval textuality and conventions for producing and reading texts were, and continue to be, fluid and fundamentally historical, that is, temporalizing retexts. The text is not the same ‘object’ over time and space. More self-evidently than print, manuscript texts are dynamic objects, sites of multiple responses and different understandings, each betraying the histories and traces of their readings. Individual books owned and used by medieval devotional readers suggest how readers shifted between regarding these books as functional texts and as sacred objects. The directions for reading in the Ancrene Wisse and the construction of individual books of hours combine both concepts and both functionalities of the book. Readers, voicing in careful tones the text of a prayer book or book of hours or gazing at the illumination depicting Christ’s birth or crucifixion, used writing and pictorial images as prompts for imaginative contemplation and spiritual activity. Campin’s painting ‘The Madonna and Child with Saints’ places St Catherine’s discontinuous, contemplative gazing on her book and on the image of the Madonna and Child in the same pictorial space. The Benedictine trope of inspicere, gazing on the page with its visible language and pictorial images, foregrounded the devotional book as a complex semiotic object, as functional text and sacred object. Within this literate semiosis, a sacred text metonymically redramatized the reader’s desired or imagined engagement with the divine, or with an eroticized object or body of desire. Sexual intercourse and erotic passion are frequent tropes of the mystic’s affective response to sacred texts. Metonymy is the trope for the material economy of affective literacy. The gestural traces of embodied affective reading are manifested on the skin of the page. Within this material economy of affective literacy, some later medieval readers participated in transgressive somatic reading, remaking the book as object and textual sign as they engaged the book with their hands, lips, eyes, bodies. Consider, for example, two gestural traces of affective reading in devotional texts: a crucifixion illustration from a book of hours, probably produced in Amien around 1490, and the image of the wound in Christ’s side from a manuscript of Gautier de Metz’s Image du monde (figs. 4, 5). The illuminated Amien book of hours was produced for the prosperous fifteenth-century reading market rather

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Figure 5. Gautier de Metz, Image du monde, Paris, BnF, MS f. fr. 574, fol. 140r. c. 1320. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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than for an elite patron. The illustrated text of Gautier de Metz’s Image was copied in Paris in the 1320s for Guillaume Flotte, a councillor of Philip the Fair and later Chancellor (1399). In the northern French book of hours illumination, Christ on the cross is surrounded by the Virgin Mary and St John. The illustration accompanies the prayer for Matins, ‘Domine, labia mea aperis’ (Lord, open my lips). The faces of Mary and John are distinct, but Christ’s face is smudged, most likely by a reader or readers repeatedly touching or kissing Jesus’s painted face as they held or gazed on the book.60 The warmth of readers’ lips or fingers loosened the dried paint from the vellum, and slowly over time, bits of Christ’s painted image moved from the page to readers’ bodies. Like the Host, the image of Jesus has been ingested by the ruminating reader. The book of hours page instantiates the linguistic and erotic ambiguity of the prayer. As the reader prays, ‘Lord, open my lips’, aloud or silently, he or she begins a mental contemplation and a physical response to the painted crucifixion scene. When did the paint on the page become softened? When did Jesus’s face begin to blur under the worshipper’s lips? Often, at the hinge of textuality, the materiality of the text or page is understood as erasing rather than retaining the temporality of environment. But as a Peircean dynamic object, the materiality of the text shifts as the space-time environment of one reader differs from that of others. The page of the Amien book of hours becomes a repository of not only authorial signs but also writerly (scriptible) signs; it retains the marks and indices of reading and re-reading. Sometimes these signs are written traces, grammatical diacritics, construe marks, or glosses. Other times the affective trace is the physically altered page. In the Amien manuscript, the trace of reading is a bodily gesture or set of gestures which enact and retext the page itself. Affective reading marked in the smudged Christ faces are traces on the skin, out of time and in the book, emphatically in the past and always able to be renewed. This trace of a gesture of medieval affective literacy retains a scandal while also being characteristic of late medieval piety. At the moment of praying for Christ to touch his or her mouth, the reader folds together the hinge of textuality, erases the difference/distance between reader and book, between referent and iconic sign, and kisses the skin of the page, the painted skin re-presenting Christ’s face. The image of Christ becomes the object of desire on the page. The semiotextual scandal is that the icon is addressed as the referent. As a reading gesture, the kiss repeats the priest’s act of kissing the scriptures, lectionary, altar, or Cross during Mass. But because it’s Jesus’s face which is smudged, the kiss is not just a 60 

Another smudged Christ face appears in a crucifixion miniature in a thirteenth-century English Bible-Missal (San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 26061, fol. 178v).

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generic, venerating kiss. As affective literate practice, the reader’s kiss on Jesus’s face in the Amien book of hours or the Huntington missal is a presumptive act which transmutes the textuality of the text. This is a very personal piety and an intimate reading experience. The traces of lay readers’ kisses on the page poach on the clergy’s authority to approach the page and to mediate Christ in liturgy and worship. That’s the scandal and the transgressive power of affective literacy. The dead flesh of the page is inscribed with ink, paint, and gold leaf in order to re-present the living word/Word. The devotional reader projects meaning and desire onto the physical image of Christ on the page. The smudged Christ face and traces of affective literacy are situated within the book of hours as a complex semiotic assemblage. The text as functional object focuses and organizes the reader’s responses on the page itself but does not altogether control the reader’s responses. The reader’s various gestures and vocalizations render the book, the repository of images and visible language, as a sacred object and a site of scandal. The prayers which accompany the illustrations are drawn from the Psalms, Song of Songs, sermons, songs, and liturgy. By vocalizing the text, a reader attaches and reattaches a voice to written language and pictorial images. Read aloud, the text prompts oral repetition, but reading always threatens to overrun the devotional text. When a reader of the book of hours kisses the painted face of Christ on the cross, the gesture semiotically remotivates the lips as the site of oral/aural textual production and pleasure through the enactment of pious, erotic desire.61 Some devotional manuscripts include kiss crosses in the book to try and contain affective literacies. Kiss crosses are ‘places’ set aside on the page so that readers might touch the text without disturbing the authorial or authorized textual images. Kiss crosses are technologies of the readerly (lisible), not the writerly, text. Another trace of affective devotional literacy is an image of Christ’s side wound, which appears on the final Arma Christi page of a Parisian manuscript of Gautier’s Image du monde (fig. 5). The image of Christ’s side wound was a focal point of later medieval affective piety.62 In this illumination, the centre of the wound is partly erased and the black and red paint rubbed off. Medieval readers don’t usually describe what they have done to manuscripts, but given that the paint on the rest of the manuscript page is intact, we can hypothesize that the centre of the image of Christ’s wound was gradually rubbed 61 

See Camille, ‘Gothic Signs’; Mills, Suspended Animation, pp. 194–95. See Buhler, ‘Prayers and Charms’, pp. 276–77; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption; Beckwith, Christ’s Body; Lewis, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side’. 62 

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off as it was touched or kissed by readers or users of the book. A reader wouldn’t actually have to have read the book or even the words on the page to affectively respond to the image. The concrete gesture whereby the reader places a finger on the book, pointing to a line or word or passage, is transposed in the Image du monde illustration into a pious gesture of affective literacy. The reader’s hand searches the dark open ellipse in the middle of the page, rendered on the page by an ambiguous image of the wound (vulna) as vagina (vulva). The affective gesture is at once sacred, erotic, scandalous, and transgressive. The convention of depicting Christ’s side wound to the scale of a woman’s genitals was not lost on medieval audiences. Eve was born from Adam’s side; the Church (Ecclesia) was said to have been born from Christ’s side. A caption to an image of the side wound (c. 1320) states that the image of the wound will help a woman in childbirth deliver without pain.63 The physical power and connotations of Mary’s body are also represented in the fifteenth-century Chester Annunciation and Nativity play. When the sceptical midwife touches Mary’s vagina, her hand immediately shrivels up.64 Given the medieval and early modern fascination with representing Jesus’s wound in realistic dimensions and frequently on the vertical axis, Christ’s wounding on the cross was associated by devotional writers with maternal genitals and a sexualized female body. In these devotional images, the ‘wound of sex’ is both sacralized and cross-gendered. Jesus’s suffering was often analogized as childbirth; Christ was rendered as a maternal figure. Kissing the representation of Christ’s side wound, or placing one’s finger on it, provokes the erotic tension in the semantic and visual overlap of vulna and vulva. The wound on the page is one of the textual places where the

63 

Simpson, ‘On the Measure of the Wound’; see Buhler, ‘Prayers and Charms’, pp. 270–78. For the recurrent sexualized linkage of Christ’s side wound (vulnus) with the female genitals (vulva), see the Franciscan work by Giacomo de Milano, Stimulus amoris, ed. by scholars of the Collegii s. Bonaventurae (composed in Latin for lay and religious women and men, c. 1300). The Stimulus amoris, sometimes attributed to Bonaventure, was translated into Middle English as the Prickynge of Love. See Psalter and Hours of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy and later mother of Charles V (Paris, before 1349; The Cloisters Collection, New York, 1969, 69.86; available online at [accessed 10 March 2012]). Other eroticized side wound images from medieval texts are available at [accessed 10 March 2012]. See the hand drawn image in Humphrey Newton’s (d. 1536) commonplace book, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c. 66, fol. 129v. 64  The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. by Mills, pp. 118–19.

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contemplative reader composes the meditative scene and enters the text: ‘The cen­tral image of meditative union is that of entering the wound.’65 While sexual imagery and functional, affective semiosis were part of general devotional and contemplative discourse, metaphors of sex/physical union were more common among late medieval texts by and for women. However, the image of Christ’s side wound and the trace of affective literacy on the Image du monde page complicate gendered and sexual significations of the trope of reading. As an open or writerly (scriptible) devotional image, the open wound metonymically stands in for Christ’s torn and penetrated body. It also evokes the female body in/of affective contemplation and reading. Doubling the female body, Jesus’s wounded body semiotically transposes and sexualizes the image of Christ on the cross and in the book, while relying on and resacralizing the ideology of female physiology.66 As part of imagined space, the skin of the book (vellum) becomes a permeable membrane. Marked and painted sheepskin is read and somatically engaged with as the Lamb’s skin and as an eroticized body. Word makes Flesh. Flesh organizes Gesture. Flesh — reader’s body and page’s skin — connects affective gesture, expression, and writing. In affective literacy, representations of Christ’s side wound enable devout readers to connect with and touch the image-place of Jesus. The image of the penetrated Jesus as a displaced body part sacralizes the culturally contentious and physically real part of a woman’s body and circulates it as a more generally desirable textual image. As I mentioned earlier, some late medieval writing presents negative kinds of affective literacy, as in the violent scenes of reading in which the Wife of Bath, Piers Plowman, and Christine de Pizan angrily tear pages and toss books aside or into the fire. They touch the page in order to silence or destroy it, or they interrupt traditional literate authority and clerical privilege which categorizes and controls others, especially women and peasants. Some more ambiguous affective reading scenes closely link the somatic with the emotional or cognitive and so problematize devotional reading and gestures of touch and literacy. I ’ll focus here on two examples: the thirteenth-century French Romance of Flamenca and Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno, Canto 5. The Romance of Flamenca is a hyperliterate narrative which thematizes book erotics and textual self-consciousness. Flamenca reads the ritual gestures of liturgy 65  Lewis, ‘The Wound in Christ’s Side’, p. 214; Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, pp. 187–89. 66  See Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose, pp. 32–43; Robertson, ‘“This Living Hand”’; Elliott, Spiritual Marriage.

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Plate 1. Leaf from a Book of Hours, Jeanne Miles Blackburn Collection, 21, Cleveland, Cleveland Art Museum. Master of the Gold Scrolls workshop, Bruges, c. 1410–15. By permission of Jeanne Miles Blackburn and the Cleveland Art Museum.

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Plate 2. Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Wien, Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, MS 1857, fol. 14v. Master of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy, Flanders, c. 1475. By permission of the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek.

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Plate 3. Robert Campin. Merode Altarpiece. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Flanders, 1425–28. All rights reserved. By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Plate 4. Robert Campin (and assistants). Madonna and Child with Saints in the Enclosed Garden, Samuel Kress Collection, 1959.9.3 (1388)/PA. Flanders, 1440–60. By permission of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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Plate 5. Book of Hours, Use of Rouen, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Buchanan e.3, fol. 74r. Rouen, c. 1500. By permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

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against the covert maneuvers of courtly love. Like Bernard of Clairvaux reading the Song of Songs, the romance foregrounds the erotic kiss, but for romantic rather than spiritual desire. The lover, William of Nevers, uses his breviary as a go-between during the Mass to touch the lips of his beloved, but unfortunately married, Flamenca. In a narrative metonymy, William yearns for the fetishized book which carries the trace of Flamenca’s touch so that he may look at, hold, and kiss it/her.67 When the lovers finally kiss one another directly, their ecstasy repeats the experiences they had when one of them kissed a mass-book the other had touched.68 Face-to-face erotic desire re-presents textually mediated desire. The circulating text in Flamenca produces secondary presence through absence, not unlike Troilus’s response to Criseyde’s letters in Chaucer’s poem.69 Kissing the book is a performance of displaced or mediated affectus rather than real presence. The romance takes textual erotics, or erotic textuality, a step further when Flamenca’s husband, Sir Archambaut, unknowingly brings his wife a manuscript greeting card from her lover. On the page, There were two figures (ymages) beautifully figured with such delicacy they seemed to be fully alive. And one was in the foreground on his knees kneeling directly in front of the other. A flower came out of his mouth touching the beginnings of the lines (verses); and at the end there was another that also gathered and wrapped them all and guided them together toward the ear of the other figure where True Love like an angel gave her advice, interpreting what the flower meant.70

Flamenca’s bedroom scene of reading retexts the Annunciation scene in a book of hours as fin’amors. Parodically repeating female devotional readers, Flamenca immediately recognizes William’s and her own face in the textual figures. When she privately holds the page and folds the edges together like hinges, the text enacts a kiss: 67 

The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. by Blodgett, ll. 2587–2610 (pp. 134–37). The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. by Blodgett, ll. 6543–51 (pp. 138–39). 69  See Rust, Imaginary Worlds, pp. 102–04. 70  The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. by Blodgett, ll. 7111–23 (pp. 366–67). 68 

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Often they [Flamenca and her maid] folded and unfolded them and were careful not to damage them by rubbing (bregon) so that neither letters nor pictures (en letras ni em penchura) look in the least erased (effassadura).71

Every night, Flamenca kisses the fetishized text as if it were a relic or a breviary or her lover’s body, but she is careful not to erase or smudge any part. She folds the edges of the manuscript page to produce an ever-perfect textual kiss. The manuscript greeting card and its hidden, performative love note recall Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermon on the Song of Songs, where the earthly ‘kiss’ joins lips to lips while the ‘kiss of his mouth’ joins the human to the divine. Later, the love note becomes more than a fetish object as Flamenca substitutes the text for her absent lover in her bed: ‘Friend, I feel your heart in place of mine where it hides away, and thus I place these greetings so close to it [my heart] so it might feel and share my pleasure.’72

In Flamenca, transgressive affective literacy mimics Christian literate devotion and textual festishization. Flamenca’s affective literacy also poaches on more general manuscript practices for performative literacies. Private or silent affective reading provokes Flamenca’s embodied pleasure, from paper to flesh to soul. Literate technology brings body and text into a closer affective relationship as the hinges of reading (bodies and pages) are folded together. At the same time, Flamenca restrains her reader’s touch on the page. Manuscript images and letters are eroticized, yet impermanent, always in danger of disappearing or being erased through the touch of desire. With these images of reading gestures and traces of affective literacy in mind, I want to conclude by rereading one of the most famous scenes of reading, Dante’s brief story of Paolo and Francesca. Dante’s narrative interrogates, perhaps not entirely consciously, affective literacy and the consequences of erasing textual difference at the hinge of embodied reading. Francesca tells a damned soul’s story of sin and loss, as her lover Paolo weeps over her shoulder. The illicit lovers — Paolo and Francesca were both already married, she to Paolo’s brother, Giovanni Malatesta — were reading for pleasure (‘per diletto’), privately, a 71  72 

The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. by Blodgett, ll. 7138–41 (pp. 368–69). The Romance of Flamenca, ed. and trans. by Blodgett, ll. 7151–55 (pp. 368–69).

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romance of Lancelot and Guinevere.73 The book organized the readers’ hands, eyes, and mouths. Francesca the narrator mentions their mouths, but she does not indicate whether they are reading aloud to one another or silently. With echoes of Abelard’s account of his reading with the young Heloise in his Historia calamitatum, Dante’s narrative rehearses how the story of adulterous love Paolo and Francesca are reading together prompts them to keep turning toward one another, their faces blushing and flushing with increasing passion. Both the text as object and the act of reading become syntactic agents in Francesca’s narrative. Reading (‘lettura’) and point (‘punto’) are the subjects of the verbs drew together (‘sospine’), changed one’s colours/makes blush, redden (‘scolorocci’), and mastered (‘vinse’). The reading couple is dominated by the text and their reading behaviour, just as Lancelot in the text they read is said to have been constrained by love (‘come amor lo strinse’). Later, Francesca refers to the romance text and its author as a collective pimp (‘Galeotto’) who aroused the readers’ erotic desire.74 Dante’s narrative foregrounds the text the lovers hold, the surface of the manu­script page, and the readers’ responses. Francesca uses the scribal term punto (Latin punctus) to mark the moment — or place — in their reading when/where the couple’s passionate identification with the courtly characters dissolves the textual object separating them in an erotic hypostasy of reading and the longedfor kiss. Punto both marks a pause in the lovers’ reading and functions as a hinge or punning word in the text, thus linking the spatial and temporal semiotics of reading. Punto refers to a particular moment in the narrative when Lancelot and Guinevere follow their desire, which prompts Paolo and Francesca to follow theirs. Punto also refers to the signum, a diacritical mark, written on the page to help readers vocalize and construe the text or pause to distinguish elements of a construction or mark a significant or problematic passage.75 The moment of punto is both performative and textual. Dante’s scene of reading in Inferno, Canto 5, meditates on the nature of skin, touch, and affect and on embodied reading with eyes, mouth, hands, and soul. The narrative highlights the moment of the readers’ affective response to the secular text they are reading as the physical and emotional realization of desire and as the moment of sin. In effect, the lovers shift their eyes and mouths from the skin and words on the page to the body of the other. As the readers increasingly identify with the Arthurian lovers, they repeat and retext devotional 73 

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. by Sinclair, v, 127. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. by Sinclair, v, 128–37. 75  See Parkes, Pause and Effect, pp. 39–40, 42. 74 

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literacy where the pious reader supposedly imagines himself or herself at the scene of Christ’s crucifixion and identifies with the suffering Christ and the mourners depicted in word and image on the manuscript page. A reader who imaginatively identified with the scene of the crucifixion, who wept at the Passion and felt Christ’s suffering as she read and contemplated, was considered by many to be performing orthodox piety and affective literacy. But such behaviours could go too far, become too disruptive, transgress social boundaries which demarcate passions from pathologies. Like devotional readers, Dante’s two secular readers imagine themselves in the scene of illicit love between Lancelot and Guinevere. But unlike the traces of devotional affective literacy we have considered in the Amiens book of hours and Gautier’s Image du monde, Paolo and Francesca turn their eyes and faces from the book. They detach their eyes and mouths from the page they are reading and kiss one another’s mouth/body/skin. Within the context of affective literacy, Dante’s narrative of Paolo and Francesca reading an Arthurian romance ambiguously repeats with a difference other readers’ pious, passionate touching and kissing of the holy text, the skin, the vellum whose surface presents sacred images and devotional writing. The scene of Paolo and Francesca’s private, perhaps even silent, reading for pleasure (‘diletto’) problematizes reception and response to texts in medieval lit­ eracies. When the readers remove their hands and eyes from the page, fall silent, and stop reading (‘quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante’), they touch each other.76 They transfer their textual erotic desire to desire for the other. The lovers parody devotional reading by enacting the anxieties about affective secular reading which troubled Guibert de Nogent and medieval grammarians who debated whether to allow young people to read Ovid’s Amores. The somatic technology of affective literacy doubles as the location of sexual desire and textual pleasure. The text as a dynamic, contingent material object, is also the site of readers’ desiring, imaginative identifications. No wonder Dante the pilgrim faints. He hears Francesca’s oral story about her reading, then is overcome by his own affective but undefined response to her story. Dante the pilgrim’s swept-away behaviour ironizes affective mystical rapture and embodied responses to sacred reading. The affectus of this reading scene in Hell is complex: remembering the scene of the lovers’ reading for delight produces misery and weeping for Francesca and Paolo, while Dante the pilgrim, moved to pity at their oral narrative, faints. The narrative re-presents affective literacy as erotic desire, repetition, and displacement — affective literacy opens an interminable loop. Sin and ecstasy are twinned and 76 

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. by Sinclair, v. 138.

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repeated, hinged, such that Dante’s complex scene of reading questions affective literacy as a procedure for faith and challenges its motives and consequences for dissolving the differences between texts and readers. Affective literacy foregrounds the later medieval semiotics of reading in several ways. First, while medieval Christian devotion depended on paying imaginative and emotional attention to the ‘absent body of Jesus’, the materiality of affective texts deployed the fictionality at the centre of mystical discourse and various kinds of affective reading. Many of the devotional readings and images we have examined render Jesus semiotically present (the mystics’ claim that the open text makes present the divine), while their linguistic and visual textuality depends on the absent Jesus, his not-there-ness which is the precondition for contemplative and imaginative semiosis. Second, as metonymic borderland discourse, gestures of affective literacy — kissing the image, touching the sacred and forbidden place on the page, fainting, weeping, roaring, becoming aroused, praying — transgress the boundaries between reader and the divine. Affective literacy seeks to close the gap between reader and image by addressing the image as an indexical signifier and the ‘real presence’ of embodied reading. Affective literacy constructs a personal kind of religious experience and expression. Third, discontinuous reading and the open book characterize the representational code for late medieval readers’ literate gestures. As we saw in the Ancrene Wisse, affective literacy was inscribed in the text as literate governmentality for the anchoresses. The somatic techniques of reading are enunciated within a more comprehensive disciplining of the female body. Fourth, secular affective literacy in the scenes of reading in the Romance of Flamenca and Dante’s Inferno transpose devotional affective literacy by foregrounding the somatic literate technology of readers’ responses. Readerslovers’ gestures and passionate affects or arousal destabilize official literacy and poach on the ideology of textual use-full-ness (utilitas). Readers can use texts in orthodox or transgressive or retexting ways. They respond to the page but not always in ways intended by writers or institutional authorities. Medieval affective literacy foregrounds the writerly (scriptible) potential in all texts and our erotic and somatic displacements at the centre of writing and reading.

Chapter 4

Reading Assimilation and Jewish Latin Textuality I am neither perfectly a Jew nor a Christian. (Hermann of Scheda, Opusculum)

‘I can’t explain myself, I ’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I ’m not myself, you see.’ (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

W

riting and reading across languages and between cultures and com­ munities entails more than just language contact. The contact and exchanges between a Primary and one or more Secondary Dis­courses sometimes results in a Borderland Discourse, hovering between here and there in a new heterotope. A Borderland Discourse is at once a projection of the linguistic subject and an appropriation of the symbolic order. Borderland Discourses are primarily located in and around schools, youth culture, many workplaces, and sites of social exchange such as markets and urban centres, ‘where people from diverse backgrounds, and thus, with diverse Primary and community-based Discourses, can interact outside the confines of public sphere and middle-class “elite” Discourses’.1 Borderland Discourses emerge especially in urban spaces, frontiers, and hyperliterate contexts. Gee’s concept of a Borderland Discourse, not unlike Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of mestiza discourse, resonates with those medieval literate discourses which combine dominant and nondominant cul­tures and Latin and vernacular languages to create new, hybrid and potentially transformative identities, knowledge-making practices and languages. Borderland Discourse is a kind of multiliteracy, wherein people struggle to articulate in one or more languages and use different scripts, genres, vocabularies, visual designs, gestures, performativities, and socio-cultural signifiers to construct meaning and interrupt or appropriate dominant Secondary Discourse. Literates’ practices for reading aloud or silently 1 

Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, pp. 189–94 (the quotation is on p. 189).

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and for interpreting vary, depending on the languages, her­meneutic strategies and performance and gestural conventions involved. Border­land Discourses foreground how multiliteracies and multilingualism are interlinked. Late medieval literacy has usually been described in terms of the relations between Latin and one or more vernaculars and in terms of who could or could not read and write across them. Latin was the dominant discourse of learned, elite and religious culture, but Latin was consistently challenged and retexted in later medi­eval multilingual literacies. Alongside vernaculars, Hebrew also challenged Latin language ideology and cultural dominance within multilingual contact zones. To broaden our understanding of later medieval multilingualism and multiliteracies, I want to consider the status of Hebrew literacies and medieval Jewish culture in the midst of Christian Europa. Like Latin, Hebrew was recognized as a sacred language in the Christian tradition, and like Latin, Hebrew initiated Jews into alphabetic literacy. Medieval language theories from Jerome to Dante posited Hebrew as the original language in Eden and before Babel, the predecessor of multilingualism. But the status of Hebrew was different in Christian literacy communities than in Jewish com­ munities, where Hebrew constituted a distinct and defining religious dis­course. Literate (Torahed) Jews with knowledge of Hebrew were biliterate in a different way from literate and often highly educated Christians with knowledge of Latin and/or Hebrew. Moreover, who read Hebrew or listened to Hebrew translated into a vernacular mattered as much as the language itself. In multi­lingual Iberia, for example, Hebrew was part of the cultural as well as religious discourse, along with varieties of Romance, Arabic, and later, Latin. In twelfth-century multi­ lingual northern Europe, Christian scholars’ vernacular interactions with literate Jews influenced their understanding of scripture.2 Multilingual environments are variable and dynamic. For medieval know­ ledges of Hebrew, Michael Signer distinguishes between ‘cultural Hebraism’ and ‘lexical Hebraism’. Cultural Hebraism entails Christian scholars seeking ‘infor­ mation from a living Jew with no requirement of independent access to the Hebrew language’. Lexical Hebraism sets a higher standard and ‘is predicated on the independent ability of the Christian to read biblical and postbiblical texts’.3 The authority of the Latin Vulgate text rested in part on the claim that Jerome’s translation enabled Christian readers to access the original Hebrew of the Old Testament. But most Christian scholars had little experience with or knowledge of Hebrew. Some who did learn Hebrew did so to refute or convert the Jews. 2  3 

See Dahan, Les intellectuels chrétiens, p. 249; Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 149–56. Signer, ‘Polemic and Exegesis’, pp. 22–23.

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Others, such as Rabanus Maurus and Peter Abelard, appealed to a knowledge of Hebrew, however rudimentary, for grasping Hebraica veritas and for gaining a more adequate understanding of scripture, but there is no evidence either had anything more than lexical knowledge of Hebrew. Their language attitudes toward Hebrew were based on linguistic, doctrinal, or exegetical principles. Many twelfth- to fifteenth-century Christian manuscripts, especially devotional ones, contain Hebrew characters, words or phrases inscribed in the margins or sometimes interlinearly (for example, Latin Psalter, Chicago, Newberry Library, Vault Case, MS 183, fol. 54v, most likely France or Flanders, c. 1480). The works of R. Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi) of Troyes’s (d. 1105) and the Englishmen Andrew of St Victor (d. 1175) and Roger Bacon (d. 1292/94) and their students suggest how the study of Hebrew and Jewish exegesis among Christian and Hebrew scholars shaped the multilingual environment and lan­ guage attitudes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Twelfth-century Victorine scholars cultivated relations with northern French Jewish scholars as part of their program to historicize and improve exegetical strategies. Unlike many, Andrew of St Victor and Roger Bacon could read Hebrew texts with varying degrees of competence. Smalley relies on G. A. C. Hadfield’s 1971 research on Andrew’s Hebrew sources to argue that Andrew could read Hebrew texts with a Jewish literate mentor but not entirely on his own.4 In multilingual and hyperliterate environ­ments, however, variable access to texts and interpretive strategies is functionally more important than some imposed standard of literate ‘competence’ based on a model of the self-contained, individual reader. Multilingual, boot­ strapping access and functional understanding can produce new language attitudes. Some twelfth-century Christian scholars increasingly regarded Hebrew as an important sacred language for understanding the scriptures in their historical contexts. Abelard recommended that the nuns at the Paraclete learn to read Hebrew and Greek to pursue lectio divina. It is likely both Abelard and Heloise had at least a basic lexical knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, based on their letters and the intriguing Problemata Heloissae (written sometime in the 1130s), in which Heloise posed questions to Abelard about how to interpret certain passages in Hebrew and Christian scriptures.5 By the thirteenth century, some scholars considered Hebrew to be an important language for comparative analysis within the Universal Grammar project, not just as the original language in a providential scheme. Herbert of Bosham, Andrew’s pupil, and Nicolas of 4 

Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. xii. See Abelard, Problemata Heloissae, ed. by Migne, in PL, 178, esp. cols 717B–718B. I thank Constant Mews for bringing this text to my attention. See Mews and Perry, ‘Peter Abelard’. 5 

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Lyra were cultural as well as lexical Hebraists, scholars who read Hebrew texts on their own for their own intellectual purposes.6 While Jews and Christians shared local community vernaculars, there is evidence, admittedly ambiguous, that Jews before 1500 in different regions may have spoken distinct varieties of the local vernacular. These local Jewish varieties, however distinct from the dominant variety, would have resulted from Jews’ multilingualism, their Hebrew literacy and different relationships to the local languages and to Latin.7 Medieval Jews sometimes wrote their vernacular with Hebrew characters, reflecting Hebrew literacy as their first or primary written code. Evidence from Iberia indicates that the Spanish spoken by Jews there was influenced phonologically and grammatically by Jews’ uses of Arabic and Hebrew. Moreover, Hebrew itself was a linguistic marker of both difference and continuity within Christian Europa. Before 1250, not all Jewish communities used Hebrew regularly, but when they did, their use of Hebrew for worship, scripture, academic study, and inter-regional or everyday exchanges marked their religious and ethnic difference, their partly unassimilated status, within dominant Christian communities. In this chapter I shall focus on a spectacular instance of Jewish multilingual literacy and textual practice in the environment of twelfth-century JewishChristian relations and Christian appropriations of Jewish reading. Hermann of Scheda’s Opusculum de conversione sua frames Hermann’s struggles with assimilation within a literacy narrative. In Hermann’s narrative, the multilingual domain of the Rhineland (Aschkenaz) — German, Judaeo-German (Yiddish), Hebrew and Latin — is reimagined as a set of different but sometimes intersecting or overlapping affiliations. Hebrew literacy was an empowering discourse, not just among Jewish readers but also among some Christians who found in Hebrew texts a different socio-temporal origin for God’s word and new starting points for alternative perspectives on dominant Christian discourse and language ideology. As a result, Hermann’s Opusculum occupies a borderland position in relation to dominant discourses. The text in some respects deterritorializes ‘Jewish reading’ and the sensus literalis, such that Hermann becomes a liminal literate figure and ‘Jewish reading’ becomes a floating practice in flight. Deterritorialized Hebrew textuality, transposed into Latin, becomes a new site of literate and social conflict, so that Hermann engages in a new struggle to reterritorialize the language and 6  Bacon, The Greek Grammar, ed. by Nolan and Hirsch; Löwe, Herbert of Bosham’s Com­men­ tary; Löwe, ‘The Mediaeval Christian Hebraists’; Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 149–72; Olszowy-Schlanger, ‘The Knowledge and Practice’; Signer, ‘Polemic and Exegesis’, pp. 26–27. 7  See, for example, Miller, Jewish Multiglossia, pp. 36–43.

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the scriptural authority. In addition, the Opusculum represents and deploys local, sometimes subversive cultural practices and exploits ambiguities and anxieties regarding language mixing and multiliteracy in ethnically and religiously plural contexts. Reading is a kind of poaching and assemblage.8 The Latin text known as Opusculum de conversione sua is attributed to the twelfth-century Ashkenazi Jew known variously as Judah ha-Levi, Hermann of Cologne, Hermann Judah, or Hermann of Scheda (after the Praemonstratensian abbey he entered and later led as abbot).9 The Opusculum has a checkered recep­ tion history. Some doubt its authenticity entirely; others regard it as a conversion story with oblique motives. Karl Morrison focuses on the dynamics of conversion represented in the text, while Steven Kruger barely mentions the text in his study of Jewishness, conversion and embodiment.10 Jean-Claude Schmitt explores the narrative in terms of the relations between oral and literate cultures and between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. For Schmitt, any discussion of the ‘reality’ of the narrative begins not with the life of the imagined author but with the text itself, the document. Schmitt reads the Opusculum as an ‘ideological construction’ perfectly suited to the religious ideals and practices of the Cappenberg Prae­monstratensians. Schmitt reads the Opusculum as an exemplum of conversion rather than as a ‘true’ account of a Jewish convert to Christianity.11 The name of the author and the genre of Latin prose narrative serve the text’s ideological auctor-function. As a first person narrative, Hermann’s Opusculum reflects the expanding uses of personal writing for spiritual, political, or documentary purposes in the twelfth century. In this new multiliterate environment, some discourses, especially multilingual ones, were creating more self-conscious textualities and mobile identities within contact zones of writing, speaking, and language mixing. Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as: social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination […]. Trans­culturation [describes] how subordinated or marginal groups select and in­ vent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture […]. Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.12 8 

See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Randall, pp. xii–xiii, 35–39. For an over­ view of these questions, principally in the thirteenth century, see Stow, ‘The Church and the Jews’. 9  Kleinberg, ‘Hermannus Judaeus’s Opusculum’. 10  Morrison, Understanding Conversion; Kruger, The Spectral Jew. 11  Schmitt, La Conversion d’Hermann le juif, pp. 237–38. 12  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, pp. 4, 6.

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Pratt presents the contact zone primarily in geographical terms. A contact zone is also textual, a textual space. The later medieval multilingual environment made possible new permeable contact zones, Borderland Discourses within trans­culturation, which destabilized or displaced regimes of power and dom­ inant identities in social and textual contexts. At the same time, this more fluid multilingual and multiliterate environment generated new frictions and struggles over identity and group-ness.13 At the intersections of medieval Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular discourses, underwriting Jewish-Christian relations and literacies, power and meaning were contested and retexted in speech and writing as Borderland discursive practices. Hermann’s Opusculum intervenes in twelfth-century constructions of multi­ lingual, ethnic and literate identities by underwriting and undermining all three. The Opusculum interrupts the literacy narrative of assimilation by representing literate intersections and literacy contests which problematize received notions of assimilation and conversion in Christian Europa. As a male member of an Ashkenazi merchant family, Hermann most likely spoke a form of JudaeoGerman (Yiddish) and was very likely literate in written business German. As a Torahed Jew, he was also literate in Hebrew scripture and Jewish liturgy. When Hermann came into closer contact with Latin scriptural literacy and Christian clerical discourse, his bilingual and biliterate matrix was stretched. To put it another way, Hermann’s Jewish understanding of Torah and exegesis were retexted and complicated when he encountered them reframed and revoiced in Christian clerical culture. Providential appropriation defamiliarizes Jewish readers’ sense of ownership of sacred texts. Likewise, Hermann’s acquisition of spoken and written Latin, often marked as privileged access to dominant elite culture, was decentred by his identity and status as a Jew. As sometimes competing sacred languages, Latin and Hebrew were both defamiliarizing discourses for Hermann in relation to one another. Latin transformed Hermann’s biliteracy into triliteracy, and his matrix of com­ petences reenacted struggles between Jewish and Christian reading, between different socio-cultural understandings of literal and spiritual senses of the text, between different language ideologies within dominant and minority cultures undergoing profound socio-cultural changes in the twelfth century. Just as the regime of Christian exegesis was designed to retext Jewish scriptures, Hermann retexts Christian Latin discourse in his post-Christian Jewish multilingual cultural situation. After about 1050, Christian fears and anxieties about cultural 13 

On medieval strategies and unconscious drives for groupification and how they shaped linguistic practices, see Fradenburg, Sacrifice your Love.

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and religious difference change the environment of European Judaism; people are newly interested in the categories of cultural differentiation and assimilation. European medieval Christianity after a transformed Judaism was itself altered. The Opusculum as a literacy and conversion narrative sits squarely in the Augustinian tradition. Intervening in the hyperliterate archive, literacy and conversion narratives foreground new reading formations, writing environments, and interpretive strategies as fundamental aspects of the creation or re-creation of a self. The writing self and the life written retext, gloss and recontextualize one another in an open chain of signifying. The tensions and overlaps between writer and written, between narrating I and narrated or addressed I, foreground literacy and writing as at once theme and medium, performative rather than representative. The narrating I is strategically grounded in Latin discourse, but the text’s narrative tactics and Hermann’s literate drift between Latin, German, and Hebrew speech and discourse often deterritorialize and remake Latin language ideology within a hybrid multilingual context. The narrating I’s Latin in the Opusculum is pluralized by the appropriation of other textual communities and writing traditions into the narrative. Following the conventions of medieval autobiography and dream visions, Hermann’s narrative creates the literate context and events which enable him to write the story at all. Hermann addresses a Latin-reading audience in a Latin discourse, but he was writing within the cultural orbit of the twelfth-century Rhineland and Mainz, a centre of Jewish intellectual culture and a major site for the production of Hebrew and vernacular Jewish texts. He cannot entirely separate his Latin text from the interpretive communities created by his vernacular German and the ‘other’ medieval sacred language, Hebrew. I read Hermann’s Opusculum as a multiliterate conversion narrative. While I agree with Schmitt that the Opusculum is an ideological text, I think the text as we have it exceeds its ideological strategy, whether intentionally or not, as a result of its multilingual literate tactics and micronarratives of language contact and hybridity. The narrator doesn’t fully grasp this conflict in the text, which is one of the reasons the Opusculum is such a remarkable trace of the literate unconscious. Whereas Hermann’s native German speech existed alongside his ethnic and religious knowledge of Hebrew, his Jewish and Hebrew understanding of Torah are reframed when he comes into closer contact with Latin Christian clerical culture. As a member of a minority social and linguistic group in Christian Europe, Hermann’s new Latin competence and reading enable or prompt him to participate more and more in contemporary Christian-Jewish debates, a move which complicates his religious and ethnic identity and blurs his marginal status in terms of language choice and discourse communities. His subsequent

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conversion to Christianity only exacerbates his split subjectivity, at least in the narrative: ‘Quae mihi de reliquo poterit spes esse salutis, neque cum Judaeus perfecte sim neque Christianus?’ (What hope of salvation can there be for me anymore, since I am neither perfectly a Jew nor a Christian?)14 His growing con­ flicts with both Christian and Jewish communities exemplify how many times twelfth- and thirteenth-century religious and linguistic contacts and differences were redescribed as literacy conflicts. The dialectic between the narrating and narrated Is opens the space of autobiography or ‘self writing’ in the text. Conversion and literacy narratives often describe identity reformation as moving from a Primary or Secondary dis­ course to another, more privileged Secondary discourse. Conversion and literacy are imagined as outcomes of community affiliation and assimilation. Hermann’s narrative is contemporaneous with other twelfth-century monastic discourses and with narratives by Abelard, Guibert de Nogent, Adamo di Salimbene, and other monastic letter writers, who represented their past lives under the gaze of their converted narrating Is.15 These writings represent a new textual self-consciousness, one which mediates the represented ‘historical’ reality with a literate I coextensive with the written text. Both the textual I and the historical I operate within the imaginative horizon of the reader who projects a reconstructed version of the writer’s experience. Different historical moments and critical perceptions, like different linguistic subjectivities, are enfolded within the same utterance or the same contact zone or same textual or discursive space. Hermann’s narrative takes this genre one step further to construct the text overtly as a literacy narrative. I ’ll begin with an analysis of the narrative structure of Hermann’s Opusculum and then discuss how the text negotiates Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular literacies by writing a multiliterate self. The Opusculum is a retrospective first-person narrative, comprised of twenty-one chapters. Hermann’s moment of Christian enlightenment occurs in the textual middle, Chapter Eleven, the fulcrum on which the narrative events are balanced. As we shall see, the middle chapter highlights the Opusculum as a kind of literacy bankruptcy narrative, inverting Freire’s ‘banking pedagogy’ as empty assimilation, neither A nor B. In a prefatory letter to his nephew Henry, Hermann indicates that he composed his narrative in Latin at the request of ‘some women of holy lives’ (quarumdam sacrae 14 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 11. All references are to the Latin edition in PL 170, cols 805–36. English translations are mine. 15  On self writing and the question of whether a new consciousness of the individual em­ erged in twelfth-century Europe, see: Hanning, The Individual; Morrison, Understanding Con­ version; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 82–105; Bagge, ‘The Autobiography of Abelard’.

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conversationis feminarum devota petitione coactus sum omnem ejus seriem replicare) because his life story indicates the ‘difficulty’ of true conversion (‘At vero mea conversio, gravissimis in ejus primordio crebrescentibus tentationum procellis, multisque, se ei opponente antiquo hoste, insidiis, et longa protelata fluctuatione, et maximis tandem laboribus effectui est mancipata. Unde et piis auribus tanto ad audiendum est delectabilis, quanto ex hac ipsa effectus sui difficultate exstitit mirabilis’).16 Hermann’s narrative stresses the struggles and temptations which kept him from embracing Christianity, including not only doc­trine, ritual and his discomfort in the company of Christians but also his relation to Latin literacy and different textual interpretive strategies. The narrating I begins with his family genealogy (he comes from the tribe of Levi, the traditional priesthood) and a dream the thirteen-year-old Hermann had. In his dream, the Emperor Henry V gives the young boy a white horse, a gold belt, and a silk purse with seven coins. Accompanying the emperor to his palace, Hermann enjoys a feast, including ‘olus ex multigenis herbis radicibusque confectum’ (a salad made up of many kinds of herbs and roots). When the adolescens tells the dream to his maternal uncle Isaac, ‘magnae tunc apud Judaeos virum auctoritatis’ (a man of great authority among the Jews), the uncle interprets the dream in an ethnic and secular context, ‘quamdam mihi secundum carnis felicitatem […] conjecturam’ (a conjecture that made sense to me from the perspective of carnal happiness).17 As the narrator reports the interpretation, ‘per equum magnum et candidum significari dicens quod nobilem ac speciosam uxorem sortiturus, per nummos marsupio inclusos, quod multas divitias habiturus, per celebratum cum imperatore convivium, quod plurimum honorabilis inter Judaeos essem futures’ (He said that the great white stallion signified that a noble and beautiful wife would become my lot; the coins in the purse, that I was to have great riches; the feast celebrated with the emperor, that I would in the future be highly honoured among the Jews).18 The narrating I then immediately interrupts this secular interpretation with a proleptic commentary on the all-important spiritual interpretation of the dream which concludes the narrative (Chapter Twenty-One). Prolepsis, a future narrative, a not yet but to come, marks the formal entrance of the narrating I in the text. The dialectic of autobiography, narrative power and interpretive foreknowledge in the Opusculum constitute what Genette calls ‘variable focalization’, that is, more 16 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, Preface (PL 170, col. 805). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 1 (PL 170, col. 808A). 18  Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 1 (PL 170, col. 807C). 17 

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than one controlling point of view in the narrative.19 The narrator’s knowledge of interpretive change is encoded in the representation of the distant past, before the change has actually occurred. The narrating I then skips ahead seven years, to when the twenty-year-old Hermann makes an unsecured loan to Egbert, Bishop of Münster. In Mainz, Hermann’s father accuses his son of violating good business practices and being ‘grossly negligent’ (nimium me negligentem dicentes). So Hermann is sent back to live in the bishop’s household until the loan is repaid, this time chaperoned by Baruch, because his family ‘Timentes autem ne, quod evenit, Christianis commanens eorum instinctu ab aemulatione paternae traditionis averterer’ (feared that going about with Christians, I might be turned away by their stimulus from following our fathers’ tradition). Literacy is about identity and community, groupness, not just skills or comprehension. Hermann’s closer contact with earnest Christians also meant closer contact with Christian Latin literacy and scriptural exegesis. Business and religion are mixed in Hermann’s multilingualism, and his father does not trust Christians with money or faith. The narrating I tells how, in Bishop Egbert’s household, his former self ‘amica adolescentibus curiositate illectus, earumdem me ovium gregi admiscui, temeraria quidem praesumptione’ (mingled with the herd of those sheep, led on by the friendly inquisitiveness of the young, or rather by a brazen impudence).20 The young Hermann’s curiosity and mixing (L. admisceo, -ui) with dominant Christian society create a contact zone filled with new ideas, social and religious change, and the luring power of Latin literacy. This mingling, potentially polluting, also estranged his Hebrew literacy and Jewish identity within the dominant culture. When Hermann heard Bishop Egbert preach in German, he encountered Christian typological exegesis and interpretations which wove together the Old and New Testaments and retexted the Hebrew scriptures differently from the way he heard and read them in the synagogue. Christians and Jews shared the local vernacular, so Hebrew, Latin, and different modes of scriptural exegesis functioned bilaterally as dividing practices and group affiliations. As Hermann listened to Bishop Egbert preach, he compared literal and spiritual interpretations of Torah texts he knew well as a literate Jewish man: Ego autem episcopum haec et hujusmodi in populo declamantem, tanto avidius ac delectabilius audiebam, quanto et ea quae de Veteris Instrumenti memorabat his­tories, saepe in hebraicis lecta codicibus memoriter retinebam. Sciens etiam ani­ malia non ruminantia a lege inter immunda reputari [Leviticus 11], quaecunque 19  20 

Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Lewin, pp. 189–94. Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 2 (PL 170, col. 808A).

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mihi ex illius praedicatione audita placuerant, in ventrem memoriae saepius me­ cum ruminanda transmisi. (As the bishop [Egbert] discoursed among the people on these and like matters, I listened with so much more eagerness and delight, as I retained in my own mem­ory those things which he was recalling from the histories of the Old Deed (Instru­ mentum) and which had often been read in Hebrew codices. Knowing also that animals that do not chew the cud are numbered by the Law among the unclean, I transferred to the stomach of memory for frequent rumination with myself what­ ever things I heard in his preaching that pleased me.)21

The narrating I uses the figure of ruminatio to describe how he listened to Bishop Egbert’s sermon not as a Christian convert but as a visiting Jew. Here, Hermann’s text detaches ruminatio from its monastic reference and resemanticizes it in the context of Jewish dietary law (Leviticus) in order to compare Jewish and Christian interpretive practices. Hermann’s retexting of ruminatio had to be jarring for his contemporary Christian readership, but it also suggests how in twelfth-century northern France Jewish and Christian religious categories could overlap without being the same. Despite some shared textual traditions, many twelfth-century Christian polemicists contrasted what they misleadingly described as Jews’ ‘literal’ inter­ pretation of the Torah with Christians’ ‘spiritual’ interpretations. But in this early episode, ruminatio as a reading and interpretive strategy becomes a site of multilingual and multicultural contact, transculturation. The narrating and narrated Is coincide to justify ruminatio according to Jewish law rather than Christian hermeneutics. In this contact, the Latin literate concept of ruminatio reverts to an open procedure. Encountering Christian scriptural interpretation from inside the Christian community, Hermann is an active listener who retains whatever he hears that ‘pleases’ (placuerant) him rather than what Bishop Egbert might have wished to impart. At this point in the narrative, just what that pleasure is remains underdetermined. This early scene of hermeneutics dramatizes how Christian and Jewish exe­ getes were imagined to or in fact did read the same Bible passages differently. Drawing on third- to eleventh-century rabbinical and Talmudic writing, medi­ eval Jewish exegesis included not only historical/literal (Peshat) but also alle­ gorical (Remez, Derash) and mystical (Sod) modes of interpretation.22 This potentially fourfold interpretive scheme is similar to fourfold allegorical exegesis in Christian reading culture. But in Hermann’s text the range of Jewish exegesis 21  22 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 2 (PL 170, col. 808D). See Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 150–52; Halivni, Peshat and Derash, esp. pp. 23–51.

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gets flattened into the Christian ideological contrast between Jewish literalism and Christian spiritual reading. As Hermann listened, Bishop Egbert divided the text of the Old Law and read some passages transhistorically, superseding spatiotemporal distance, and other passages as typological prefigurations or metaphors of Christian truth. Christian typological exegesis is an appropriating mode of reading, wherein the Old Testament is retexted as either literal or figurative meaning and reframed within Christian doctrine and the sociocultural, political, and textual communities that doctrine created. The bishop’s typological reading interrupts the intention and historical situations of the Hebrew scriptures, which Egbert’s contemporaries Hugh and Andrew of St Victor called the littera and sensus. Although they endorsed typological and sacramental reading, the Victorine exegetes said the Hebrew text (littera) should also be respected and read in its appropriate linguistic and historical contexts. Unlike Egbert, twelfthcentury learned readers, such as Hugh of St Victor, Herbert of Bosham, and Stephen Harding, abbot of Citeaux, believed that the best Latin version of the Bible depended on careful analysis of the Hebrew of the Old Testament and consultation with learned Jews of the time.23 Hermann’s description of his encounter with Bishop Egbert’s typological reading of the Old Testament uses the representation of individual reading responses and frames to reproduce and then displace the interpretive schema which the narrated I has not yet grasped but which marks proper Christian reading in the text. Reading the Old Testament against the Jews, Bishop Egbert characterized Jews in his metacommentary as brutes, ‘sola in his littera, velut palea, contentis’(content with the letter of the precepts alone, as with chaff ), while reasonable (ratio) Christians nourish themselves with ‘spirituali intelligentia, velut dulcissima paleae medulla’ (spiritual understanding, as with the sweetest pith of straw).24 These binaries — Jew vs Christian, letter vs spirit, chaff vs kernel, surface vs depth, deafness vs hearing — belong to the dominant twelfth-century Christian literate imaginary. In dominant Christian literacies, these oppositions distinguish good from bad readers, orthodox from heterodox, mature from immature, proper from improper literacies. When Hermann acquires Latin literacy, he might begin to read the Old Testament in Latin, but he cannot forget altogether his initial reading of the Torah in Hebrew. His Latin literacy always has a Hebrew substratum. So, at 23  For a good overview (beyond Smalley) of the history of literal interpretation, and especially the literal sense as a structuring structure in ancient and medieval contexts, see Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent, pp. 55–98. 24  Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 2 (PL 170, cols 808C–D).

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least initially, the narrating I in the Opusculum deploys the ideological binary between letter and spirit in tactical, more subversive ways. First, Hermann reads literate and multilingual communities narrowly, in terms of their socio-religious affiliations rather than doctrine. Second, as we have seen, the narrating I, by adopting the narrated I’s point of view, retexts the figure of ruminatio as a Jewish rather than a Christian figure of reading and interpretation. And when Hermann hears the Torah discussed in Latin and German in Bishop Egbert’s household, he responds by debating the Hebrew scriptures in a more pluralized context and discusses the scriptures publicly with different religious groups. Hermann’s discourse mixing and multilingual conflicts deepen after he began studying Latin and reading Latin scripture: Clericorum etiam saepe ingrediens scholas, libros ab eis accepi, in quibus singu­ lorum elementorum proprietates diligenter considerans, et vocabula sagaciter in­ ves­ti­gans, coepi subito cum ingenti audientium stupore litteras syllabis et syllabas dictionibus, nullo docente, copulare, sicque in brevi scientiam legendi Scripturas asse­cutus sum. Quod ne forte alicui hoc incredibile videatur, non mihi sed Deo, cui nihil impossibile est ascribatur. (Frequently, also, entering the schools of the clergy [at the cathedral in Mainz], I received books from them, in which I diligently considered the properties of in­di­ vidual elements [of grammar] and wisely studies names [nouns]. I began at once, without a teacher and to the immense astonishment of those who heard, to join letters to syllables and syllables to expressions, and so, in brief, I came to know how to read Scripture [i.e., in Latin]. This would, perhaps, seem incredible to any­one if it were ascribed to me and not to God, to whom nothing is impossible.)25

In that Hermann was already literate in Hebrew and German, he adapted his literate skills to decoding Latin in Roman script. This episode depicts knowledge and skills transfer, not a literacy miracle, in hyperliteracy. Shortly after starting his Latin studies, Hermann debated the Benedictine Rupert of Deutz on the nature of faith of Jews and Christians (Chapters Three and Four). His new Latin literacy gained him access to Christian theological disputation, but he continued to occupy a marginal position as a dissenting subject. In effect, Hermann’s Latin disputations affirmed the cogency of Jewish religious identity in the form of another marginal Latin literacy, even as Hermann was poaching on the clerical domain. After these encounters with clerical Latin literacy and public disputation, the narrating I inserts stories of his other encounters with pious and charitable Christians. In particular, Hermann is compelled by Richmar’s asceticism and willingness to endure physical pain to ‘prove’ Christians’ providential election 25 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 2 (PL 170, col. 809D).

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and, hopefully, convert Jews (Chapters Five and Six). He is also impressed by the Augustinian monks of Cappenberg, whose humility and ascetic piety prompt the young Hermann to feel sympathize with them ‘from my inmost being of human feelings’ (ego potius vere miser humano affectu condolens, altaque ex imo corde suspiria trahens) even as he experienced a ‘grandis continuo cordi meo de contrariis atque diversis a se Judaeorum et Christianorum legis ambiguitatis ortus est scrupulous’ (a heavy scruple of doubtfulness […] concerning the mutually contrary and diverse laws established by Jews and Christians).26 Here, the narrated I oscillates between affective engagement with and cultural distance from Christian asceticism. Hermann is especially struck by the diversity of people molded into a group (the ‘faithful’) within the monastic community: ‘in hac Christi fidelium societate ex omnibus (hominibus) variae conditionis diversaeque nationis collecta’ (in this Christian community of the faithful were gathered people of various ranks and diverse nations/regional groups).27 These encounters with ascetic Christians highlight how Hermann’s Latin literacy was embedded within Christian cultural practices. They also foreground the narrated I’s growing alienation, his partial deterritorialization from his historical Jewish identity. By learning Latin in a clerical setting and meeting Christian ascetics, Hermann was becoming even more of a liminal subject: multiliterate in Hebrew, German, and Latin; associating publicly but contentiously with Christian preachers; separated from his home community, but still not completely assimilated to or at home in the dominant interpretive discourse. The narrative at this point plays a trick in developing its point of view. The narrating I knows perfectly well the narrative outcome, but he witholds that information here, leaving the reader with the narrated I’s ambiguous perspective: ‘I had absolutely no idea what could come of these uncertainties’ (Chapter Six). The literacy narrative foregrounds Hermann’s liminality, his linguistic, and cultural between-ness. After recovering his debt and returning to Mainz, Hermann came under in­ creasing suspicion from the Jewish community because he had become in their eyes contaminated by ‘overmixing’ with Christians. Physical association and reading are linked in the narrative. The Opusculum represents Hermann’s conflict in terms which resonate with Basil Bernstein’s theory of restricted and elaborated codes and even more with Leslie Milroy’s Network Theory and the sociolinguistic differences between more homogeneous and more heterogeneous communities.28 26 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 6 (PL 170, cols 816C, 817B). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 6 (PL 170, col. 815D). 28  Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity; Milroy, Language and Social Networks; Milroy, ‘Social Networks’. 27 

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Milroy argues that individuals create personal communities within broader social networks, using interpersonal ties of varying strengths and endurance and different language matrices to solve everyday problems, enhance their social prestige or security and achieve other goals. Sociolinguistic variation within a multilingual network creates identities and literacies, establishes knowledges and creates more ambiguous borders through hybrid discourses. Hermann’s ongoing contact with dominant Latin Christian culture made him suspect within the more restricted community of Rhineland Jews. But Hermann can’t win either way. His newly acquired Latin literacy made him suspect among both Christians and Jews. Baruch the chaperone charged that ‘me contra licitum tanta Christianis sedulitate ac familiaritate adhaesisse, ut jam non Judaeus sed Christianus existimari potuerim, nisi simulator pietate paternam religionem habitu solo mentitus fuissem’ (contrary to our law I had adhered to Christians in such an eager and familiar way that I could be thought, not a Jew, but a Christian. The only reservation was that with simulated piety I had continued, simply out of habit, practicing my ancestral religion).29 Hermann’s use of the word adhaesisse in a sociolinguistic sense suggests identification through association. His elaborated multilingual literacy creates suspicion in both Christian and Jewish communities. The narrative allegorizes some parts of twelfth-century Christian Europe’s fear of global contamination and the simultaneous discovery of difference within the social body. Jews, heretics, and alternative literacies disrupt the presumption of a culturally homogeneous and Christian Europa. Hermann’s liminality continues to be foregrounded and marked later in the narrative. In Egbert’s household, Hermann had compared and contrasted different strategies for reading scripture in Latin, Hebrew and the vernacular. When he returned to Mainz, he combined Jewish and Christian rituals for fast­ ing: ‘ignarus, quod horum magis Deo placeret, indifferenter utrumque servare decrevi’ (But I did not know which of these pleased God the more. I decided to keep both without distinction).30 Although hybridity makes Hermann suspect among Christians and Jews, he adopts hybrid behaviour as a form of ritual piety. Hermann pluralized his practice such that ritual no longer distinguishes (indifferenter). He continued to study scripture from both Christian and Jewish perspectives and disputed more and more with Christians about the meaning of the Old Testament, this time not necessarily to defend Judaism but to satisfy his 29  30 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 7 (PL 170, cols 818A–B). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 8 (PL 170, col. 818D).

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curiosity and discover with ‘reason’ (ratio) whether he should adopt Christianity.31 With his more elaborated multilingual literacy — German, Hebrew, Latin — Hermann began to doubt Jewish scripture as the sole regulating text for everyday life, just as he no longer practised Jewish ritual alone. Whereas Christian cultural Hebraists such as Andrew of St Victor and Stephen Harding preferred the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to the Septuagint, Hermann’s Latin literacy and familiarity with some Christian modes of interpretation complicated his Jewish identification with Hebrew scripture. Multilingualism and new modes of reading and interpretation destabilize his religious and interpretive schemes, leading him to question his Jewish faith and adopt hybrid or pluralized religious practices which produce a disorienting indifference. At one point in the Opusculum, marriage and sexuality briefly displace different literacies as markers of different cultural identities. Under pressure from his family and the Jewish community, Hermann agreed to marry a virgin from his synagogue. The Jewish community uses in-group marriage to try and reintegrate the contaminated Hermann back into the group. But the narrating I increases the distance between his narrating voice and his former self by criticizing his earlier decision as ‘the corruption of the flesh’ (ubi sum carnis corruptionem expertus).32 This episode reintroduces into the narrative the theme of the ascetic’s conflict with the world. After three months of marriage, Hermann ‘began again to seethe with anxiety’ because ‘for the slight pleasure of the flesh, I had cast myself down into the vast whirling mouth of perdition’. The Opusculum actually downplays the stereotype of the sexually predatory or voracious Jewish male by pitting Jewish marriage against monastic celibacy. Hermann says he ‘paululum de larga Dei pietate fiducia, coepi superfluas saeculi curas ab animo resecare, carnis concupiscentias continentiae freno coarctare’ (began little by little, with confidence in God’s great pity, to cut off the superfluous cares of the world from my mind and to restrain the lusts of the flesh with the bridle of continence).33 The narrating I describes his former self as consumed with anxiety about his spiritual identity and assaulted by both the Christian and the Jewish communities. Jews are outraged at his growing involvement with Christianity; Christians are sceptical of the convert’s sincerity, or they question his right even to be a Christian. From a Jewish point of view, Hermann’s Latin literacy and public disputation have become a threatening other, the stain of assimilation, rather than an index of cultural pluralism and achievement. Elaborated discourse 31 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 9 (PL 170, col. 819D). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 10 (PL 170, cols 822D–823A). 33  Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 11 (PL 170, col. 823C). 32 

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outside Hermann’s Primary ( Jewish) Discourse community is threatening. But from a Christian point of view, although Hermann has acquired Latin literacy, his frequent disputations with preachers regarding the meaning(s) of scripture suggest he has not really abandoned his ‘Jewish-ness’. Literacy skills, linguistic com­petences and reading strategies are never uncontextualized, even if they are not the contexts we want. Hermann’s growing liminality and his displacement from any single group come to a head in the exact middle of the Opusculum (Chapter Eleven). The narrating I sharply identifies his former self as a marginal, hybrid figure, competent in both Jewish and Christian religious discourses but also persecuted by and exiled from both communities: ‘Heu! me miserum, quid faciam? Quo fugiam? Quae mihi de reliquo poterit spes esse salutis, neque cum Judaeus perfecte sim neque Christianus ?’ (Alas, woe is me. What am I to do? Where am I to flee? What hope of salvation can there be for me anymore, since I am neither perfectly a Jew nor a Christian?). Hermann doesn’t fit exactly into any specific community with its restricted practices and discourse. At this point, the narrating I mimics his former self ’s despair at his marginality and alienation: ‘Si talem me ultima vitae meae dies repente tanquam fur veniens (3 Peter 2) comprehenderit, quo ibo? Utique peribo’ (If, ‘coming swiftly as a thief in the night’, the last day of my life finds me such as I am now, where shall I go? I shall perish utterly)34 These lines intertextually evoke Augustine’s representation in the Confessions of his former self as a liminal figure, in the process of turning but not yet fully converted. As Augustine and Hermann represent it, conversion, like literacy, is never completed. There is no fully literate or fully converted position. But in Hermann’s case, his earlier acquisition of Latin literacy and access to Christian scriptural interpretation initiated a crisis which destabilized his social, ethnic and religious identity. Trilingual literacy disrupts Hermann’s cultural literacy schema. After this central episode of mixed (con-fused) cultural and religious identity, Hermann visited Christian celibates and congregations, including two Christian female religious, Bertha and Glismut (Chapters Twelve and Thirteen). The narrating I affirms the efficacy of quiet, female Christian prayers and the ‘intercessions of the holy Church’ by contrasting his former self ’s Jewish wife with these devout female Christians. The narrating I also addresses devout women as readers of or listeners to his text: congrua nimirum vicissitudine, ut per feminam lapsum, feminiae precibus sub­ levarent. O vos ergo devotae et sacrae mulieres, quaecunque ista legeritis, vel lec­ 34 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 11 (PL 170, col. 825A).

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ta audieritis, praeclarum imitandumque in his beatis feminabus [feminis] oran­di exemplum accipiter, scientes orations vestras quanto quietores, tanto esse sincer­ iores, tantoque esse ante Dei conspectum ad impetranda quaelibet effica­ciores. Ecce enim me, quem ad fidem Christi nec reddita mihi a multis de ea ratio, nec magnorum potuit clericorum convertere disputatio, devota simplicium feminarum oratio attraxit. (It was indeed an appropriate about-face for women to raise up by their prayers a man who had fallen because of a woman. O you devout and holy women, therefore, whoever may read these words or hear them read, receive the outstanding and imitable example of prayer in these blessed women. Know that the quieter your prayers are, the more sincere they are, and so the more effective before God for obtaining whatever things are sought. Look at me. Neither the explanation (ratio) given by many concerning the faith of Christ nor the disputation of great clerics could convert me to the faith of Christ, but the devout prayer of simple women did.)35

Once more, the literacy narrative is reframed, this time as a Christian typological plot, but with a distinctly female orientation. Hermann’s former Jewish self is associated with Old Testament/Torah and with Adam and Eve, while his con­verting but not yet converted self increasingly identifies with Christian typological reading, the reading machine which retexts the New Testament to produce a new Adam and a new Eve. Here, the narrating I’s reinterpretation of his life suggests he has internalized Egbert’s exegetical practice, alienating rather than confirming his earlier Torah knowledge and his Primary group Discourse. But that’s only part of the story. With the irate Jewish community plotting against him (Chapter Fifteen), the narrating I asserts that his former self increasingly identified with the Christian community. And why not? If Hermann is being exiled from one Primary and Secondary Discourse, why not identify more with another Secondary Discourse and the community which appears to accept him? The problem is, Hermann never feels entirely accepted or comfortable within the Christian community. Morever, he never entirely gives up nor forgets his Jewish background, Torah training and Hebrew literacy. They inscribe his relation to scripture as much as do his new Latin literacy and Christian affiliation. Nonetheless, Christian typological interpretation is an important aspect of the narrating I’s focus. For example, he equates his seven-year-old half brother by a different mother with Old Testament scripture. He did not want to leave ‘tenebris videlicet judaicae infidelitatis, vacuus exire, sed sacris […] litteris ali­ quam inde auri et argenti, seu pretiosi cujuslibet indumenti, sed rationabilem 35 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 12 (PL 170, cols 826A–B).

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praedam adducere’ (the darkness of Jewish unbelief empty-handed, but to take away, not plunder of gold and silver, or any precious raiment, but plunder of a rational being).36 The allusion to Augustine’s De doctrina christiana is obvious. Hermann kidnaps the boy and places him in a monastery to be educated in Latin ‘sacred letters’ (sacris […] litteris).37 Hermann replaces a literal genealogy with a spiritual one. Christianity has always been about new group-ness. He brings his half-brother spiritually closer by substituting the universal Mother Church (ecclesia) for their different natural mothers (Chapter Fourteen). In this complex episode, the narrating I rewrites medieval stories and rumors of Jews stealing and killing Christian children and transposes the literal narrative into another Augustinian story of literate conversion. In the second half of the Opusculum Hermann continues to publicly dis­ pute with other religious teachers, but this time it’s with Jews rather than Christians. When he preaches Christian doctrine and faith as a lay man in his home synagogue at Worms, the congregation, ‘… me Christianis tam pertinaci studio favere videntes, semichristianum vocare coeperunt’ (seeing that I favoured Christians with such stubborn zeal, began to call me ‘semi-Christian’).38 The striking and loaded Latin compound semichristianus highlights Hermann’s liminality, his hybridity, dangerous mixing and contamination from the point of view of in-group purity. The term intertextually invokes Paul’s angry Letter to the Galatians, an important text in the history of Christian conversion and written at a time when the many (most?) early Christians were former followers of Mosaic Law. Paul criticized those ‘judaizers’ in the Galatian Church, who argued that to become a Christian, Gentiles had also to adhere in some measure to Mosaic Law. Paul vehemently declared, ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ (Galatians 3. 28). The term Hermann uses here, ‘semichristianus’, actually appears not in Paul’s letter but in Jerome’s commentary on Galatians: ‘quia maledictio Dei est suspensus, in hebraeo ita ponitur: chi klalat eloim talui. Haec verba Ebion ille haeresiarches semichristianus et semiiudaeus ita interpretatus est: ότι ϋβρις θεοϋ κρεμάμενος, id est quia iniuria Dei ⌠ est suspensus’ (Ebion, that haeresiarch semi-christian, semi-jew, interprets these words thus), referring to the syntax of Galatians 3. 14. According to Jerome, Ebion interprets Paul’s Greek infinitive to mean that God hung (on the Cross) is an insult rather than an act of grace, 36 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 14 (PL 170, col. 826D). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 17 (PL 170, col. 830A). 38  Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 16 (PL 170, col. 829A). 37 

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a possible reading which he confirms via Deuteronomy 21. 23 by relying on the inter­pretation of a ‘Hebraeus qui me in Scripturis aliqua ⌠ ex parte instituit’ (Hebrew who instructed me to an extent in the scriptures).39 In the Opusculum’s representation of Jewish discourse, Hermann’s synagogue retexts the language of Pauline controversy to ‘out’ the ambiguously Jewish, semi-Christian Hermann. The narrating I in the Opusculum, however, continues to describe his ambiguous assimilation to Christianity more synthetically in terms of mixed physical contact and literate experiences. For example: ‘vix domi cibum caperem, sacrorum basilicas magna cum devotione frequentare, ac verbo Dei audiendo tam cordis quam corporis auditum coepi delectabiliter accommodare’ (I scarcely took food at home. I began to frequent the basilicas of the saints with great devotion. Listening to the word of God, I assimilated in delight what I heard both with the hearing of the heart and with that of the body).40 Here, the narrating I’s discourse evokes Augustine’s theory of cognition and metaphors for perception and understanding (the heart’s mouth, ear, eye). Hermann’s deployment of the Augustinian model for interiority implicitly refutes his earlier Jewish insistence on the sensus literalis of scripture. After receiving baptism, Hermann entered the canonry of Cappenberg and ‘Latinae quoque linguae addiscendae jugem indulgens operam, tantum intra quinquennium, Deo opitulante, profeci, ut ad sacros ordines suscipiendos aptem me fratrum caritas judicaret, benigneque attraheret’ (again undertaking the yoke of learning the Latin language became so proficient within five years, by God’s gift, that the charity of the brethren judged me apt to undertake holy orders and kindly drew me into them).41 Higher Latin literacy (Secondary Discourse) gives Hermann access to clerical Christian status, but despite his Latin and interpretive proficiency, his membership in the Christian community remains suspect. Hermann’s continuing dread about his own legitimacy results from the way he internalizes the Christian community’s scepticism about assimilation and about converts such as himself. As a Christian convert, he learns to abject himself. He becomes his own enemy. Although conversion is the goal of Christian evangelism, the baptism scene in Opusculum further suggests how conversion threatens the Christian community. Hermann is not quite sure the Christians aren’t mocking him during the ritual. Moreover, the community wonders whether the baptism ritual is really effective. How much depends on the convert’s ‘sincerity’ of faith, and how do ‘we’ confirm that sincerity? How much depends on the community’s 39 

Jerome, Commentarii, ed. by Raspanti, p. 90. Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 13 (PL 170, cols 826B–C). 41  Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 20 (PL 170, col. 833A). 40 

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acceptance of the convert as ‘one of us’? The converso was always suspect, a possible contaminant within the group. Given Christianity’s foundational belief in a universal group, the fear of Jewish converts such as Hermann in the Rhineland would seem to stem more from ethnic, linguistic, and cultural prejudice. The Opusculum, like Augustine’s Confessions, ends with the converted narrating I rereading a text, in Hermann’s case the adolescent salad dream which began the nar­rative. In contrast to his uncle’s earlier ethno-religious interpretation of the dream, the narrating I now offers a strong re-reading of the dream as Christian revelation (Chapters Nineteen to Twenty-One) informing the writing of his text: ‘Tunc itaque primo visum ante meam conversionem somnium in prima hu­jus opusculi fronte insertum, quod in me futurum, praesignaverit, intellexi, cujus, superius sicut promise, interpretationem explicabo’ (Then for the first time, I understood the dream that I had seen before my conversion and that I inserted at the beginning of this little work. As I promised above, I shall explain the interpretation of it — what it foretold would happen to me).42 The narrating I addresses the reading audience directly and positions his boyhood dream as a text whose true signification, like that of scripture, is revealed to the dreamer only after his conversion, that is, after he occupies a different reading formation and a different literate identity. Different literacies, different selves. Overall, the Opusculum text balances the episodes around Chapter Eleven, enforcing narrative symmetry onto the linear diegesis of conversion. Hermann’s Jewish marriage contrasts with the exemplary piety and intercessions of Bertha and Glismut; his uncle Isaac’s more secular, ethnic interpretation of the salad dream is displaced by the converted Hermann’s ritual interpretation; Hermann’s debates as a Jewish exegete with Egbert’s household and Rupert of Deutz are set against the marginal(ized) but Christian-leaning Hermann’s disputations with other Jews in the synagogue; Hermann’s Jewish reading of scripture is first complicated by his acquisition of Latin literacy in a clerical household, then retexted by his typological interpretation of scripture. Hermann’s alienation from his Primary Jewish Discourse community is inversely proportionate to his gradual, but never complete acceptance into the Secondary Christian Latin Discourse community. Moreover, his growing distantiation from the Jewish community parallels his increasing fear for his life. These parallels and symmetry within the Opusculum conversion narrative, however, are problematized by Hermann’s resistance to or hesitation before total religious and linguistic assimilation. Some bit, some morsel of Hermann’s German-Jewish self remains unassimilable, even as his literacies and community 42 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 20 (PL 170, cols 833A–B).

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contacts expand. Perhaps it’s something religious, perhaps something ethnic, but it’s certainly connected with something linguistic embedded within the representation of Hermann’s multilingual identity. The Opusculum’s representation of public and private reading and inter­ pretation draw on medieval metaphors of literacy, in particular reading as eating and contemplative reading as ruminatio. But as we have noted, ruminatio as figure and practice belongs to Jewish and Christian literate traditions, and the Opusculum destabilizes the restricted association of rumination with Chris­ tian reading alone.43 The Opusculum was written shortly after the first crusade (1096) and the beginning of an increase in anti-Jewish sentiment and behaviour, especially in northern Europe. The text encodes a split subjectivity as the narrative ruminates on Hermann’s developing multilingual literacy and the ambiguous consequences of conversion. In the wake of Augustine’s Confessions, Hermann’s conversion narrative depends generically and thematically on Latin language ideology supported by Christian literacy and clerical culture, but his multilingual Jewish culture (German, Hebrew, Latin, perhaps Yiddish) resists total assimilation to dominant Christian literate and cultural practice. The multilingualism and religious traditions in his Primary Discourse community remain outside the mainstream of Christian Europa. Hermann’s literacy narrative seems written against twelfth-century anxieties about nonclerical, that is, lay, female and Jewish Latin readers; the Opusculum questions the assumption (both medieval and modern) that learning literacy or acquiring an elite literacy such as Latin or English is necessarily a unilateral assimilating practice. Exchanges between Christians and Jews within different regions resulted in various kinds of borrowing or assimilation. Relations between medieval Christian and Jewish scribes, bookmakers, and designers were complex, sometimes con­ tentious, and scholars disagree as to the extent of influence and cross-fertilization between Christian and Jewish bookmakers, scribes, and patrons from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. Jews of course continued to use scrolls for Torah texts even though the codex had become the standard format in Europe for Jewish and Christian writing after 1000. Some scholars downplay the influence of Christian literacy developments on Jewish scribal and manuscript traditions and regard pre-1000 Jewish literacy in Andalusia (a multilingual setting of Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian) as higher than that in Franco-Germania. Others point to the rich Jewish intellectual culture in the mid-eleventh-century Rhineland and argue that the Mainz network was poised to carry on Jewish cultural traditions 43 

For Christian contexts for ruminatio, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 205–08; Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, pp. 54–57.

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in commentary, exegesis, liturgy, and poetry after 1050 but that the violence of 1096 and afterwards constrained that cultural translation work. Beit-Arié points out that whereas eleventh- to fourteenth-century Latin manuscripts were mostly produced in multicopyist scriptoria, university peciae centres, or commercial workshops, Hebrew manuscripts during the same period were more likely, though not necessarily, to be produced for or copied by scholars and others for their personal use or for use within an immediate social network. Even so, rates differed among Jewish intellectuals and readers in different regions across Europa and the Middle East for user-produced books.44 How much did Latin Christian manuscript conventions and book-owning and book-using attitudes influence Jewish scribes and book users? What were the influences of Jewish book makers on Christians? If a region includes two strong literate traditions in different and shared languages, how separate were those traditions? How might Hermann’s knowledge of Hebrew have influenced his German or Latin? These questions are especially relevant for Hermann’s Opus­culum since his conversion narrative is situated as a literacy event with two learned traditions, but the narrative does not explicitly represent much of the rich Jewish intellectual culture in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries Rhineland. Some evidence after 1100 suggests that dominant Christian Latin culture did influence Jewish literate attitudes and behaviours. Some twelfth-century northern French Jews adopted the dress, customs and literate habits of their Christian neighbours, as a way of accommodating to dominant culture. Vivant de Belley (Yehiel ben Eliezer) dressed like his Christian neighbours, wrote a glossary of Biblical words in Hebrew and French and inscribed Hebrew characters for both Hebrew and French in a manner suggesting the influence of Latin Gothic scribes.45 Textually, Christian, and Jewish scribes and book makers shared many of the same local vernacular techniques (page layout, script and illustrating styles, colophons, character shapes, illuminations, decorations), but they differed with regard to the religious implications of writing, attitudes toward scribal practice and control of language. In addition, the mobility, forced or otherwise, of Jewish scribes resulted in Hebrew manuscripts being copied in regional-cultural styles not altogether consistent with their places of production.46 Before 913 ce, perhaps 44 

See Beit-Arié, The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book, p. 11; Beit-Arié, ‘Palaeographical Identification’, p. 16; Schoulvas, ‘On the Attitudes to Books’, pp. 340–41. For a convenient survey of the pecia system of manuscript production, see Pollard, ‘The pecia System’. 45  Sirat, Hebrew Manuscripts, ed. and trans. by de Lange, pp. 5–7, 16; see Abrahams, Jewish Life, rev. by Roth, pp. 302–03, 305–12, 377. 46  See Beit-Arié, The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book; Beit-Arié, ‘Wandering Hebrew

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before 1200, Christian versions of the Bible were prone to errors and variation, whereas the medieval Torah text was relatively free of scribal error, due to the Masoretic scribes’ efforts to maintain a uniform text. Although many conservative synagogues did not approve of including illustrations or illuminations in Biblical texts because they violated the commandment against images, medieval Hebrew Bibles, liturgy, and prayer manuscripts and commentaries in fact contain numerous illustrations and illuminations which gloss, complement or elaborate the verbal text. In twelfth-century Europe (especially France, Italy, Spain, and Germany), Jewish scribes produced Torahs and Haggadahs using many of the same techniques and designs as Christian scribes used to produce their glossed Bibles and hypertextual scriptural commentaries and finding aides. But whereas twelfth-century Christian literacy was largely identified with male clergy and monastic and cathedral scriptoria, Jewish literacy extended to all capable men and some women.47 Medieval Hebrew books were often produced by professional or semi-professional scribes commissioned by private individuals or else copied by the users themselves.48 When Jews such as Hermann encountered Latin clerical literacy, they were not facing a foreign Literacy but rather an alternate version of the religious and exegetical literacy they were already familiar with in a different language and a different script. Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Jews engaging with Christian Latin literacy tactically defamiliarized dominant clerical culture by bringing it into contact with their Hebrew and vernacular discourses. The multilingual and multicultural contact zone is crisscrossed by different discursive affiliations and hierarchies, depending on who’s writing and reading, who’s speaking and listening. These shared literate codes and procedures nonetheless produced difference and shaped other aspects of Jewish-Christian contact. Some literate practices integrated Jews into dominant society. In Spain, for example, Jewish scribes and businessmen used the same documentation as their Christian counterparts, including contracts, wills, deeds and commercial titles, often in Latin. Tenthand eleventh-century Ashkenazim were largely an urban merchant class, often protected by the Church and secular rulers, with strong self-government in municipal Jewish quarters.49 Hermann’s hometown of Mainz was a centre of the east-west import-export trade. Because in many areas Jews had a working Scribes’; Sirat, Hebrew Manuscripts, ed. and trans. by de Lange, pp. 14–17. 47  See Riegler and Baskin, ‘“May the Writer Be Strong”’. 48  Beit-Arié, The Makings of the Medieval Hebrew Book, pp. 80–81. 49  See Marcus, The Jew, rev. by Saperstein; Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government; Parkes, The Jew in the Medieval Community.

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monopoly on commerce and trade, feudal lords often employed them as estate stewards and relied on them as agents to help conduct their financial affairs.50 Jews owned property and produced goods, but they were prohibited from becoming citizens. As native speakers, we can assume their local vernaculars were nearly similar to those of their Christian counterparts. But Christian and Jewish vernacular speakers filtered their pronunciation of Latin or Hebrew through their local accents (German, Italian, etc.), and vice versa. After 1000, sermons in the synagogues were most likely delivered in the local vernacular or by itinerant preachers using the local or perhaps a related variety. Some Jews adopted the dress of wealthier Christians, perhaps as status markers. A few made wills in both Latin and Hebrew to ensure their wishes were officially recorded and enforced by Christian authorities, a practice more common in Catalan Spain and Italy than in northern Europe.51 Despite these overlaps, Rhineland Jews were still marked as different and often performed themselves as different from Christians in important ways, especially in their ethnic marking, religious customs, language and literacy. They did so as much to protect themselves as to self-identify or conform. In addition to residing in designated Jewish urban ghettoes, Jews’ dietary and cleanliness rituals also marked them as outsiders with respect to Christian society. While literate in Hebrew, many Rhineland Jews were probably bilingual in German, for wider communication, and taytsh, a local German vernacular for the neighbourhood, later known as Yiddish, the leshon ashkenaz (language of Ashkenaz), leshonenu (our language), or Judaeo-German. Some wrote their vernacular with Hebrew characters; Hebrew literacy was a means to acquiring a more general literacy across languages, just as Latin script was. One manuscript of Rashi’s eleventh-century commentary on the Torah includes French glosses written with Hebrew characters; a manuscript of the epic Dukus Horant (1382) represents the Middle High German verses with Hebrew characters.52 Whereas some southern European Jews exploited Latin legal discourse to protect their family and community interests, Ashkenazim and northern Jews were more reluctant to participate in Latin literate discourse because of Latin’s ideological role in Christian domination. Perhaps because of the increasing animosity toward Jewish communities in the Rhineland, Jews there were more averse to Latin literacy as an assimilating discursive practice. If so, Hermann’s Latin literacy narrative is all the more striking for the way it adopts 50 

See Agus, The Heroic Age, pp. 109–10. Metzger and Metzger, Jewish Life, pp. 138, 158–66; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, pp. 121–28; Burns, Jews in the Notarial Culture. 52  Renan and Neubauer, Les Écrivains juifs français, p. 589. 51 

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elite Secondary literate discourse and separates itself linguistically from the Jewish Primary Discourse community of German and Hebrew. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the general perception that Jews are linguistically and religiously different was refigured within a new anxiety about the Other in the community. The escalating violence against Jews around the beginning of the First Crusade (1096) can be understood as having both push and pull effects on Jews’ marginality. On the one hand, the violence may have reflected frustration at the difficulty in assimilating the outsider Jews and bringing about a more completely Christian Europa. However, the violence also seems to have been the beginning of a growing dividing practice which sharpened the differences between Christians and Jews in a time of war and external cultural threat. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council required Jews to wear badges and special hats and colours, restricted their public appearances during Easter week festivals, prohibited Jews from holding public office and admonished converts not to observe their old customs. Many of these new regulations were directed at preventing cross-religious and cross-cultural interactions, including sexual relations and intermarriage. Jewish mixing, like Hermann’s with Egbert’s household, was more and more interpreted as contamination and transgressive pollution even as conversion ideally marked the assimilation of outsiders into dominant Christian culture. Because Jews in a given locale by and large spoke, dressed, and in many respects looked like their Christian counterparts, Church officials and some ruling elites, fearing dangerous mixing in urban public space, began to emphasize Jews’ religious otherness and customs, such as dietary and cleanliness laws, which were non-assimilable to Christian Europa. Theologically, Christian Europa’s goal was to convert the Jews, but in practice the Church and local elites wanted to curb Jews’ economic and intellectual power and influence.53 The embodied linguistic and literate environments of Jews and Christians often subverted this separatist regime. The existence of strong minority communities of Hebrew speakers and readers within medieval Christian culture highlights the paradoxes of language contact and multiple modes of interpretation. On the one hand, some evidence suggests that twelfth-century Christian-Jewish relations in northern France were not always as cooperative as Smalley and other scholars have represented them to have been. Whereas Jewish intellectuals in southern Europe actively translated Arabic-Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Hebrew, the Ashkenazim and northern European Jews were less likely to do so. Their reluctance to participate in Latin learned culture deprived many of access to 53 

See Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 27–45; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, pp. 108–11, 121–25.

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the new Arabic learning of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Moreover, some Jewish, especially Ashkenaz, communities attempted to restrict interactions with neighbouring Christians, proscribing reading Latin books, teaching Christian priests to read or write Hebrew or to sing Hebrew songs and having too much business dealing with Christians.54 Of course, these restrictions also suggest the reality or perceived reality of the interactions they prohibit. On the other hand, the new authority of Universal Grammar in the twelfth century reignited Christian scholars’ interest in Hebrew language and texts. Within the multilingual domain, Hebrew altered Latin textual authority. Some vernacular and Latin translations of the Pentateuch for Christian audiences were revised by Christian writers according to ‘Jewish’ knowledge, although some criticized Andrew of St Victor’s commentaries on Hebrew scripture as excessive judaizing.55 Among the Victorines, Jews were idealized as models of pious lit­ eracy, at least when they weren’t being stigmatized as intractable readers unable to hear God’s word. Jewish exegetes’ presumed devotion to Hebrew scripture was read by Christian reformers not as resistance to Latin culture and Christian revelation but as a model of piety. For the Victorines and other Christian readers (for example, William of Auvergne), ‘judaizing reading’ was not necessarily stigmatized. Christian scholars regarded Hebrew and Latin as sacred languages and authoritative commentary languages, even though Hebrew was also the written and ritual language of the contaminating others. Spanish, Italian, French, and German vernaculars were important bridges between Jewish and Christian religious communities. For instance, Parisian scholars and Hugh, Andrew, and Richard of St Victor exchanged interpretations of scripture and ideas about theology with northern French Jewish intellectuals by using their shared oral vernacular language.56 Jewish and Christian exegetes and scholars made their sacred texts available to one another primarily orally in the middle ground of local vernacular conversations. Some Christian scholars and theologians became interested in Jewish reading as models for new ways of reading, discovering in Jewish interpretation what they believed to be strong, intellectually rigorous modes of literal reading, sensus literalis, and more historically contextualized interpretations. Hugh, Andrew, and Richard of St Victor, Hermann’s near contemporaries, reimagined Jewish literalism not as an obstacle to Christian reading but as a provocation and challenge to those dominant Christian textual studies which had repressed the Jewish and 54 

Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, p. 134; Schäfer, ‘Jews and Christians’, pp. 35–41. See Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 164. 56  See Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 155–56. 55 

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Hebrew origins of Christianity. For the exegetical reforming Victorines, a true Christian literacy required more concentrated attention to the scriptures in their historical linguistic forms (Hebrew as well as Greek, Latin, and vernaculars) and to the scriptures as polysemous text with multilayered linguistic histories. Jewish and Christian scholars’ shared vernacular brought Latin and Hebrew sacred texts into a new kind of contact zone. Vernacular theological and intellectual discourse mediated between Latin and Hebrew sacred writing and between Jewish and Christian intellectual communities. Some evidence suggests that these spoken and written contacts, aspects of a Borderland Discourse, enabled scholars such as Abelard, Heloise, and Roger Bacon in northern France to access and make use of Hebrew grammar and Jewish ways of reading, buttressed with Jerome’s work on Hebrew names, in their own interpretations. This is a limited version of what Signer calls cultural Hebraism.57 The twelfth-century Victorine exegetes argued that Christian readers should give more interpretive attention to the sensus literalis of scripture. The 1096 crusaders’ bloodlust in Mainz and Cologne and the subsequent violence against Jews in the region were implicitly supported by commentators’ and preachers’ dismissal of the sensus literalis as ‘Jewish’, ‘dirty’, an obstacle to ‘high meaning’. Bernard of Clairvaux characterized Jewish scripture reading as deaf and stiff, bound by a narrow, literal interpretation of the law. Rebutting Bernard and other ‘teachers of allegory’, Hugh of St Victor (1096–1141) argued that littera was the textual ground which governed and gave rise to other modes of reading sac­red texts: miror qua fronte quidam allegoriarum se doctores jactitant, qui ipsam adhuc pri­ mam litterae significationem ignorant. Nos inquiunt, Scripturam legimus, sed non legimus litteram. Non curamus de littera; sed allegoriam docemus. Quomodo ergo Scripturam legitis, et litteram non legitis? Si enim littera tollitur, Scriptura quid est? Nos, inquiunt, litteram legimus, sed non secundum litteram. Allegoriam enim legimus, et exponimus litteram non secundum litteram, sed secundum allegoriam. Quid ergo est litteram exponere, nisi id quod significat littera demonstrare? (I wonder at those who have the gumption to boast themselves teachers of allegory, who as yet do not know the primary meaning of the letter. They tell us, ‘We read the Scriptures, but we don’t read the letter. The letter does not interest us. We teach allegory.’ How do you read Scripture, then, and not read the letter? Subtract the letter and what is left of Scripture? They tell us, ‘We read the letter, but not accord­ ing to (are not bound by) the letter. We read allegory, and we teach the letter not 57 

See, for example, Mews, ‘Abelard and Heloise on Jews’, pp. 98–100; Signer, ‘Polemic and Exegesis’.

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according to the letter but according to the allegory.’ But what is it to teach the letter unless to show what the letter means/signifies?).58

For Hugh, littera included the actual words and grammatical constructions on the page and also writers’ intentions, historical events and contexts and primary reading contexts such as figurative language. Littera refers principally to meaning and signification, not to inscription; littera is the basis upon which higher moral interpretations of scripture are properly founded. The Victorines’ interest in ‘judaizing reading’ suggests how twelfth-century literacies and religious politics were intertwined. Hugh’s needling but common­ sense question belies a more complicated interpretive agenda. In Hugh’s rebuke to Bernard, littera serves two interpretive functions. Following medieval gram­ matical theory, litterae constitute the minimal textual or linguistic elements and the minimal level of textual meaning as both multiple and constraining. Con­ gruent sense (Hugh uses the grammatically loaded word congrua) is historical and contextually bound up with the production of text: ‘Historia est rerum gestarum narratio, quae in prima significatione litterae continetur’ (Historia is the interpretation/account of actual deeds, which are comprehended in the initial signification of the letter.)59 The Christian reader should be guided by, but not stop at, the literal meanings of the text (sensus, sententia) before proceeding to more advanced understanding (allegoria, tropologia). When a reader applies their grammatical competence and knowledge to scripture and structures their reading in the proper order, from letter (‘congrua ordinatio dictionum, quod etiam constructionem vocamus’) to sententia (‘profundior intelligentia’), the reader ideally achieves a more complete understanding of the text (‘perfecta est expositio’).60 The littera or historia is a level of meaning (lexical, syntactic, intentional, his­ torical) and not simply the words or marks on the page. For Hugh, litterae bring together writing and voice to make congruent, grammatical utterances which are then understood as the sensus literalis, the historical and intentional meanings of textual utterance. The Jewish scriptures constitute textual utterances in their own right and their immediate historical contexts should not be abandoned except when the derived textual meaning clashes with Christian doctrine: ‘si autem et scripturae circumstantia pertractari ac discuti non potest, saltem id 58 

Hugh of St Victor, De scripturis et scriptoribus, v (PL 175, cols 13A–B; my translation). Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, i, 4 (PL 176, col. 185A; my translation). 60  Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, bk 3, chap. 8 (LLT, pp. 58; my trans­ lation). 59 

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solum quod fides sana praescribit’ (if the context of scripture cannot be handled or dispelled, then we must choose only that [meaning] which orthodox [sana] faith prescribes).61 Interpretive pragmatism (pertractari) to serve doxa has always been Christianity’s textual escape plan. Hugh’s interpretive scheme privileges the sensus literalis so long as it is understood to be continuous with later Christian thought. The problem is, when deploying this more historicized reading of scripture, the Victorines and other Christian exegetes and commentators were more likely to — or were perceived to be more likely to — identify closely with Jewish readers’ interpretive formations and thus risk being contaminated or seduced by ‘Jewish’ meanings. Interpretive methods were regarded as performing religious and cultural identities, not just deploying competences. In addition, Hugh used Jewish-inflected Christian readings of scripture to constrain more abstract allegorical and spiritual readings of scripture, especially those associated with Bernard of Clairvaux. Andrew of St Victor went further than Hugh in revising the view that the sensus literalis constituted the ‘Jewish meaning’. Andrew argued that the literal and historical senses of scripture permeate all interpretive levels and should not, indeed cannot be jettisoned in favour of allegorical interpretation. Instead of dis­regarding Jewish culture and history when interpreting scripture, Andrew’s exe­gesis takes the letter as the historical context and authorial intention of scripture. The letter of the text stands for the historical integrity of the Jewish scriptures in Hebrew. Reading the letter meant reading more closely, being more involved with the Jews and their scripture, with the Hebrew version of the Bible, outside the regulating context of the Christian Bible text. Andrew actually attempted a thoroughly ‘literal’ interpretation of the Jewish scriptures without any reference to Christian typology or salvation history. As Smalley points out, Andrew’s com­mentaries deploy a Christian strategy for understanding the Jewish scriptures different not only from the monastic lectio and spiritual allegory but even from those earlier Jewish commentators before Rashi for whom allegorical and mystical exegesis were also important. Already in the eleventh century, Rashi had argued for the primacy of peshat (literal reading) in scriptural exegesis. Similarly, in the twelfth century, Andrew’s model for scripture reading was sometimes more literal, that is, nonmystical, rational, historical, than many Jewish commentators’ models.62 Twelfth-century public disputations between Christian and Jewish scholars (such as that between Rupert of Deutz and Hermann) put Jewish and Christian 61  Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, bk 6, chap. 11 (LLT, p. 129; my trans­ lation); see Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 94–95. 62  Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 171.

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interpretive assumptions and philosophies on a more equal discursive footing. Abelard’s Collationes (also known as Dialogus inter philosophum Iudaeum et christianum, composed sometime between 1123–35) shows an accurate know­ ledge of Jewish customs and a broad tolerance for Jewish scriptural interpretations and opinions, in contrast to later scholars’ virulent anti-Jewish judgments.63 The dialogue gives equal authority to each interlocutor, and at one point (Collationes, Chapters Fourteen to Seventeen) the Jew eloquently rebuts Christian society’s view of the Jew as subordinate: Whoever thinks that we shall receive no reward for continuing to bear so much suffering through our loyalty to God must imagine that God is extremely cruel. Indeed, there is no people what has ever been known or even believed to have suffered so much for God […]. We are thought by everyone to be worthy of such hatred and contempt, that whoever does us an injury believes it to be the height of justice and a supreme sacrifice offered to God […]. Nowhere but Heaven (ad celum) may we enter safely, and even our own homes are places of danger for us. When we travel to anywhere in the neighbourhood (proxima loca), we must pay a high price to a guide in whom we have little trust. The very rulers who are in authority over us and whose protection we buy at much expense are all the more eager for our deaths because they can snatch up (diripiunt) what we possess more freely […]. [N] or can we have fields or vineyards or any sort of landed property […]. And so the main way which remains for us to earn an income to support our wretched lives is by lending out money at interest to those of other races (alienigenis); and this, indeed, makes us especially hated by those [Christians] who consider that they are put under a great burden by it […]. Indeed, it is clear from these and countless other observances that each of us who follows the law (liquet unumquemque nostrum legi obtemperantem) says with justice the words of the psalmist to God: ‘For the sake of the words of your lips, I have kept to hard pathways.’64

Abelard influenced his students regarding the exemplary position of Jews in twelfth-century Europa. One student reproduced many of his teacher’s inter­pre­ ta­tions of Paul’s letters in Commentarius Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 1. 39). Although he disputes many Jewish arguments, the writer still paints a glowing picture of Jewish literacy, piety and intellectual life and in­ verts the negative stereotype of the money-grubbing or spiritually deaf Jew: If the Christians educate their sons, they do so not for God, but for gain, in order that the one brother, if he be a clerk, may help his father and mother and his other 63  Abelard, Collationes, ed. and trans. by Marenbon and Orlandi, pp. xxvii–xxxii; Mews, Abelard and Heloise, p. 135, n. 120. 64  Abelard, Collationes, ed. and trans. by Marenbon and Orlandi, pp. 20–23.

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brothers […]. A Jew, however poor, if he had ten sons would put them all to letters, not for gain, as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law, and not only his sons, but his daughters.65

In the prickly, contentious world of twelfth-century intellectuals, Jewishness was a controversial and potentially deterritorialized identity, while Hebraica veritas was a contested discursive space. Jewishness was also a controversial reading practice and a marker of Christian Europe’s unassimilated past and present. Whereas Bernard of Clairvaux regarded Jews as the inveterate sign of irredeemable stubbornness and interpretive literalism before God’s grace, Abelard, Richard of St Victor and others regarded Jews as the prestigious other, a living utopian figure and the continuing image of the first sacred language against which contemporary Christian reading practices and behaviours could be measured and critiqued. Smalley’s emphasis on intellectual cooperation among northern French Christian and Jewish scholars omits some of the Victorines’ other responses to Jewish learning. The Victorine interest in the authority of the letter and Hebraica veritas did not always extend to the Jews themselves. Rather than build bridges between Jewish and Christian interpretive systems, some Christian interpreters appropriated Jewish literate identity to mark out a new reading position within dominant Christian discourse. They deterritorialized the sensus literalis from Hebrew literacy and the Jewish interpretive community and redeployed Jewish modes of reading as part of Christian reading. Some Christian interpreters re­ texted the image of Jewish literalism as a counter to allegorizations and mys­ti­ caliz­ations of scripture. Andrew of St Victor characterized Jewish and Christian interpretive systems as separate, in history and as communities. In his commentary on the Octateuch, he rejected allegorists’ wholesale assimilation of the Old Testament and highlighted a different interpretive question: We do not ask them [ Jews] to contradict their own canonical Scriptures in partic­ ular, which we too wish not at all to contradict, or to remember writers whom they have never read, but let us ask that, saving authority if possible, they should not nullify our traditions by theirs. Let us so contest in this doubtful contest that tradi­ tion may not prejudice tradition, and we may seem to contend, not for the sake of victory, but in order to establish the truth. Since the canonical Scriptures stand for both sides, let us see whether they give reasonable support to one view rather than the other.66

65  Abelard, Commentarius Cantabrigiensis in Epistolas Pauli e Schola Petri Abaelardi, cited in Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 78. 66  In Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 166–67. I have modified Smalley’s translation slightly.

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For Andrew, interpretive incommensurability disassembles typological exegesis, but he has a difficult time sustaining an even-handed separatism. Despite his strong rationalist stance toward interpretation, Andrew sometimes complains about the materialism and interpretive ‘deafness’ of Jewish commentators. Responding to contemporary Jewish commentators who disagree with him, earlier Christian exegetes or even the prophet Daniel himself, Andrew declares, ‘For the Jews of to-day care much more for moneymaking than for careful exegesis.’67 Here, social stigma and contemporary ethnic politics trump interpretive plurality. Idealized Jewish exegesis has become deterritorialized and floats as a model of right reading which can be deployed by both Christian and Jewish readers. Andrew’s commentary on the Jewish prophetic scriptures straddles the line between granting legitimacy to Jewish reading and characterizing contemporary Jewish readers as deaf to the proper revealed Christian truth. Curiously, Hermann straddles a similar line in his Opusculum. Andrew wants to embrace the letter of scripture and acknowledge the legitimacy of historical and intended meanings in both ancient Jewish and Christian writing. Christian and Jewish readings of the Old Testament are presented as separate, valid, rational discourses, each a truthseeking interpretive regime. At the same time, Andrew wants to affirm the truth of the Jewish prophets in revelation and salvation history. Andrew and Richard of St Victor legitimate and assimilate Jewish scripture readings by incorporating Hebrew readings in their Latin exegetical discourse circulated among Christian readers. Dominant Christianity accepts the Torah only as the ‘Old Testament’, that is, as the anterior condition of the revealed text completed in the historical Torah’s future but which is the twelfth-century exegetes’ past. Holy texts travel from one discourse community to another, but they do not remain the same. The Latinized Torah (Vulgate) rendered the Jews’ ancient texts linguistically copresent with Christian texts and so assimilated Torah into European hegemony. When Christian scholars began to acknowledge more openly the presence of two different interpretive communities in the twelfth century, each authoritative in different historical and social contexts, they named a gap within the interpretive hegemony of Europa and revealed the interpretive conflict which Christian Europe repressed. In effect, the books of the Torah were read by two different medieval literacy communities — one majority, one minority — living in near proximity to one another. Both groups were necessary to the functioning of twelfth-century society. The dominant Christian discourse community needed to 67 

In Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 167.

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appropriate Hebrew texts from the Jewish margin to identify itself as the proper custodian of God’s word. Translating the Old Testament into Latin had effectively assimilated Jewish scripture to Christian providential reading. The Latin Vulgate erased Jewish texts as linguistically and culturally ‘Jewish’. Thus, when scholars such as Jerome, Roger Bacon, and Andrew of St Victor advocated from time to time the study of Hebrew, they went against the grain of dominant Christian appropriation and retexting to reassert linguistic pluralism and multilingualism within the sacred languages of European Christianity. By revoicing the Hebrew scriptures as Latin texts and sounds, Christian cul­ ture sought to separate Jews from their holy texts. This is what happened on a small scale when Hermann heard Bishop Egbert preach in German on the Old Testament. Unlike their scriptures, the Jews themselves did not enjoy full membership in the European community. Twelfth-century Jews living according to the Old Law and their Jewish scriptural interpretations and supported by the Talmud and Midrash were described by many Christian scholars as deaf to the historical present, a charge the clerical and lay publics repeated when it suited their purposes. Whereas Jewish scripture was read as assimilable to a more inclusive Christian reading schema, many medieval Jews resisted and were thought to be resistant to cultural assimilation and transculturation. Taking into account the complex and varied situation of Jews, Jewish reading and Hebraica veritas in the twelfth century, we can rethink our earlier discussion of multilingualism and Hermann’s Opusculum. Jews always lived in a different multilingual context than Christians. Jewish multilingualism encompassed: one or more vernaculars and hybrid languages for everyday exchange, domestic life, and commerce; Hebrew for ritual, worship, and sacred reading; sometimes Latin for official or legal written discourse. When some Jews wrote their vernacular with Hebrew characters, they not only extended Hebrew literacy into vernacular inscription, but they also asserted orthographically an ethno-religious difference despite phonological sameness. In urban language contact situations, Jewish vernacular speakers inevitably borrowed Hebrew words and syntax, thereby creating new hybrid vernaculars ( Judaeo-German (Yiddish), Judaeo-French, Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino)). Over time, however, such linguistic assimilation actually diminished Hebrew as a salient ethnic marker, while concurrently the study of Hebrew became a new marker of Protestant resistance to Roman Church dominance. By 1616, Leon of Modena, rabbi of Venice, complained in his History of the Jews that ‘the common people use in their ordinary discourse the language of the nation they dwell in, mixing here and there a few broken Hebrew words among it’, while few except rabbis, he said, were fluent in Hebrew

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reading or talk.68 Jewish linguistic assimilation often proved to be more fluid and functional than cultural or religious. So beginning in the late eleventh century, Jewish separateness began to be construed more widely as a cultural symbol of uncomfortable difference, with violent consequences. Jews in the Rhineland and France were attacked, and Jews were massacred in Cologne and other Rhine cities in 1096.69 Hermann’s narrative bears traces and echoes of these attacks, in the narrating and narrated I’s ambivalence about even mingling with Christians, let alone interpreting scripture, learning Latin, or converting. Hermann of Scheda’s home town, Mainz, was both a centre of commerce and a centre of Torah scholarship in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The earliest known European commentary on the Torah, ascribed to R. Gershom ben Judah (960–1028 ce), derived from notes compiled by the Mainz Torah Academy’s most famous student, Rashi. Mainz rabbis produced literal (Peshat) and higher ‘ethical’ (Derash) readings of the Torah, and Rashi incorporated many of these moral interpretations into his own Torah and Talmud commentaries. Rashi’s com­mentaries focus on particular words or passages in scripture and emphasize how ancient scripture applies to contemporary situations.70 His Torah readings juxtapose literal and figurative meanings as complementary, partial readings which together might reveal the ‘whole meaning’ of scripture.71 While Rashi’s preference for literal exegesis was influential especially in northern France, Rashi’s wholistic interpretive scheme was strongly criticized by some rabbis, for example, Abraham ibn Ezra (Spain, twelfth century), who believed that Rashi had not gone far enough and still relied too much on Derash at the expense of the letter of the Torah. Rashi also used vernacular French in his commentaries to explain difficult Hebrew words and phrases. As we have seen, Hermann’s Opusculum narrativizes these interpretive conflicts in Christian and Jewish communities regarding the sensus literalis and the Old Testament’s place in salvation history. Pluralizing ruminatio as a figure of both Jewish and Christian interpretive and textual cultures, with different scriptural and cultural contexts, Hermann’s literacy narrative refuses to, or can’t quite, assimilate its Jewish and its Christian perspectives without gaps or seams. The narrating I is conflicted, dispersed, over multilingual and cross-language interpretive practices. Sometimes, the text suppresses the differences between 68 

Marcus, The Jew, rev. by Saperstein, pp. 437–38. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 29–30. 70  See Rashi, Commentaries, trans. by Pearl. 71  Contra Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 171–72. 69 

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Christian and Jewish modes of reading by translating ruminatio from Jewish to Christian literate contexts and then using ruminatio as a reading practice to sig­ nify Hermann’s literate and religious conversion to Christianity. Elsewhere, how­ ever, the narrative destabilizes this interpretive framework when it privileges some scriptural readings and imaginatively represents a multivoiced literacy com­bining Jewish and Christian interpretations in Hebrew, German and Latin and reading beyond Hebraica veritas. By the middle of the text, the narrating I has represented his multiliterate former self as a transitional figure, neither wholly assimilated to the dominant Christian literate regime nor entirely alienated from it. In this narrative fold (Chapter Eleven), textuality itself becomes the space for performing a split subjectivity and multilingual intersubjectivity. Reading is a problematic mode of assimilation in the Opusculum. Hermann’s Torah training, culturally outside of Christian time and Latin clerical discourse, unintentionally prepared Hermann to understand Latin Christian scriptures. But because Hermann first acquired his scriptural knowledge through Hebrew and in a different literate and orthographic environment, his subsequent reading of Christian scripture becomes heterological and bi-hermeneutic. The narrative represents Hermann’s readings of Torah and Christian scripture as two kinds of reading from the margins, both before and after his Christian conversion. When he learns to read scripture in Latin, Hermann understands the sacred text as double-voiced, linguistically, and hermeneutically situated within two different interpretive communities: Christian typological interpretation and Jewish exegesis. Jewish exegesis was shaped by his Torah training and eleventhand twelfth-century Jewish debates on literal and mystical readings of scripture, especially in the writings and teachings of Rashi, Joseph Kara and Joseph Bekhor Shor of Orleans.72 Hermann’s multilingual readings of the Old Testament are not exactly those his Christian teachers or interpreters might expect or desire, but they directly engage with questions other prominent twelfth-century Christian exegetes, especially Rupert of Deutz, Andrew of St Victor, and Abelard, were debating about the sensus literalis and ‘judaizing reading’. Hermann’s literate experience in effect becomes a limit case for all twelfth-century judaizing readings of scripture. In a multilingual and hyperliterate religious network, the Opusculum represents the narrated I as a Hebrew reader talking and writing back to dominant clerical Latin culture, while the narrating I hesitates before the prospect of assimi72 

See Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp.  149–56; Abulafia, Christians and Jews, esp. pp. 63–75, 94–106.

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lation. Even after his conversion, the narrating I and his former self inhabit different subject positions within dominant Christian culture. At one point, Hermann sounds a bit like Andrew of St Victor on the littera when he criticizes Bishop Egbert. Rupert of Deutz, and others for using the Pentateuch in non-Jewish ways: sicut sanctus est, fierunt, non solum edicendo praecipere, verum etiam propria manu in tabulis lapideis conscribere dignaretur. Solis, inquam. Hoc enim illa testa­ tor, quae ab ore vestro quotidie ruminatur Scriptura, dicens ‘Qui annuntiat ver­bum sum Jacob justitias et judicia sua Israel’ (Thus it is holy, they say, that He [YHWH] not only commanded this rule by pro­ claiming it, but he even wrote it with his own hand on tablets of stone. [He gave the Law] to them [ Jews] alone, I say, for this Scripture itself, which is daily ruminated [on] by your own mouth, testifies, saying: ‘He declares his word to Jacob, his works of justice and judgment to Israel’).73

The Opusculum supports this judaizing reading with a Latinized Torah citation. Hermann also used Jewish reading contexts to criticize Christian readers around him as hypocritical and dishonest, similar to the way heretics or dissenters were criticized for their selective or slanted or partial readings: ‘pro velle vestro corrigitis, et quaedam quidem suscipitis, caetera vero vel ut superstitiosa respuitis, vel ut mystica et alio, quam dicta sunt modo accipienda stultis et anilibus, quibus cui placet fictionibus depravatis’ (you correct it [scripture] just as you want. You accept some things but reject others. Among the latter, you decide some are superstitious and others, said in a mystic fashion, are to be accepted, not in the way in which they were actually said [i.e. literally], but according to whatever stupid, asinine, and depraved fictions anyone pleases).74 The conflict here between correction and misreading foregrounds the ambiguity in Hermann’s narrative regarding judaizing literacy and proper scriptural reading. Early in the narrative, Jewish literal reading of Torah occupies a position similar to that of doxa in Christian hermeneutics, as a semantic given. But after his discussions with members of Bishop Egbert’s household, Hermann becomes more curious (curiositas) about Christian typological readings of Torah. That is, he becomes intrigued by hermeneutic difference and the estrangement of Torah in Latin and German clerical discourse. The narrated I begins to question not literal interpretation per se but literal interpretation unsupported by other interpretive strategies: ‘Most stubbornly supporting myself on the letter alone’ (Chapter Nine). At this point, the narrating I starts to critique his earlier inter­ 73  74 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 3 (PL 170, col. 810B). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 3 (PL 170, col. 810D).

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pretive assump­tions and to speak for Christian typology, which subsumes Jewish significations within the Christian textual archive and redescribes them as historically and spiritually incomplete. Christian typology changes the way contemporary readers, whether in the second century or the twelfth, relate ancient scripture to present belief. Typological reading is predicated on the privilege of reception within history. It subordinates and appropriates Jewish religious reading while excluding the Jewish community for whom the Hebrew scriptures are central. Hermann’s text tries to justify Jewish literalism and at the same time accept Christianity’s assumption that Jewish reading is not sufficient. The Opusculum dramatizes literate practices and assimilation strategies through debates, scriptural interpretation and dream interpretation, but not all episodes tend toward Christian conversion. Hermann’s debate with Rupert of Deutz and others regarding the sensus literalis and sensus figurativus foregrounded Jewish modes of reading (Chapters Three, Four, Six, and Eleven). Conversely, after learning Latin and reading the scriptures within a Christian interpretive framework, Hermann found himself in a more liminal position in the Jewish community. He disputed with members of his own synagogue about the Christian faith. Standing within the synagogue community as a triliterate, Hermann embodies the social contact zone between Judaism and Christianity, Christian and Jewish Europeans, dominant and marginal groups. Hermann becomes an elaborated reading and writing figure in the midst of a restricted literacy, a potential impurity and an alternate, pluralized semantics. The synagogue dispute (Chapter Sixteen) is quickly followed by Hermann’s Christian conversion (Chapter Eighteen), and the narrating I disavows his remarks in the synagogue. This disavowal suggests the narrated and narrating Is’ continuing ambivalence about absolutely separating Jewish and Christian understanding. Hermann’s textual subjectivity cannot be located in just one subject position. Michel de Certeau describes such a position as the poaching reader, who ‘insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasures and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it’.75 But unlike de Certeau’s sly poacher who delights in his pluralization, the narrating I represents his former self as a vaguely paranoid, maladjusted multi­ literate. In a sense, Hermann’s new Latin literacy and the closer contact it entails with dominant Christian culture complicates his multilingual literacy, making it more mixed and more dangerous. Read together, the two disputation episodes with Rupert of Deutz and the Mainz synagogue implicitly repeat and critique the Augustinian intertext of reading and conversion. Rather than completely displacing or erasing his Torah training and Jewish literate context, Hermann’s new Latin literacy reorders his Hebrew and vernacular literacies by adding an­ 75 

De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Randall, p. xxi.

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other hermeneutic code — Christian revelation and exegesis. The narrating I continues to depict himself as a split subject despairing and oscillating within multiple linguistic and discourse communities: ‘What hope of salvation can there be for me anymore, since I am neither perfectly a Jew nor a Christian?’76 The Opusculum stages this ambivalence about assimilation and multilingual literacy in other ways. For example, the text frames, bookends, the narrative with the two interpretations of Hermann’s boyhood dream. Interestingly, both inter­ pretations are symbolic. Neither takes the dream literally. His maternal uncle’s secular interpretation (interpretatio) is a prophetic dream allegory which foretells Hermann’s growing stature within the Mainz Jewish community. At the end of the text, the narrating I redescribes Isaac’s interpretation as a guess (coniectio). The converted narrating I then rereads his own dream with a more spiritual inter­ pretation (interpretatio, allegoria) and with an explicit literacy theme. The palace allegorically signifies the monastic life; the banquet, the Eucharist. The salad be­ comes a complex textual image: Porro olus, quod in mensa regia manducare mihi visum sum, Christi arbitror desig­nare Evangelium. Nam sicut idem olus ex variis fuit herbarum generibus confectum; ita ex variis praeceptis ad vitam aeternam pertinentibus Christi constat Evangelium. Ad regale igitur convivium olus manducare est, sacerdotem Dominico altari assistentem sancti Evangelii praecepta solerter atque subtiliter considerando velut in ore cordis ruminare (Continuing, the salad (olus) that I seemed to myself to eat at the royal table, I think designates the gospel of Christ. For just as that salad was made up of various kinds of herbs, so the gospel of Christ is composed of various precepts pertaining to eternal life. To eat a salad at the royal banquet, therefore, is for the priest assisting at the Lord’s altar to consider carefully and subtly the precepts of the gospel. It is for him to do this as though chewing the cud in the mouth of the heart.)77

The salad (olus) is a literate figure of Gospel ruminatio. Hermann’s new dream interpretation retexts not only Isaac’s interpretation but also the earlier scene when he heard and ruminated on Egbert’s preaching. Hermann rereads his dream as an allegory of literacy, motivated in part by a literal reading of ruminatio as cud chewing and the text he is reading as vegetable rather than as animal or manGod (Christ).The dream interpretation figures the Eucharist as consistent with Jewish dietary law and the Seder meal.78 Hermann’s second dream interpretation 76 

Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 11 (PL 170, col. 825A). Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 21 (PL 170, col. 834C). 78  See Hermannus Iudaeus, Opusculum, chap. 21 (PL 170, col. 834B). 77 

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replaces the Host with the Book. The oral figure of ruminatio redescribes read­ ing the Gospel as multilayered and multisignifying. The Eucharist has been retexted as book or mixed greens and herbs, as something vegetarian rather than associated with cannibalistic orality or transubstantiation. Hermann’s rereading of his dream associates the Eucharist with decidedly Jewish ingestion, textuality with assemblage, not ritual sacrifice. Hermann’s interpretation of the salad dream again manifests the text’s un­ resolved tension between interpretive groups. On the one hand, the narrating I allegorizes his teenage dream, rejects Jewish interpretive authority and performs his Christian conversion through an interpretive act. Worldly and religious success and integration within the Jewish community are replaced by a more rigorist allegorical interpretation of enclosure within a Christian liturgical community. But the narrator’s interpretation of the salad meal as signifying Gospel reading suggests how the literacy narrative retains features of Jewish cultural practice within a dominant Christian narrative frame. Hermann’s adult interpretation repeats the trope of ruminatio for Jewish as well as Christian reading. Vegetables become counter-hegemonic religious signifiers and a disruptive image within the conversion narrative. Daniel rejected Nebuchadnezzar’s royal feast in favour of vegetables (Daniel 1. 8–16). In Proverbs 15. 17, eating olus is associated with humility and charity, whereas eating meat is associated with pride and arrogance. Herbs and roots, words and meanings, bread and wine, body and blood constitute a blurry signifying chain of substitutions in the Opusculum, overwritings and displacements more than equivalences. Because Hermann does not disavow his teen dream salad image, the image erupts within and interrupts dominant Christian cultural signification. The salad image interpolates Jewish dietary laws into the text as a counterreading of Christian sacramental theology. Hermann’s Opusculum narrativizes in a number of ways conflicts and inter­ sections between Christian and Jewish religious and linguistic literacies in the twelfth century. A social and literate contact zone is a site of conflict and ambiguity as well as combination. Latin literacy and the multiplication of ruminationes are turning points in Hermann’s conversion story, as they were in Augustine’s Confessions. But unlike Augustine’s narrative, neither the Opusculum’s narrating I nor the narrated I, nor indeed the text, is wholly assimilated to Christian culture and orthodoxy. The text, intentionally or not, stages the ambiguous inter­play among Latin, Hebrew, and vernacular texts and speech, between Christian and Jewish identities, between different literacy communities in the multi­lingual, multicultural contact zone of southern Germany. Just as Hebrew could be deployed to destabilize Latin language ideology, Latin literacy could subvert multilingual appropriations of Hebraica veritas. A marginal annotator to Cambridge, Corpus

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Christi College, MS 315 noted of Andrew of St Victor’s commentary on Kings and Chronicles, ‘Andrew here uses false Latin; hence you may believe that he often speaks false Hebrew; for he says reservaturum and retenturum for reservandum and retinendum.’79 Other annotators took issue with Andrew’s Latin translations of Hebrew, particularly his syntax. For these critics, Latin, and Hebrew grammar were contested metonymies for orthodoxy or proper signifi­cation. Hermann of Scheda’s narrative of ambivalent assimilation through Latin lit­eracy is one kind of understanding of Christian-Jewish literate interactions in twelfth-century Europa. As we have seen, Victorine scholars, Abelard and others took from Jewish scriptural reading other models for literal interpretation and a more ecumenical, or at least pluralized, scriptural theology. Elsewhere, some people’s literal interpretations of scripture led to a radical apocalyptic under­standing of the end of days signalled by the First Crusade and massacres of Jews in the Rhineland. Before 1300, literal understanding of scripture interrupted mainstream symbolic, spiritual, and allegorical readings, but not all literal interpretations of scripture adopted the same critical assumptions and strategies nor did literal reading necessarily serve social reform, radicalism, lay empowerment, or ecumenism. In particular, close reading of the grammar of the text and the assumption that meaning and syntactic form were intertwined did not always square with historicizing readings which adopted Jewish perspectives nor with interpreting literally to derive millenarian or apocalyptic readings of biblical prophecy. Since Carolingian times, some Christians and Muslims had converted to Judaism, and almost always, their stories were read as exposing the dangers of un­ guided literacy or too much indiscrete contact with recalcitrant, contaminating Others. Around 1102 ce, Giuàn ( Johannes), a Norman Christian priest living in southern Italy, converted to Judaism as a result of his Biblical reading, the events leading to the First Crusade and an historical sensibility prompted by his judaizing. Like other converts to Judaism, he took the name ‘Obadiah ha-Ger’ (Obadiah the Proselyte), after the ancient prophet Obadiah who was reputed to have converted to Judaism.80 Obadiah’s chronicle/personal narrative presents several kinds of language mixing. After his conversion, Obadiah travelled to the Middle East, learned Hebrew and maybe Arabic, wrote Italian and Latin words in Hebrew characters, quoted Jewish prophetic scripture in the Latin version 79 

In Smalley, The Study of the Bible, p. 177. See the selections from Obadiah’s chronicle translated into English in Other Middle Ages, ed. by Goodich, pp. 70–74. See Prawer, ‘The Autobiography of Obadyah’; Warner, ‘Obadiah the Proselyte’, pp. 170–73. 80 

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( Joel 4. 4) and adapted Gregorian musical style to Hebrew poetry.81 In 1012, as Jews were being expelled from the Rhineland, Wecelinus (Wezelin), ‘qui fuerat Cuonradi ducis clericus, illusione diabolica seductus, errori Judaeorum consensit’ (who was Duke Conrad’s cleric, accepted the Jews’ errors, seduced by diabolical illusion).82 In the twelfth century, Rabbi Joel ben Isaac from Bonn told of a convert to Judaism, Abraham ben Abraham, who had been a monk at Würzburg. One day, Rabbi Joel found him ‘sitting and translating the Pentateuch from an improper book of the monks’. When questioned, Abraham replied, I know the tongue of the monks (Latin), and I do not know the holy tongue (Hebrew), so I am using it (the Latin book) as a commentary; the sages of Speyer even lent me the books of the monks to copy and they did not object to my using them, but if you disapprove, I will repent; tell me and I will not continue.

Although Rabbi Joel disapproved, he was inclined to let the matter go because he believed Abraham’s intentions were good.83 In John of Worcester’s Chronicle (thirteenth century), contact with Hebrew leads to apostasy: In London, one of the order of preachers (called brother Robert of Reading), an ex­ tremely accomplished preacher and someone most learned in Hebrew, aposta­tized and converted to Judaism. Taking a Jewish wife, he was circumcised and re­named Haggai. When he was speaking boldly and publicly against Christian law, the king summoned him and committed him to the care of the Archbishop of Canterbury.84

Cultural, religious and linguistic contacts create complex kinds of transculturation moving sometimes in different, sometimes in similar directions. Within vernacular multilingualism, Latin and Hebrew literacies are socio-religious linguistic performances and contested discursive spaces which function as specially charged markers of religious and ethnic identity. Latin and Hebrew were asymmetrical as sacred languages in the Middle Ages, but Hermann’s Opusculum questions that asymmetry. When Andrew of St Victor and Hermann of Scheda participated in Hebrew and Latin Secondary Discourses as risky elaborated literacies, they created multilingual literacies which challenged existing hegemonic literacies in both Christian and Jewish communities. 81 

See Golb, ‘The Autograph Memoirs’, pp. 259–73 (English version at [accessed 1 April 2010]). 82  Regesten zur Geschichte der Juden, ed. by Dresdner, Aronius, and Lewinski, p. 63. My trans­lation. 83  Sefer Ra’aviah, ii. 53, trans. by Elka Klein, in Internet Medieval Sourcebook: Converts to Judaism: France and Germany, [accessed 1 April 2010]. 84  John of Worcester, Florentii Wigorniensis, ed. by Thorpe, ii, 214 (my translation).

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Reading the Opusculum’s narrative strategies and tropes in the context of the Crusades, contact with Jewish Others and twelfth-century controversies over the sensus literalis, we open up the performativity of dominant and minority lit­er­acies and the relations between oral and written discourses in the twelfth century. When Hermann learned to read Latin, his increasingly elaborated literacy (beyond German and Hebrew) fundamentally altered the linguistic and cultural contact zone he occupied as a Jew living within Jewish and Christian communities. Rather than displacing other languages, his Latin literacy was grafted onto his vernacular and Hebrew literacies and the interpretive strategies Torah training supplied him with. Of course, Christian teachers and preachers such as Egbert had other ideas for how converts should behave, but converts are always belated, haunted by the ideological shadow of unfaithfulness, the ambiguity of assimilation, and the receding horizon of nativeness. Hermann’s multilingual literate performativity creates a heteroglossic convert, a marginal figure, a differend. Hermann’s Opusculum retexts Bernard of Clairvaux’s famously ambivalent state­ment that the ‘Jews are for us [Christians] the living word of scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered’. Amid crusading pogroms, Bernard argued that the Jews are both living books and resisters of the revealed Word. The Jews, he wrote, are not to be harmed but allowed to circulate in Christian society to remind others of Christ’s redeeming message and to embody the not yet converted.85 But the living word, when written in/on/by the bodies of Jews and Christians, became another site of literate and ethnic conflict. In the twelfth century, the emerging regime of a ‘persecuting society’ took issue with such multilingual literacies in Europa. Christian officials increasingly scrutinized and sought to contain those who shouldn’t read, weren’t trusted to read, or read like Jews. The eleventh-century peasant Leutard of Vertus, for instance, had a vision which compelled him ‘to renounce his wife, break the crucifix in his local church and preach against the payment of tithe and in favor of literal adherence to the New Testament’.86 Leutard was condemned not for reading but for his literal, apostolic reading and for his dissent from official doctrine and practice which that reading produced. Jews and heretics were becoming identified with one another and with bad, or at least troublesome, readers. Using official Latin and the orthodox conversion narrative, Hermann of Scheda’s Opusculum dissents 85  Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 14845, fol. 257, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Letters, trans. by James, p. 462. 86  Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, pp. 16–17.

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from this regime by staging multilingual literacy and mixed ethno-social identity as real, historical alternatives to a totalizing assimilation which amounts to erasing difference in either Jewish or Christian Europe. Hermann’s subject position as ‘neither perfectly a Jew nor a Christian’ turns out to be a positive textual place.

Chapter 5

Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers well interruption is addition read and follow

(Lyn Hejinian, Writing is an Aid to Memory)

L

iteracy as social practice struggles with how to order texts as well as with what to write, what to read, and how to read. The proliferation of texts and literates does not in itself explain why literacy matters nor how it structures mental maps, ideological contests, or social order. Literacy as practice depends on the archive, the material base of the hyperliterate situation, but people ‘are not the masters [of the archive], of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth they have a very inadequate idea’.1 The structures and silences of the archive constitute a hypotext within discursive space, a space for the interplay of memory, textuality, invention, and surprise. The archive is at once concrete and conceptual, the temporally situated material projection of a langue only existent as its traces, paroles. The archive is constituted in the imaginaries of individuals and materializes in institutions, practices, and intertextualities. The hyperliterate archive is impossible to control or even take in with a single look, although that doesn’t stop people and institutions from trying. The archive can be construed not as a cause, but as a field, object of analysis, or ‘positivity’ upon which archaeology (or deconstruction) operates: ‘Archaeology describes dis­ courses as practices specified in the element of the archive.’2 The late medieval archive comprised a network of hypotexts — literary, reli­g ious, cultural, and official texts which endow language and forms with cultural authority. As Lyn Hejinian reminds us, interruption and addition are both intervention, readings in(to) the archive, which may follow and obey or bend the pretext.3 Textual authority derives from the situations within which 1 

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 126. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 131. 3  Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid, section 9. 2 

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individual texts were produced, read, and circulated: grammatical base texts for Latin literacy (Virgil, Ovid, Horace), paradigmatic cultural texts (scripture, Aristotle’s logic), official texts (papal decrees, canon law, city proclamations, and parliamentary decrees), carnivalesque discourses (popular drama, ballads, charivari, popular romances), and elite genres (court poetry, verse saints’ lives). As a structuring structure for textuality, the archive nominally sets the cultural para­meters for what can be said in writing (literatus), for what is grammatical (grammatica) and sayable (dicibile), which are not quite the same thing. Such parameters always turn out to be provisional or afterthoughts, and the archive is always under construction. Within the late medieval archive, Ovid’s texts presented a special problem. The conflicts and interpretive debates within Ovidian commentary and mythographic discourses from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries reveal the strategies and tactics by which the medieval hypotextual archive was maintained, retexted, or subverted. In this chapter I read readers of Ovid, in particular his Metamorphoses, as synecdoches for a genealogy of reading inflected in local reading situations. Juxtaposing Latin and vernacular commentaries and poetic retexts of Ovid’s mythography reveals not a singular, monologic discourse but a literate matrix of commentary, mythography, and counter mythography which responds to the problem of how to read questionable, unruly texts by a canonical author, including how to read the Song of Songs. Paralleling debates about orthodox and heretical readings of scripture, commentators and mythographers attempted to guide readers through Ovid’s poetry, while vernacular writers like Christine de Pizan and Chaucer used Ovidian narratives to write into the archive by transgressing or seizing canonical literature with learned, gender-marked narratives. Literacy as practice continually challenges and disturbs the boundaries of the textual archive. In Archive Fever, his belated response to Foucault, Derrida ruminates on how an archive includes more than the literal memory of origins. The archive also includes what has been repressed — unconscious desires, contradictions, gaps, and absences. The archive embraces not only multiple pasts, acknowledged and unacknowledged, but also possible futures: ‘There is no meta-archive.’4 Foucault suggests that while the hyperliterate archive orders and differentiates discourses and ‘is first the law of what can be said’, it is neither static nor ahistorical. 5 Both Derrida and Foucault recognize that the archive, rather than a still point of origin, is an historical phenomenon, changing and 4  5 

Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Prenowitz, p. 67. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 129.

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changeable and always in dialogue with the present: ‘The a priori of positivities is not only the system of a temporal dispersion; it is itself a transformable group.’6 However, Foucault’s theory of epistemes and ruptures, especially in his earlier work, emphasizes large systems rather than local situations, cultural grammars rather than local speech communities and idioms. Even Foucault’s later work on subjectivity and sexuality focuses on the structural domains and heterogeneity of discursive formations rather than on the accumulation of material texts and communicative changes which create epistemic crisis and discursive reordering. Derrida argues that the underlying fluidity of the archive manifests how the historicity of discursive formations depends on the interplay between procedures for maintaining and pressures for altering or reordering the archive of hypotexts which are themselves utterances in hypertextual associations, exchanges, and conflicts. Literate technologies — material production, reading, writing, archiving — instantiate textuality and discursivity by regulating the dominant archive or altering or resisting the archive with unruly reading practices, transgressive language, or open forms. The hyperliterate network is always a work in progress and always pushing against its own boundaries.

Grammatical Commentary and Ethical Reading In late antique and medieval ars grammatica, questions about what should be read (hypotexts in the archive) and how (textualities, interpretive practices) were implicit in traditional definitions of grammar and descriptions of curriculum authors. In the first century ce, Quintilian stated that grammar ‘in duas partis dividatur, recte loquendi scientiam et poetarum enarrationem’ (comprises two parts, the study of correct speech and the reading/interpretation of the poets). But, as Quintilian added savvily, ‘plus habet in recess quam fronte promittit’ (there is more of it behind the scenes than meets the eye).7 Writing is closely related to speaking; construing properly is closely connected to interpretation. Later Roman grammarians repeated this two-part definition of the ars grammat­ ica. What was written in Greek or Latin and how it was written exerted varying degrees of control on correct speaking, depending on the grammarian’s or rhetorician’s view of the relationship between speech and writing and how much written poetic discourse governed literary conventions and everyday eloquence. But many Imperial grammatical commentaries noted the growing distance bet­ween 6  7 

Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 127. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 1. 4. 2.

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speech and writing in terms of pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar. Alcuin’s royally supported imposition of a ‘corrected’ standard Latin Bible text and pronunciation (813) created an even wider gap between Latin and vernacular literacies.8 Changes in Latin grammar and the emergence of vernacular literacies alongside Latin literacy as a Secondary Discourse transformed the Carolingian hypo­ textual archive and reordered conceptions of both Latin and vernacular literacies. Following Imperial grammarians, Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), one of Alcuin’s students, defined grammatica explicitly as a literacy programme: ‘Grammatica est scientia interpretandi poetas atque historicos et recte scribendi loquen­dique ratio.’9 (Grammar is the systematic knowledge of interpreting the poets and historians and the knowledge of writing and speaking correctly). The ability to read Latin prose and poetry was no longer taken for granted nor were there presumed to be Primary Discourse or ‘native’ speakers of Latin. Also, as Rabanus indicates, writing contemporary Latin correctly was at least as important as pronouncing it correctly whether privately or in public. In northern Europe, where Latin was regarded as a foreign and written language more than as a prior version of native speech, Latin was often written with increased word spacing to enhance pronunciation and construal, whereas the native vernacular, Old English, for example, was less likely to be written with word spacing, at least before 1000 ce.10 After 800 ce, many changes in manuscript format and writing practices were closely linked to perceived changes in local speech communities or to the changing socio­linguistic matrix of the Latin-vernaculars multilingual environment. Likewise, changes in late classical and medieval reading practices were linked to perceived linguistic changes, but often with different outcomes. In Christian literacy, the practice of reading pagan and Christian poets and other writers was situated within a complex, heterogeneous set of strategies and goals for engaging with literary texts. Christian readers were concerned about how to read troublesome scriptural texts (Song of Songs) and how to determine which authors were appropriate for Christian readers. The grammatical and rhetorical terms enarratio and interpretatio covered a range of interpretive strategies whose goals sometimes conflicted with one another. In De doctrina christiana Augustine tried to articulate a coherent program for Christian reading, but his solution was primarily to dissolve all contradictions or interpretive differences under 8 

See Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance; Herman, Vulgar Latin, trans. by Wright, pp. 115–24; Amsler, ‘History of Linguistics’, pp. 53–62; Amsler, ‘The Role of Linguistics’, pp. 533–34, 537–39; Grotans, Reading in Medieval St Gall, pp. 297–99. 9  Rabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum, iii, 18 (PL 107, cols 293–418 (col. 395B)). 10  Saenger, Space between Words, pp. 30–32, 34; O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song, pp. 21–22.

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pragmatic rubric of the proper reader’s interior knowledge of Christian orthodox doctrine informing allegorical reading whenever necessary. Between Quintilian and Chaucer, the reading procedures of enarratio and interpretatio included textual paraphrase, grammatical analsysis, interpretation of schemes and tropes, allegorizing, glossing, etymologizing, and other modes of interpretation.11 But interpretive procedures do not in themselves produce meaning. They are framed and deployed according to a reader’s assumptions and goals for what counts as productive or fruitful reading. A literal or historical commentary on Virgil or Ovid might use etymology and figurative glosses to paraphrase or explain the poem’s syntax, allusions, references, and contexts. A rhetorical commentary might use etymology and paraphrase to explain the poem’s figurative language or distinguish between everyday and poetic usage or highlight models for Latin verse composition. An ethical reading of Virgil or Ovid might use etymology, figurative glosses, and descriptions of authorial intention to develop an allegorical reading which explains the poem’s philosophical meaning, its usefulness as a guide for conduct, or appropriateness for Christian readers. Reading Ovid silently, an embodied affective literate technology different from interpretation, could be regarded as expert, contemplative, or dangerously secretive, depending on how the scene of reading is interpreted. Medieval commentators did not always distinguish between literal, rhetorical, and ethical readings of the poets, nor did readers and commentators necessarily want to separate interpretive procedures in this way. Readers construe texts in terms of the linguistic regularity (grammaticality, horizon of expectations) against which textual syntax, tropes, and figurative discourse play; in medieval literacy, grammatical exposition and rhetorical reading were intertwined. New Christian readers, schooled in literacy through the ars grammatical canon, continued to read poets like Virgil, Horace, and Ovid alongside the Bible, Sedulius, and contemporary Christian writers. They used certain interpretive practices and contexts to appropriate or seize Roman texts in acceptable, but sometimes in controversial ways. The status and significance of canonical Latin poets and the goals of Christian literacy marked out a tense contact zone throughout the history of medieval grammatical, rhetorical, and literary discourses. How medieval readers read Latin words and images in the Aeneid, Metamorphoses, or De nuptiis philologiae et mercurii was shaped by how those texts were situated within specific reading formations. 11 

Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Trans­ lation; Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 29–30, 73–87; Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling. Smalley, The Study of the Bible remains the best general overview of medieval scriptural interpretation.

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The traces of reading responses and interpretations are notoriously ephemeral. In addition to collections of annotations and glosses, some of the most explicit interpretive frames for medieval readings of Latin poets were prefaces to authors, known as circumstantiae, accessus ad auctores, or prologus. Modern scholars have shown how the format of the accessus, part of both monastic and university literary discourses, changed from the Carolingian era to the late Middle Ages.12 Early medieval grammarians applied the rhetorical circumstantiae (quis, quid, ubi, quibus facultatibus, cur, quomodo, quando) to a variety of texts in the monastic grammar curriculum, including Virgil, Horace, and Martianus Capella.13 By the late eleventh century, many moderni regarded the circumstantiae as old fashioned, and they deployed a more philosophically inflected kind of accessus. Drawing on Aristotle’s Categoriae, commentators posed seven interpretive questions to a text: Who is the author (auctor)? What is the subject (materia)? What is the author’s intention (intentio)? What is the utility of the text (utilitas)? What is the title (titulus)? To what part of philosophy (intellectual discourse) does the text belong (cui parti philosophie suponatur liber iste)? What are the causes (causae) of the text (based on Aristotle’s four causes: efficiens, materialis, formalis, finalis)?14 Some commentators reduced these questions to three (auctor, titulus, cui parti philosophiae) or two (quid, quia). By the fifteenth century, the accessus scheme was main-stream enough that Osbern Bokenham, in his prologue to Legendys of Hooly Wummen, used the Aristotelian questions to frame his subject matter (female saints) and justify his translation of the work into English: The fyrst cause is for to excyte Mennys affeccyoun to haue delyte Thys blyssyd virgyne to loue & serve […]. Anothyr cause wych that meuyd me To make thys legende, as ye shal se, Was the inportune and besy preyere Of oon whom I loue wyth herte entere, Wych that hath a synguler devocyoun To thys virgyne of pure affeccyoun.15 12 

Quain, ‘The Medieval Accessus ad auctores’; Lutz, ‘The Commentary of Remigius of Auxerre’; Accessus ad auctores, ed. by Huygens; Medieval Literary Theory, ed. by Minnis and Scott. 13  Manitius, ‘Remigius of Auxerre’, p. 49. 14  Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid’; Allen, Ethical Poetic, pp. 71–85; Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship; Medieval Literary Theory, ed. by Minnis and Scott, pp. 15–28. 15  Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by Serjeantson, ll. 127–29, 175–80 (pp. 4, 5); for Bokenham’s general plan, see ll. 1–28 (p. 1).

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Medieval interpreters used the accessus questions (whether seven, three, or two) to frame ethical interpretations of pagan texts and address teachers’ and grammarians’ anxieties about readers, especially young readers, reading or even possessing secular Latin poetry. The archive of Latina, proper Latin and grammar itself, was schizophrenically constructed around a dynamic tension of purity and danger. Highbrow Latin literary discourse was an ethical and linguistic ideal but also something dangerous or potentially corrupting for Christian readers. As we shall see, this conflict underwrote many medieval mythographic interpretations, commentaries, and vernacular retexts of classical authors. How to read sacred scripture appropriately was a continuing question for language and piety, orthodox and heterodox. But the classical and Christian poets in the medieval grammar curriculum presented other questions. Students acquired Latin competence and learned ways of writing and reading discourse by reading authoritative Latin texts by Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Theodulf, Martianus Capella, and Sedulius. Teachers and commentators composed accessus, textual commentaries, and artes poetriae as guides for reading and writing. The accessus on Latin poets situated Latin writing within an overarching interpretive, ethi­ cal, sometimes historical context, whereas many commentaries explained grammatical points, allusions, and vocabulary in Roman poets. School and uni­ ver­sity commentaries frequently combined technical grammatical explana­tions of morphology and syntax with exposition of authorial intentions, genres, and poetic figures. In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the artes poetriae de­ ployed a kind of close reading of selected passages from Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan to explain classical metrics, poetic conventions, figurative language, and syntactic manipulations (ordo artificialis) and show how to recognize the differences between ‘normative’ Latin usage, barbarisms, solecisms, and the ‘poetic’ uses of deviant diction in Virgil and Ovid. These artes poetriae taught young students, mostly boys, how to compose (inventio) by teaching them how to expound and analyze (enarratio) syntax and figures in texts. Although focused on Latin authors, medieval debates about how and what to read were part of general literacy debates about the nature of written language, textual authority, meaning, and Christian revelation.16 How should one con­ strue Virgil and Ovid? Should a young reader even read Ovid at all? Could or should one read the Bible the same way as one read Virgil? Although late classical and early medieval exegetes (Augustine, Jerome, Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bede, 16 

See Smalley, The Study of the Bible, esp. pp.  26, 97–106, 125, 147, 370–73; Allen, Mysteriously Meant; Allen, Friar as Critic; Hexter, Ovid and Medieval Schooling, esp. pp. 48–77; A Companion to Ovid, ed. by Knox, pp. 327–40.

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Smaragdus, Remigius of Auxerre) had christianized Roman imperial grammar and rhetoric with examples from the Bible and Christian poetry,17 non-­Christian Latin authors remained controversial in Christian literacy. The vernacularization of late medieval literary culture did not really change this situation, although wider vernacular and lay literacies changed the archive within which Latin authors’ texts circulated. Twelfth-century commentators and teachers compared and contrasted the Bible with secular or pagan texts to construct hierarchies of study and orders of reading. Hugh of St Victor argued that ‘omnes artes naturales divinae scientiae famulantur; et inferior sapientia recte ordinata ad superiorem conducit’ (all the natural arts serve divine science, and the inferior science, correctly organized in the hierarchy, leads to the superior).18 Nonetheless, in the late Middle Ages there was a wider interest in the canon of classical Latin literature. Virgil continued to be the principal non-Christian author in the grammatical curriculum and the principal Latin writer in the poetic archive. Horace’s Satires were also a popular and important text for teaching elementary Latin literacy and ethical reading. But what about Ovid? Although the twelfth century has been called the ‘Age of Ovid’, the surviving manuscript evidence suggests that Ovid’s texts were more problematic than those of Virgil and Horace within the canon of Christian literacy. Birger Munk Olsen contrasts the numerous twelfth-century manuscripts of Virgil (Aeneid, sixtyfive manuscripts) and Horace (Satires, sixty-seven manuscripts; Odes, fifty-eight manuscripts; Epistles, sixty-five manuscripts) with only twenty-eight manuscripts of the Metamorphoses. More recently, Olsen has identified one hundred and forty-five surviving manuscripts of Horace’s Satires from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, eighty-two from the twelfth century alone.19 Ovid occupies a more restricted and anxious position within the medieval Latin archive. More directly than any other Latin writer, Ovid’s poetic materiae — sex, pagan mythology, discursive power, polysemic language — and his canonical status in the grammar curriculum provoked and disturbed many interpretive assumptions, procedures, and goals in late medieval literacies. In response, as D. C. Allen has argued, ‘the Middle Ages invented the theory that the Metamorphoses of Ovid 17 

Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse, pp.  177–97; Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture, pp. 225–34, 292–97, 462–63. 18  Hugh of St Victor, De sacramentis, Prol., chap. 6 (PL 176, col. 185C; my translation). 19  Olsen, ‘La popularité des textes classiques’, pp. 176–79; see L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins, ed. by Olsen.

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was capable of allegorical exposition’.20 This strategy represented an expansion of the Augustinian literacy program as well as that of other allegorists for Virgil. Nonetheless, Ovid’s poetry posed different problems for medieval reading communities. Ovid’s writings are filled with erotic scenarios, rape narratives, forced sex, attempted rape, seduction, and kidnapping, not to mention cannibalism, bestiality, and species transformations, almost always perpetrated by male figures. Further, Ovid’s narrative voices present readers with multiple subject positions, ironic undercutting, self-conscious textual parody, and crossgender and cross-genre representations. With such narrative instabilities, themes, and experiments, Ovid’s texts occupied an uncertain but potentially very creative place in the medieval archive and Latin grammar canon. On the one hand, Ovid was one of the nine golden auctores or autentices.21 Ovid’s erotic and exile writings — Amores, Ars amatoria, Remedia amores, Fasti, Heroides — provided medieval readers and writers with a rich archive of narratives, vocabularies, themes, and figurative conventions, many of which differed from the available heroic discourses of elite poetry. The Metamorphoses was the hypotext for medieval versions of many classical myths and stories. Ovidian vocabularies and themes permeate the language of courtly love, real or imagined, and informed the development of ironic and self-reflexive poetic discourse in Latin and vernacular lyrics. However, ‘Ovidianism’ was also shadowed by a persistent ‘anti-Ovidianism’, from Juvenal’s rejection of Ovid’s foolish stories to the Antiovidianus and medieval critics of the Roman de la rose, from Chrétien de Troyes, Jean de Meun, and troubadour poets to Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pizan. Ovid’s texts were also feared as sites of dangerous reading, writing, and desire, especially for young readers. Conrad of Hirsau in his Dialogus super auctores (first half of twelfth century) removed Ovid’s erotic writings and Metamorphoses (‘the inventor of a large part of idol-worship’) from his grammatical canon, and he only tolerated Ovid’s Ex Ponto, Fasti, and a few other writings.22 Alexander Neckham in his Sacerdos ad altare accessurus happily included Donatus, Priscian, Theodulus, Cato, Virgil, Horace, and the Old and New Testaments in the modernus Latin literacy curriculum, but he waffled on Ovid: ‘Placuit tamen viris autenticis carmina amatoria […] subducenda esse a manibus adolescentium’ (Nonetheless, some men of authority hold that [Ovid’s] love poetry should be kept from the 20 

Allen, Mysteriously Meant, p. 163. For example, Aimeric, Ars lectoria, ed. by Reijnders, p. 170 (1086 ce). 22  Conrad of Hirsau, Dialogus, cited in Medieval Literary Theory, ed. by Minnis and Scott, pp. 56–57. 21 

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hands of adolescent boys).23 Specifically, Neckham recommended the Remedia amores as an antidote to Metamorphoses and Ovid’s more pernicious writings. Guibert de Nogent in his memoire Monodiae (c. 1108) condemned his youthful desire to rival Ovid and ‘pastoral poets’ and his ‘striving to achieve an amorous charm’ in his manner ‘of arranging images and in well-craf­ted letters’. Reading Ovid inspired him to produce ‘lascivious […] poetic expres­sions’, which prompted his ‘immodest stirrings of the flesh’.24 Dangerous reading leads to lascivious writing and affective reading, which in turn ignite censor­ ship, interpretive regulation, and silence. But unruly texts and dangerous, counterhegemonic reading can also produce further unruly writing, which is just what literacy police fear. In the cycle of transgression and control (but which came first?), both profit from the hyperliterate archive. Medieval grammarians’ proscriptions of Ovid’s writing were caught up in repetitions of desire, affectus, and ambiguous guilty pleasure. Interpretation and commentary are ongoing forms of boundary work pushing against the potentially excessive or transgressive interpretations of writerly (scriptible) reading and writing. As we have seen, affective reading had many dimensions in late medieval literacies. In itself, affective literacy is not simply productive nor simply corrupting or distracting. The pleasure and understanding generated within affective reading are intertwin(n)ed with its unruly and excessive practices. Affective reading could trigger complex spiritual engagements with a text and mental imagery, as in the Ancrene Wisse. But Ovid’s poetry, especially his mythography and erotic scenarios, foregrounded specific cultural anxieties within affective literacy: What happens if a reader responds erotically to a text, or becomes sexually aroused, or reads primarily for pleasure, delight, or laughter? What happens if a reader identifies with or models a morally corrupt character? What are the politics and pleasures of satire and the skewering of authority figures? The shifting points of view in Ovid’s narratives make it difficult for readers to construct a single ethical perspective in a text, especially when that text represents a highly charged situation such as seduction, rape, or incest. Nonetheless, for many professional readers and commentators, Ovid’s canonical status demanded that they try and develop appropriating or ethically useful readings of the Metamorphoses and other poems beyond simply using individual Ovidian lines as examples for Latin 23  See Corrogationes Promethei, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 550 (late twelfth century), in Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, i, 270. 24  Guibert de Nogent, Monodiae, trans. by Archambault, i, 17. On medieval attitudes to­ ward the pleasures, profits, and dangers of delight in reading, see Olson, Literature as Recreation.

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composition. Medieval commentators struggled to make Ovid a fit and proper auctor, both in terms of his narrative themes and his Latin language. While rigorists such as Conrad of Hirsau proposed that the Metamorphoses be erased from the list of acceptable pagan writers, other Christian commentators and official readers appropriated or assimilated Ovid’s narratives within commentaries or accessus which deployed moral, authoritative, and useful (utilitas) interpretive procedures. As Jean Seznec, D. C. Allen, Judson Allen, and others have shown, Ovid’s stories of rape, attempted rape, and kidnapping were read and interpreted not only as adventurous, fantastic narratives but also as exempla, that is, coded texts which required contextualizing interpretation, especially learned exegesis, to produce or release moral narrative interpretations for Christian readers.25 Ovid’s texts foregrounded for medieval audiences the problem of whether to read for profit or for pleasure or both (Chaucer’s ernest and game) as well as the problem of just how to determine reading’s profits and dangers. Ovidian commentators, allegorists, and glossators constructed interpretive frames (parerga) for medieval audiences. Sometimes these frames were explicitly displayed on the page, formatted with rubrics as text+gloss+allegory; other times, reading frames were implicitly embedded within general mythographic discourse or attached as prefatory accessus. In addition to such guided readings, some Latin and vernacular writers rewrote Ovid’s narratives without overt allegorical gloss or mythographic hermeneutics, leaving readers and listeners to interpret the intertextual relations with the underlying Ovidian narratives. Focusing on how medieval readers read some of Ovid’s highly charged rape narratives, we can see how literacy, interpretive practices, and ideological assumptions are implicated in one another. How did medieval readers read Ovid’s rape narratives? Often, medieval readers of Ovid’s mythographic rape narratives elided or erased rape itself by interpreting sexual violence either as an allegory of creation or spirituality or as a moral exemplum which subordinated gender and sexual behaviours to other socio-political codes. Constructing contexts primarily along ethical or spiritual utilitas lines, official commentaries and mythographies of Ovid in effect sought to control medieval discourses about rape and sexuality. They downplayed legal questions of rape, or silenced sexual violence (in the textual letter and the literal body), or decoded rape narratives as integumenta structured around gendered binaries of virtue and vice. But other readings and retextings of Ovidian rape narratives, notably by Chaucer, Gower, and Christine de Pizan, challenged many mythographers’ 25 

Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. by Sessions; Allen, Mysteriously Meant, pp. 163–99; Allen, Friar as Critic, esp. pp. 3–28, 59–60; Allen, Ethical Poetic, esp. pp. 3–116.

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assump­tions about reading for pleasure or moral edification. From different tex­tual standpoints, Chaucer and Christine de Pizan reproduced Ovid’s selfconscious, destabilizing inscriptions of multiple subject positions within their own narratives, unpacking in different ways the gendered semiosis of writing, reading, and sexuality.

Romance, Mythography, Law In the medieval hyperliterate archive, ‘Ovid’ was a hypotext, a generative intertext with shifting borders. The contrast between Ovidian poetics and Ovidian mythography was a structuring structure in the medieval archive. The ways Ovid’s narratives of rape and sexual violence were framed in later medieval romances, fabliaux, courtly allegories, and pastourelle differed from the ways they were contextualized in mythographic texts.26 As critics have noted, Chrétien de Troyes’s romances used Ovid’s texts to construct a new narrative language of romance, interiority, and sexuality. Chrétien’s heroes and heroines use bits of Ovidian discourse to express their desires, anxieties, sexual imaginings, and everyday relationships. Rape is positioned as a moral countersign in Chrétien’s Ovidian narrative discourse, and female consent is crucial for ‘good’ sexual and romantic relationships. In the romance of consensual sex, Chrétien’s rape narratives deploy sensational, titillating narratives of female trauma and hypermasculinity to help readers distinguish between ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’. (Chrétien is supposed to have composed a vernacular version of Ovid’s story of the rape of Philomela, an Ovidian narrative we will return to in a moment.) In romance discourse, good knights don’t sexually violate women. What these narratives cover over, however, is the violence which supports the representation of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ knights. Unlike romance writers’ representations of rape and sexual violence, medieval mythographers and commentators interpreted Ovid’s narratives in Metamorphoses by reframing and interpreting the narratives as fictionalized representations of natural processes or physical processes or in some cases historical persons (euhemerism), or as allegories of moral traits or cognitive processes, or as allegories of spiritual or Christian truths revealed more fully in Scripture. Euhemerizing and allegorizing interpretive strategies, well known to ancient and early medieval commentators, were also deployed in the late medieval accessus and commentaries on Ovid.27 Using as a pretext Jesus’s self-representation 26  27 

Gravdal, Vilain and Courtois; Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens. Curtius, European Literature, trans. by Trask, pp. 36–61, 203–13, 436–67; Seznec, The

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as the ‘fulfillment of the scriptures’, early Christian commentators appropriated mythographic strategies from the Stoics and early Jewish exegetes to develop Christian readings of scripture. To varying degrees, Christian commentators also applied grammatical and hermeneutic methods of exegesis and allegorizing to classical texts as refutations of the ‘rigorist’ argument discrediting pagan or scandalous texts in favour of Christian truth. By the twelfth century, euhemerist and allegorical interpretations of Ovid, Virgil, and Lucan, together with grammatical and etymological glosses on classical texts, were established within the grammar curriculum and increasingly became part of learned mythographic writing, university lecturers’ repertoire, and preachers and writers’ archive of exempla.28 Classical myths were read as ‘cloaked’ ancient writing (integumentum) whose textual letter concealed and revealed moral or cosmological truths. These textual commentaries and accessus ad auctores established the literate context for reading Ovidian texts in an ethical or moral interpretive program, especially for young readers or future teachers of young Latin readers. Using the accessus questions, a late medieval commentator on the Ars amatoria (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 7998 [c. 1305]) wrote, ‘Ethice supponitur liber iste quia loquitur de moribus iuvenum et puellarum, quos introducit in hac arte’ (The book (Ars amatoria) pertains to ethics because it addresses the behaviour of young boys and girls, whom it introduces into that art).29 Another fourteenth-century commentary on the Metamorphoses (Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS N 254 sup.) specifically identified Ovid as an ‘ethical poet’ with a pun on the writer’s name: ‘vel dictus est Naso per similitudinem, quia sicut canis venaticus odore nasi feras percipit et sequitur, sic Ovidius odore et discrecione nasi sui bonas percipiebat sententias’ (or he is called ‘Naso’ as a simile, because just as a hunting dog senses wild animals with his nose and follows them, so Ovid perceived good moral instruction by the suggestion and discernment of his nose). (In Horace’s Satires, for example, 1. 2, nasus is associated with scorn or satire.) The MS Ambrosiana N.254 sup. commentator distinguished two uses (utilitates) of the Metamorphoses on the axes of textual production and reception. First, he says, Ovid wrote the poem to redeem himself in Caesar’s eyes and compensate for his earlier erotic works. Then readers (legentium) discover in the Metamorphoses what comes of wicked behaviour (‘quid de pravis moribus Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. by Sessions, passim; Chance, Medieval Mythography, i, 29–30; Chance, Medieval Mythography, ii, 10–12, 28–30, 233–38. 28  Smalley, The Study of the Bible, pp. 83–111; Allen, Mysteriously Meant, pp. 163–73; Allen, Friar as Critic, passim; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 15–40. 29  Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid’, p. 45.

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acciderit’) and learn how to avoid vices and beast-like sin (‘a viciis et a belvina turpitudine abstineamus’). The commentator reads Ovid’s narratives within an interpretive frame which legitimized Ovid as an advanced canonical writer whose texts guide readers through the natural world and ethics (‘Epthicus et phisicus est actor iste’).30 Other commentators on the Metamorphoses focused on mutations as textual signs in ethical reading. Arnulf of Orléans, in his influential Allegoriae super Ovidii Metamorphosin (late twelfth century), linked Ovid’s materiae to three kinds of transformation (natural, magical, spiritual) and read the physical trans­formations in Metamorphoses as metaphors for spiritual change. Most manuscripts of Arnulf ’s Allegoriae include an accessus and for each chapter a meta­textual keyword summary to help readers locate individual mutations, inter­preted historically, allegorically, and morally. These changes, Arnulf wrote, bring ‘proper’ Christian readers back to God and call on readers to avoid vice and follow virtuous reason.31 One fourteenth-century reader of the Metamorphoses (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8253) used the Aristotelian categories to read shape changing ethically: Causa efficiens est illud a quo res agitur sicut est ipse deus, quia est causa efficiens cuiuslibet rerum. Causa materialis est illud de quo res agitur sicut sunt ligna et lapides que sunt causa materialis domus. Causa formalis est illud quod in esse rei, sicuti divinitas in deo, humanitas in homine. Causa finalis est illud propter quod res agitur sicuti bonitas quia propter bonitatem et, ut ad bonum finem deveniant, omnia procreantur. (The efficient cause is that by which something is brought into being, such as God himself, because he is the efficient cause of everything. The material cause is that something from which an entity (res) is brought into being, such as wood and stones, which are the material cause of the house. The formal cause is that which inheres in something, such as the divinity in God, the humanity in a person. The final cause is that because of which something is brought into being, such as good­ ness, because on account of goodness everything is created, so that people come to a good end.) 32

30 

Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid’, pp. 53–54. Arnulf of Orléans, Allegoriae, ed. by Ghisalberti, p. 181. On the kinds of mutations and hyperliterate marginal Latin notes to help readers locate individual myths, see John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, ed. by Ghisalberti, ll. 11–20. 32  Ghisalberti, ‘Medieval Biographies of Ovid’, p. 51. 31 

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The Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8253 commentator, adapting scholastic analyses of being (essendi), classified the different kinds of mutationes in Metamorphose: mutatio naturalis (earth to water, air to fire), mutatio spiritualis (Agave goes insane, Orestes becomes mad after killing his mother), mutatio moralis (Lycaon is punished by being turned into a wolf ), magica mutatio (Circe turns Odysseus’s men into pigs), mutatio de corpore in corpus (Io becomes a cow), mutatio de re inanimata in rem animatam (Deucalion’s stones become people), mutatio de re animata in animatam (Actaeon is turned into a deer), mutatio de re animata in inanimatam (a serpent trying to devour Orpheus becomes a stone), mutatio de re inanimata in rem inanimatam (Philemon’s house becomes a temple). The commentator’s reading is sensitive to the complexities of Ovid’s representations of metamorphoses. For Arnulf and the Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8253 commentator, bestial transformations are textual signs of characters’ moral failing, psychological imbalance, or punishment. Some medieval scholars sharply distinguish between early medieval and later medieval commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses or between sacred and secular reading strategies or between pedagogical commentaries for elementary students and those for advanced interpreters. But the differences are not always so clear. Some medieval theorists also tried to distinguish different reading strategies for different kinds of texts or, conversely, to appropriate unruly texts to more established modes of reading. For example, in the twelfth century Hugh of St Victor stipulated that a proper reader of scripture should first expound the text’s grammatical construction (littera), then proceed to the ‘obvious’ (facilis) historical or rhetorical sensus offering aperta significatio, and finally explore the text’s ‘profundior intelligentia’ sententia.33 Hugh links these modes of reading with the order of exposition. But Hugh suggested a different order of exposition for secular writings and yet a third for meditative reading. Meditative reading, he argued, should skip around more freely (recall Anselm on affective literacy), and the meditating reader should select subjects and threads according to the movement of his or her soul. For Hugh and others, devotional and secular reading practices were more variable and discontinuous with the text than were scriptural reading practices. Other reading and preaching theorists argued for more discontinuous, thematic modes of reading scripture. Theory and practice do not always meet, and in practice, of course, annotators and commentators combined these different interpretive modes in various ways. Some glossed manuscripts of Ovid or Virgil encode the historicity of their 33 

Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, bk 3, chap. 8 (LLT, p. 58, ll. 16–19).

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successive annotations in institutional settings. They combined materials from earlier commentaries (Servius on the Aeneid, Macrobius’s Saturnalia, Arnulf on Metamorphoses) and linguistic and mythographic notes from Isidore with anno­ tations and references drawn from Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae, Macrobius’s Somnium scipionis, and other texts, and with commentaries and annotations reflecting contemporary historical or religious concerns. These hybrid textual commentaries, based on compilatio modes of writing, reframe their object texts in manuscript space to produce a dynamic textuality of historicized and historicizing readings. Christopher Baswell has discussed a twelfth-century English school manu­ script of Virgil (Oxford, All Souls College, MS 82) containing three sets of annotations which reflect the manuscript’s changing pedagogical situations, from a twelfth-century English canonry to a fifteenth-century university college.34 Each annotator marked up features of Virgil’s Aeneid to provide readers with linguistic, historical, and religious information that he thought will contribute to a ‘proper’ or ‘complete’ reading of the poem. Many glosses provide grammatical and semantic contextual information (for example, from Aeneid, Book One: ‘Vesta’ (l. 292), ‘dea’ (a goddess); ‘Eurotus’ (l. 498), ‘fluvius’ (a river)) or elaborate etymologies based on Servius or Isidore (for example, ‘Oenotri’ (l. 532), ‘Oenotri dicuntur a cultu vini quod ibi habundabat. enos. grece. vinum. latine. unde enophorum vas vinarium’ (The Enotri are named from the wine cult which was widespread there. ‘Enos’ in Greek is ‘wine’ in Latin. Thus ‘enophorium’: a wine vessel).35 The fifteenth-century annotator included plot summaries and topic headings, similar to the hyperliterate text markup in thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury preaching handbooks to facilitate discontinuous reading. The fifteenth-century annotator also glossed figurative language and rhetorical devices, pagan mythology and religion, geography, and historical references. But, according to Baswell, the last annotator in Oxford, All Souls College, MS 82 used no allegorizing interpretations, not even for Aeneid, Book Six, which in the twelfth century had received an elaborate allegorical reading in Pseudo-Bernard Silvestris’s widely disseminated commentary on the poem.36 Not all annotated and framed readings of Virgil or Ovid were intended for the same school audiences or individual readers. In his summaries and moralizations of Ovid, Arnulf of Orléans incorporated earlier commentaries by Servius, 34 

Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 41–83. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 55, 57, 335 (n. 62), 337 (n. 77). 36  Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 71–80. 35 

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Fulgentius, the three Vatican Mythographers, and Albericus of London. Arnulf says he interpreted the Metamorphoses using moral, historical, and allegorical methods (‘Modo moraliter, aut historice, aut allegorice exponamus’).37 Arnulf ’s summaries of myths might assist teachers and new Latin readers with Latin syntax, but the bulk of his commentary and moral explanations collect previous glosses and interpretations of Metamorphoses into a compendium of background knowledge for classroom teachers and preachers. Whereas glosses in twelfth-­ century manuscripts of Horace’s Satires were more commonly used to teach beginning syntax, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was a hypotext for ethical and moral interpretation.38 This pedagogical division of grammatical labour compensated for Ovid’s contested place in the literacy curriculum. Many Latin teachers, university commentators, and guardians of public morality regarded Ovid’s mythological narratives, Ars amatoria, and Remediae as dangerous and his poetic syntax and diction as difficult. Many commentaries on Ovid’s poetry assume that the texts are for older students or more advanced, accomplished readers. These metatextual parerga in the archive keep Ovid’s poetry away from young readers while maintaining the institutional power and prestige of advanced grammar teachers. As we saw with Modistic grammar and Latin syntax (Chapter Two), not all grammatical annotations and construe notes in commentaries are elementary Latin pedagogy. Grammar and syntax cover broad areas of textuality and reading. What Dagenais calls the ‘invisible merging of text and gloss’ is complicated by the fact that linguistic and allegorizing glosses were frequently and necessarily intertwined.39 (I am not appealing here simply to the ‘original manuscripts’ for a ‘proper’ historical understanding, but rather to the materiality of text-making.) Stylistics and reader response theory, notably the work of Stanley Fish, have shown the fallacy of making an absolute distinction between syntactic construal and textual interpretation. Many medieval literate practices and textual poetics also called such a distinction into question and resisted the hierarchy of ‘senses’ and meanings which privileged the spiritual significatio over the letter (sensus literalis). Spiritual or ethical signification was grounded on the litterae of syntax and semantics and on the context of utterance. Nonetheless, some medieval critics and scholars continue to divide the gloss from the text in medieval interpretive discourses and distinguish lower from 37 

Arnulf of Orléans, Allegoriae, ed. by Ghisalberti, p. 212. On glossed manuscripts of Horace’s Satires, see Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 33–41, and Chapter 2 above. 39  Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading, p. 37. 38 

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higher glosses in order to reserve interpretive authority for ‘higher criticism’. Baswell, for example, labels some parts of a complex annotated manuscript of Virgil ‘pedagogical’ and subordinates them to more sententia-oriented exegesis and allegorical interpretations.40 Such interpretations and the critical theory they presuppose are misleading when applied to many glossed manuscripts after 1100, especially those of classical Latin authors. Distinguishing between ‘lower’ pedagogical glosses and ‘higher’ interpretive glosses imposes a hierarchy of reading, that is, an ordered textuality, on manuscript space and presumes to separate allegory and moral commentary as advanced reading from the construal of textual, grammatical meaning. This dividing practice was also deployed by exegetical commentators and theorists such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St Victor. Some, like Bernard, relegated grammatical or linguistic matters to ‘lower’ level construal and therefore ‘basic’ literacy, not part of higher, more sophisticated interpretation. However, construing vocabulary, semantic associations, and syntax are key strategies of textual interpretation and response, not prior to it. Grammatical glosses and late antique interpretations of Virgil continued to be primary mat­ erials for advanced and university-level education. They were part of the grammar teachers’ pedagogical repertoire and increasingly part of preachers’ and writers’ working archive. Along with newer accessus and commentaries such as that by Pseudo-Bernard Silvestris, allegorical and moralizing commentaries on Ovid’s mythographies were just as ‘pedagogical’ as were grammatical and lexical annotations. Moreover, construing Ovid’s vocabulary and syntax was part of the literate Latin archive and linguistic community in the central and late Middle Ages. Elementary annotations and commentaries and advanced allegorical and moral exegeses drew from a common set of syntactic construals, etymologies, and glossed historical and mythological references to connect, in Hugh of St Victor’s terms, littera with sensus and sententia. So rather than restrict ‘pedagogical’ to elementary education, we do better to read the medieval educational and textual continuum, from ABC and grammar schools to the university, as a complex hyperliterate institutional network of practices, with different settings foregrounding different aspects of the textual archive for students, who are ‘subjectified’ in their acquisition of Latin literacies and reading competences and in many cases capable of creating new pathways, readings, and texts. Some late medieval glossators of classical texts explicitly expanded their syntactic construals and close readings with higher-order allegorical inter­ pretations. Servius’s (fourth century) commentary on the Aeneid was a central 40 

Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, pp. 41–167.

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hypotext within the archive, which later medieval glossators and commentators cited, snipped, plagiarized, or expanded for syntactic, semantic, or encyclopedic annotations. Late medieval commentaries on Ovid and Horace, however, were connected to a more amorphous body of glosses and annotations from the Carolingian era onward. Tenth- and eleventh-century grammatical glosses on Ovid and Ovid-based mythographies formed a key part of the hypotext which was retexted by later medieval moralizing readings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The ‘Vulgate’ Commentary (c. 1250) collected many of these earlier marginal or interlinear grammatical and lexical glosses on the Metamorphoses.41 The First and Second Vatican Mythographers, most likely writing in the tenth century, emphasized genealogies, euhemerist or historical fables, and cosmology in Ovid’s mythic narratives while transmitting earlier mythographies by Fulgentius and Lactantius to the late Middle Ages. 42 Beginning in the late eleventh century, moralized commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses were more popular as the ethical use (utilitas) of texts became one of commentators’ principal concerns. Arnulf of Orléans’s Allegoriae super Ovidii Metamorphosin was followed by an explosion of moralizing commentaries in the fourteenth century: in particular, the Ovide moralisé in vernacular verse (prose version, fifteenth century 43) and Latin allegorizing mythographies by John of Garland, Thomas Waleys, John Ridewall, and most important, Petrus Berchorius (Pierre Bersuire, 1290– 1362). Berchorius’s prose Ovidius moralizatus (often attributed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to Waleys) made up Book Fifteen of his encyclopedic Reductorium morale. The first chapter, De formis figurisque deorum, circulated independently in the late medieval and early modern eras. These allegorical readings of Metamorphoses, part of a broad mythographic discourse identified with the School of Chartres but which exceeded that institution’s neo-platonic program, continued to influence literary and learned uses of classical myth into the sixteenth century.44 Despite commentaries mingling construal and interpretation, many schools still deployed ethical interpretation as another dividing practice, reserving allegorical and moralizing readings of texts for advanced Latin readers. Paradoxically, these mythographic and allegorical 41 

‘Vulgate’ Commentary, ed. by Coulson. See Coulson, ‘Ovid’s Transformations’. On the problems identifying the Vatican Mythographers, see: Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, p. v; Chance, Medieval Mythography, i, 162, 164; Mythographi Vanitani i, ed. by Zorzetti, pp. xi–xii. 43  Ovide moralisé en prose, ed. by Boer. 44  See Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, trans. by Taylor; Stock, Myth and Science; Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry. 42 

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readings also repositioned literal reading of scripture, for example, among the Victorines and Hermann of Scheda (Chapter Four), in various ways. Literal readings of scripture and the Latin canon became a linguistically and historically sophisticated rejoinder to allegorical reading or served to mark naive, possibly heretical readers or was taken up by heterodox readers as a counterhegemonic strategy to challenge dominant clerical allegorical reading. While Horace’s Satires were read more literally as ethical texts, Ovid’s Metamorphoses was situated in the archive as a repository of symbolic and metaphoric texts requiring hyperliterate interpretive attention to remain part of an ethical reading program.45 Medieval anxieties about proper and improper affectus, pragmatic knowledge (how to talk to girls) which might lead to sin, and other consequences of reading were fully operating with Ovid’s texts and with the situations in which Ovid was read, more so than with other classical texts in the grammatical curriculum. Moral allegorical interpretations of classical texts may be ‘domesticating’46 if we think of textualities as necessarily taming otherwise ‘wild’ literary texts by incorporating their narratives and figures within a system of dominant ethics, contemporary history, or disciplinary knowledge. But texts are complex networks which always already archive and say more than they mean to say in utterances that remain to be read and retexted. A text activates the archive in a number of ways, combining language, themes, and representations in familiar or unfamiliar ways. Readers connect a text with the unmasterable archive as part of intertextual reading, sometimes using the archive to seize or resist textual meaning and render the text writerly (scriptible) so as to negotiate their intellectual and emotional responses to Ovid’s narratives. Official commentaries intervene in textual space to produce guided readings and authoritative frames for Latin pagan texts as well as scripture. These interpretive textualities, ranging from literal to allegorical and focusing on the litera, strictus sensus, and sententia, retext old poetry for new audiences and so alter the hypotextual archive within hyperliteracy. Retexting a text for profitable reading (utilitas) depends, first of all, on what sort of use value the interpreter wants to propose — grammatical, aesthetic, moral. Was Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Horace’s Satires scanned for examples of good Latin verse composition (linguistic form)? Or for ways to construct a narrative (ordo naturalis or artificialis)? Or for historical examples or political advice? Or for moral or ethical examples? Or some combination of these? In the first place and despite a strong authorial model of textuality, 45  46 

Reynolds, Medieval Reading, pp. 146–48; Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading, pp. 34–35. Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, p. 10.

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to read a text with profit, medieval ethical commentators did not require that an interpretation recapitulate the author’s intention or pagan historical con­ text (the letter, littera, sensus). In the case of Ovid, many commentaries and mythographies appropriated Ovid’s rape stories for cosmological, euhemeristic, or moral purposes, or sometimes simply omitted the rape narratives altogether. In other words, many mythographers tried to make Ovid’s texts instructive rather than pleasurable or offensive for readers. They read rape as a signifier of other behaviours with frequently gendered meanings (male cosmological creativity), or they rewrote the Ovidian hypotext and erased rape altogether from the mythographic narrative. Annotating and commentary discourses are textual inter­ventions and literate strategies which reproduced the base text but always with a difference — rescriptions and retexts for ‘modern’ literate purposes. Surprisingly, given Ovid’s mythological material and the program for ethical reading, many late medieval Metamorphoses commentaries did not engage much with contemporaneous shifts in legal discourse, especially regarding raptus, as did romance, pastourelle, and beast fables. In twelfth- to fourteenth-century secular and canon law, raptus, ‘clandestine marriage’, and sex crimes were redefined in ways that sometimes gave more weight to female consent and legal recourse, but sometimes reduced the criminality of raping women (other than virgins) and placed a greater burden of proof on the accuser. In England, for example, both Glanvill (twelfth century) and Bracton (thirteenth century) defined raptus as ‘forced coitus’. But Westminster I (Parliamentary statute, 1275) identified raptus as either ‘ravishment’ or forcible kidnapping, with or without the woman’s consent, while Westminster II (Parliamentary statute, 1285) restricted raptus to kidnapping and forced coitus without a woman’s consent, ‘neither before or after’. During this same period, the charge of raptus was changed from a capital crime which broke the king’s peace to a felony with a lesser punishment.47 Within the hyperliterate network of commentary and legal discourses, the disconnect between legal disputes about the meaning of raptus, textual commentaries on rape narratives, and some Ovidian mythographies suggests how discourses are not necessarily homologous within a single historical timeframe. 47 

The scholarship on medieval rape is enormous. See Brundage, ‘Rape and Marriage’; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, pp. 47–48, 209–10, 311–13, 469–72, 530–33; Carter, Rape in Medieval England, pp. 35–37; Joplin, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle’; Cannon, ‘Raptus’; Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, pp. 6–11, 122–40. On marriage and consent in later medieval English writing, see: Fradenburg, Sacrifice your Love, pp. 199–238; Robertson, ‘Public Bodies and Psychic Domains’; Robertson, ‘Marriage, Mutual Consent’; Robertson, ‘Rape, Female Subjectivity, and the Poetics of Married Love’.

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Intertextualities clash. Discourses contest. Mythographic commentators and canon lawyers inhabit and practice different discourses, even though they use the same Latin grammar, similar vocabulary, and even some of the same assumptions about femininity, masculinity, sexual responsibility, intention, consent, and goals of reading. The ‘poetic text’ relates to the social environment indirectly rather than directly, connotatively rather than denotatively. Rather than read in a deterministic ‘historicism’ way from legal or interpretive ‘context’ to the commentary or poetic ‘text’, I want to foreground the filiations and resistances between hypotexts and textual practices in heterogeneous discursive or manuscript spaces. Official interpretations and fictional representations (enoncèes) are key components of a hyperliterate network, but depending on the literate technologies and motives, their discursive filiations are organized differently according to different subject positions. A ‘prince-pleasing’ poet might create a text which supports or at least doesn’t question directly the status of his patrons, while another poet, also performing for his patron, might create a poem which indirectly criticizes social abuses or the arrogance of power in the voice of the counseling poet or a character. Writers might align their texts with one or more social discourses, such as that of urban counselors, dissenting clergy, or female mystics, through fictions of historical or imaginary characters. In the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the vocabulary which moral commentators and mythographers used to describe sexual violence belonged to a different textual space from that of canon lawyers. Their interpretive vocabularies reveal different slippages and ambiguities. The terms raptus (n.) and ravere (v.) occur frequently in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But semantically related Latin and vernacular words do not necessarily reproduce the primary meaning of the Latin word. Much of late medieval English and French law was articulated in at least two languages (Latin and a vernacular), and this functional multilingualism produced linguistic ambiguities. The French legal term for rape, eforcier, foregrounds the criterion of force or violence found in Roman legal definitions. But does OF ravir always carry the same connotation? Does MedLat rapina, ‘pillaging, destruction of property’, also refer to rape? The OED lists Gower’s ‘Tale of Tereus’ (aka ‘The Tale of Philomela’, 1390) as the first English appearance of ravener meaning ‘a deforcer, ravisher, destroyer’, whereas Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s Consolatio (1374) is cited as the first use of ravener meaning ‘a robber, plunderer, despoiler’. Given the story context, Gower’s usage clearly indicates rape, but what about the connotation of fierce hunger/desire (EModE ‘ravenous’)? Does the English ravysch refer to kidnapping, plunder, or rape, or all three? Do any of these semantic fields overlap, characterizing a woman as someone else’s property and therefore subject to pillaging?

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While some linguistic ambiguities are unresolvable, we can explore more carefully how semantic conflicts provoke different textualities and create new hypotexts in the archive of pagan Latin texts, thus remaking the ‘medieval Ovid’. Allegorical commentators deployed a marker model of literacy to control and guide potential teachers and readers of Ovid’s poetry. Mythographers retold and moralized the narratives of Callisto, Pluto and Proserpina, Daphne and Apollo, and Philomela and Tereus as part of their ethical or cosmological interpretations of problematic Latin narratives. But these mythographic readings and reading practices were intertextually knotted up with new versions of the ‘medieval Ovid’, in particular Christine de Pizan’s Épistre Othéa (to Hector) and Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Philomela’ in Legend of Good Women. As retexts, Christine and Chaucer’s poems challenged the mythographers’ interventions and grammatical annotations while inscribing into the archive countermythographies and alternate hypotexts of Ovid’s rape narratives, which in turn created new gaps and tensions within the discursive archive.

Moralized Ovid As we have seen, glosses, accessus, and commentaries provided medieval audiences with alternative ways of reading Ovid’s transformation narratives. Glosses attached contextual or grammatical information to a literary text; accessus framed poetry manuscripts by juxtaposing accounts of authorial intention with goals for reading older texts appropriately or with ‘profit’. These paratexts produced textual meaning as an-other. By deterritorializing textual meaning from authorial intention or the narrative’s historical circumstances, moral allegorizers theoretically positioned the Metamorphoses as a written object, a modular piece of language, which could be intertextually reterritorialized elsewhere in the archive. To be susceptible to allegorical interpretation, a text must be untethered from its historical, literal situation and allowed to float within the hyperliterate archive. But mythographers were also acting as socially authoritative readers. They recontextualized Ovid as the base text for producing a certain pedagogical content. Hyperliteracy’s modularity and blurred textual edges make intertextuality possible and render the archive unstable, but they also make it possible for authoritative readers to appropriate unruly texts within dominant signification. The archive is always under construction. The commentator in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8253 read Ovid’s physical mutations as metaphors of natural, moral, magical, or spiritual change. But if we reverse the interpretive scheme and reread the

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hypotext as another intertext, we get a different interpretation of Ovid’s rape narratives, one which implicitly resists mythography’s ideological work. For example, many commentators described Lycaon and his daughter Callisto as humans transformed into animals for their crimes.48 But the stories of father and daughter are not exactly parallel with respect to moral culpability. The tyrannical Lycaon questions Jupiter’s authority and is punished by being turned into a wolf. However, Callisto is raped by Jupiter (disguised as Diana in order to get near her), then turned into a bear by a vengeful Juno after giving birth to a son, Arcas.49 Ovid’s narrative foregrounds Callisto’s wariness of men and her same-sex desire, as well as Juno’s humiliation at her husband’s sex crime and her eagerness to cover her shame by punishing the rape victim. Not to mention Jupiter’s crossgender deception. Ovid’s narrative resists a monological reading of physical transformation as rewarding virtue and punishing vice, not least because Jupiter’s own shape changing helps perpetrate the crime. Medieval commentaries and mythographies of Lycaon and Callisto reiterate and expand on different aspects of Ovid’s narrative for why father and daughter are changed into beasts. Revealingly, the commentators’ moral discourse doesn’t always focus on rape. Revising Ovid’s narrative, the thirteenth-century Vulgate Commentary annotates Lycaon as a king who changes ‘de benigno in raptorem’ (from a generous [or favourable] character into a plunderer [rapist?]). An interlinear gloss on Metamorphoses i. 144 associates Lycaon with ‘rebus per rapinam adquisitis’ (acquiring things through plunder).50 Lycaon’s transformation into a wolf is interpreted as apt punishment for his tyranny and rapacious avarice. In the Vulgate Commentary, ‘raptor’ and ‘rapina’ denote greedy acquisition and seizure of property, which may or may not include sexual oppression, while Ovid’s association of Lycaon and Jupiter as ‘raptores’ remains unexamined. Earlier, the First and Second Vatican Mythographers (tenth century) narrated how Lycaon was punished for his arrogance toward the gods, whereas Callisto, whom Jupiter overpowered (viciasset) and raped, was banished by Diana and punished by the jealous Juno.51 In both Ovid and the mythographers’ accounts, the young Callisto is drawn to Diana and her circle of women, but then raped by a shape-changing Jupiter. Both Ovid and the mythographers describe Callisto’s further humiliation and punishment by two female gods (Diana, Juno). Diana 48 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, ii, ll. 401–40, 466–507 (pp. 46–47, 48–50). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, ii, ll. 468–69 (p. 48). 50  ‘Vulgate’ Commentary, ed. by Coulson, pp. 27, 112–13. 51  Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, pp. 8, 153–55. 49 

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punishes Callisto because she had sex with a male god, even though he seduced her in the form of a woman and then raped her; Juno punishes her because her pregnancy publicized the rape. In neither case can Callisto be said to be at fault. Yet, according to the first two Vatican Mythographers, Callisto the victim bears the blame for bringing ‘male pollution’ into Diana’s circle and for ‘showing’ the rape to gods and humans. By contrast, the mythographers are silent about Jupiter’s responsibility in the whole affair. Berchorius, in his fourteenth-century Metamorphosis Ovidiana Moraliter, read Ovid’s myths as exemplary narratives in malo and in bono. He continued the mythographers’ indictment of Callisto, whom, he wrote, was changed into a bear as punishment for having given into her carnal (bestial) desires.52 These reframings of Ovidian narratives in authoritative Latin discourse suggest how commentary functions in literate pedagogy as a kind of guided reading, in this case to learn that women are subject to difficult lustful desires. Mythographies distribute praise and blame and retext myths as moral illustrations. But, as Berchorius’s text reveals, mythographies assume Ovid’s text is susceptible to multiple recontextualizations, an interpretive assumption which often serves his misogynistic readings. Thus, many commentaries articulate the lexical ground and normative enoncées which organize retellings, interpretations, and mythographic readings in the medieval Ovidian archive. Nonetheless, within hyperliteracy, many of these commentaries, by foregrounding a normative discourse for Ovid within grammatical pedagogy and Christian moral education, also set the terms, the lexical and interpretive conventions, for alternative, resistant, and counter mythographies. Cosmological and naturalist commentaries interpreted Ovid’s myths as representations of creation events, biological processes, or natural phenomena. Ovid’s narratives of forced sex and rape were read off as representations of divine creation.53 Proserpina’s kidnapping and forced marriage (raptus) to Pluto were frequently allegorized as natural forces, literally a ‘naturalizing’ interpretation. Early mythographers such as Fulgentius (c. 480–550) refer to Proserpina’s marriage as an allegory of vegetative growth.54 The First Vatican Mythographer explained Pluto’s kidnapping (raptus) of Proserpina as the origin of the seasons or as a representation of the lunar cycle: ‘Quod ideo fingiatur quia Proserpina ipsa est et Luna que toto anno sex mensibus crescit, sex deficit, scilicet per singulos menses quindenis diebus ut crescens apud superos et deficiens apud 52 

Berchorius, Metamorphosis Ovidiana, ed. by Orgel, fol. xxix. Chance, Medieval Mythography, i, 183–89. 54  Fulgentius, Mitologiae, ed. by Helm, i, 10 (LLT, p. 22). 53 

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inferos videatur’ (This is written thus because Proserpina herself is the moon, which grows six months of the year and decreases six months of the year. Plainly, she [the moon] appears in each month for fifteen days as though growing and [for fifteen days] as though decreasing).55 Commentators etymologized the kidnapped young woman’s Greek and Latin names as key words motivating a naturalistic exegesis. The Vulgate Commentary marginally glosses Persephone (Metamorphoses, x. 15) as: ‘Persephone id est pergens sine sono. Cum maiore enim strepitu movetur sol quam luna que intelligitur per Proserpinam’ (Persephone, that is, ‘going forward without sound’. The sun changes its countenance with a greater commotion than the moon, as is understood through the figure of Proserpina).56 Other commentators, following Fulgentius, pick up Proserpina’s silence and gloss her as the image of a seed growing silently into a plant. This agricultural reading is motivated by the etymological interpretation of Proserpina as signifying ‘[crops] creeping through the earth with root’.57 These annotations of Proserpina and Proserpina illustrate how grammatical glossing and discursive allegorical interpretation, construal, and interpretation, were interwoven rather than separated throughout the Ovidian archive. Retexting the original myth in a naturalizing commentary, breaking the language apart and resyntactizing it, these mythographies translate and expand Ovid’s Latin poetry into wider interpretive discourses and attach the authority of profitable university and clerical readings to unruly classical texts. The mythographers overwrite the pathos of the abducted young Proserpina and Ceres’s tearful search for her lost child with a cosmological allegory of agri­ cultural cycles and planetary motion. Individual characters get reimagined as natural forces. These commentators also suppress the Ovidian narrative’s ambi­ valence about Pluto’s actions. Although Ovid’s text sharply resonates in reverse historical order with late medieval debates regarding female consent in marriage, most mythographers repress any ironic reading of the text, and their silence on this aspect of the text is deafening. Venus’s desire that the god of the underworld 55 

Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, p.  5. See also: Remigius of Auxerre, Commentum, ed. by Lutz, i, 133; ii, 185; Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum, ed. by Huygens, iii, 95–109; Bernard Silvestris, The Commentary, ed. by Westra, pp. 630–32, 682–90; The Berlin Commentary, ed. by Westra, i, 57–58; Berchorius, Metamorphosis Ovidiana, ed. by Orgel, fol. 6vb (pp. 28–29). 56  ‘Persephone’, in Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, x, ll. 15–16 (p. 238); ‘Vulgate’ Commentary, ed. by Coulson, p. 121. 57  Fulgentius, Mitologiae, ed. by Helm, i, 10 (LLT, p. 22); Remigius of Auxerre, Commen­ tum, ed. by Lutz, i, 133.

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and Ceres’s daughter should fall in love is countered by the nymph Cyane’s reply to Pluto, which foregrounds female consent: ‘“non potes invitae Cereris gener esse; roganda, | non rapienda fuit”’ (You cannot be the son-in-law of Ceres. You should have asked for the girl, instead of snatching her away).58 Ovid intratextually links this structural ambivalence, expressed through two different female voices, with the later story of Orpheus. Pleading for his kidnapped Eurydice, Orpheus asks Pluto and Proserpina to release his wife as a reminder of their own love: ‘“supera deus hic bene notus in ora est; | an sit et hic dubito, sed et hic tamen auguror esse, | famaque si veteris non est mentita rapinae, | vos quoque iunxit Amor”’ (this god [Love] is familiar to you, and if there is any truth in the story of that kidnapping [rapina] long ago, then you yourselves were brought together by Love).59 Almost alone among medieval Ovid commentaries, the Vulgate Commentator explicitly notes the tension between amor and rapina in Orpheus’s speech. Com­ bining construal and interpretation, the commentary’s lexical gloss directs the reader to skip back and recall an earlier passage from the poem: ‘amor. Ad hoc respicit quod dixit supra Iupiter excusando Plutonem de raptu dicens: Non hoc iniuria factum, verum amor est’ (amor. On this passage, refer back to what Ovid said above about Jupiter, excusing Pluto from rape, saying, ‘If no harm was done, it is certainly love’).60 The Vulgate gloss makes discontinuous, skipping reading a key part of reading the ‘whole text’. Reading the narrative intratextually and asking the reader to do the same, the commentator compares Jupiter’s utterance (no physical harm, no rape) with the narrator’s own description of Jupiter’s narrative motive (to excuse Pluto of rape). Other moral commentaries omit Proserpina’s kidnapping altogether and interpret the narrative from the viewpoint of Orpheus, not Proserpina. In such readings, Proserpina is simply Pluto’s counterpart, queen of the underworld or, in John Ridewall’s (fourteenth century) unironized ‘Orphean’ reading of infernal marriage, the figure of ‘joy’ or ‘felicity’.61 Ridewall’s commentary combines moral with natural allegory and reads women’s relationships with men and male gods, real and imagined, as representations of the human condition vis à vis gods. Ridewall’s interpretation of Proserpina as a figure of marital joy silences her kidnapping, rape, and the pain they cause: ‘Tercia vero pars beatitudinis, scilicet eternitas tencionis, figuratur per suum tercium nomen, scilicet Proserpinam. 58 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, v, ll. 415–16 (p. 141). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, x, ll. 26–29 (p. 284). 60  ‘Vulgate’ Commentary, ed. by Coulson, p. 129. 61  Ridewall, Fulgentius metaforalis, ed. by Liebeschütz, pp. 106–07. 59 

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Dicitur enim Proserpina a procul serpendo; et convenit tencioni beatifice, cuius est perpetuo permanere’ (The third part of beauty, namely, eternity of desire, is figuratively represented by its third name, namely, Proserpina. Indeed, she is called Proserpina from creeping far, and this is appropriate to beautiful desire, in which she is to remain forever). Earlier, the Vulgate Commentary had interpreted Proserpina as silence itself, the figure of the lack in the underworld which Orpheus filled with his musical performance. Proserpina ‘pergens sine sono’ (going forward/passing over without sound) is a fitting ruler for the underworld, filled with silencia because the gods lack the ‘instrumenta corpora ad loquendum’62 (bodily instruments/organs for speaking). Ridewall inverts this reading and interprets Proserpina as ‘poetic joy’ and ‘delight in cithar’.63 Ridewall’s commentary indicates how guided readings of Ovid shaped social discourses and expectations for narrative representations of gender as much as they reproduced Latin poetry as cultural knowledge or examples for verse composition. Berchorius’s mid-fourteenth-century moralization of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was one of the most popular and influential mythographies of the later medieval and early modern eras. Although the textual history of Berchorius’s Ovidius moralizatus is convoluted, the compilation reordered the Ovidian archive for late medieval readers and writers.64 The medieval text known as Moralizatus, surviving in more than eighty manuscripts, was actually Book Fifteen of Berchorius’s moral encyclopedia, Reductorium morale. The Reductorium incorporated materials from Ridewall’s Fulgentius metaforalis and the Ovide moralisé. The first chapter of the Moralizatus also circulated independently as De formis figurisque deorum.65 Like earlier mythographers, Berchorius erased Proserpina’s kidnapping/rape and reads the narrative according to a Christian semiotic grid of virtues and vices, in malo and in bono. Producing alternative readings of Ovidian narratives and figures, Berchorius’s commentary recasts events as exempla of moral behaviour and attributes multiple positive and negative meanings to a character. Ralph Hexter notes how Berchorius treats Ovid’s text as ‘inexhaustible’, while Jane Chance discusses Berchorius’s ‘free will in reading’.66 Berchorius’s allegoresis displays an almost Nietzschean will to meaning. A key term in Berchorius’s interpretive discourse is allegari (adligare), to link or join together. The mythographer gen­ 62 

‘Vulgate’ Commentary, ed. by Coulson, p. 127. Ridewall, Fulgentius metaforalis, ed. by Liebeschütz, pp. 107–08. 64  Engels, ‘L’édition critique de l’Ovidius moralizatus’. 65  Chance, Medieval Mythography, ii, 320–26; see Ghisalberti, ‘L’Ovidius moralizatus’. 66  Hexter, ‘The Allegari of Pierre Bersuire’; Chance, Medieval Mythography, ii, 338. 63 

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erates many possible meanings from Ovid’s text by linking different textual bits or words together. The reader must choose which moral interpretation best suits. Interpretive trouble rests not with Ovid’s text but with readers. In the Prologue to De formis figurisque deorum Berchorius explains how advanced Christian readers should allegorically interpret Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Properly read, Ovid’s narratives are fabulae (‘enigmatibus et poematibus’) that affirm scriptural truth and teach morals. They reveal how both classical fables and sacred scripture teach ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ truth through fictions: ‘Sic etenim Sacra Scriptura in pluribus passibus videtur fecisse, ubi ad alicius veritatis ostensionem fabulas noscitur confecisse […]. Simili modo fecerunt poete qui in principio fabulas finxerunt, quia s. per huius[modi] figmenta semper aliqua[m] veritatem intelligere voluerunt’ (Thus sacred scripture seems to have been written on many levels, as it is known that fables can be composed for the representation of another truth […]. The poets who originally constructed fables did the same, because they always wanted [people] to understand some truth by means of such imaginary representations (figmenta)).67 For Berchorius, fables’ falseness, their fictionality, nonetheless ‘may be forced to serve the truth’, especially because not all fables can be understood in a literal sense. The textual letter cannot be trusted or taken at face value. Poetic figures interpreted in bono and in malo reproduce the pagan text as a plural text, meaning-full. Berchorius argues that poetic art transforms truths into fables, fictions, and enigmas, multiple layers (‘multis modis’) of encoding and textual meaning which the reader must attend to in several ways, ‘s[cilicet]. litteraliter, naturaliter, historialiter, spiritualiter’ (namely, literally, naturally, historically, spiritually). 68 Berchorius’s first three ways of reading were all encompassed by littera in the Victorines’ programme for reading scripture. Paradoxically, Berchorius’s allegorical interpretations posit the Ovidian text’s multiplicity as a precondition for reducing rather than multiplying textual meanings. In his commentary, the variable pagan text signifies repeatedly the same binary set of moral meanings or Christian referents (for example, Devil-Christ, Virgin Mary, tyrant-good ruler); Berchorius especially links wicked prelates with the Devil. His mythography, buttressed by correspondences between Ovid’s narratives and scripture, deploys the mono-logic of many allegorists who repress moral ambivalences in Ovid’s text. Contradictorily, Berchorius’s allegorizations render Ovid’s poem as infinitely meaningful but always meaning the same thing within a universal Christian interpretive matrix. 67 

Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 1 (fol. 1va). 68  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 5 (fol. 1vb).

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Berchorius’s allegorical reading of Pluto and Proserpina illustrates this monointerpretive-logic. Allegorically, Pluto in malo is a figure of the devil (‘ymaginem […] dyaboli’) or an example of ‘malus & austerus princeps vel eciam prelatus cum sua uxore terribili i. cum domina avaricia vel rapina’ (an evil and harsh ruler, or indeed a prelate, with his terrible wife, that is, with Lady Avarice or Pillaging). Proserpina in malo is his sordid consort, who co-rules in hell and whose ‘evil suggestions’ (malis suggestionibus) are followed by everyone there.69 Curiously, Proserpina in malo is interpreted as an attribute of a male figure, ‘domina avaricia vel rapina’. The kidnapped bride attracts the meaning of violent seizure and oppression. Collocating rapina (plunder, robbery, pillaging, violent seizure) with Proserpina, even as an allegorical attribute of Pluto, shifts her textual representation from kidnap victim to controlling influence, from kidnapped woman (rapta) to uxor to domina. The phonetic (or graphic) similarity between the proper name and the vice deforms ‘Proserpina’ into an allegorical signified, ‘pro rapina’. Berchorius’s Proserpina in malo thus connotes the very actions to which the Ovidian female character was subjected. In his master binary allegorization, Berchorius also interprets Pluto and Proserpina as a positive example for Christian audiences. As fable, Pluto in bono signifies ‘virum iustum’ (just man), ‘pro eo quod terribilia vincit & eis principatur’ (because he overcomes awful/hellish things and governs them) or a type of Christ because he rules in hell. Berchorius even reads Proserpina in bono as signifying the Virgin Mary, ‘coniugatus per amorem & dilectionem’ (joined to him [Christ] by means of love and worthiness).70 In the allegory, Proserpina’s status as a married woman consistently positions her as an attribute of a male figure, silencing her abduction, flattening the ambivalences in Ovid’s narrative, even erasing the naturalistic interpretations of the narrative we find in other commentaries on Metamorphoses. Like many earlier mythographies and commentaries, Berchorius’s readings almost entirely erase raptus as sexual violence from the myths, even though Ovid’s narratives make the violence explicit. Nonetheless, rapina and rapere permeate Berchorius’s versions and interpretations of Ovid’s narratives, and his multiple interpretations often divide along social lines. In bono readings usually refer to ecclesiastics; in malo readings often refer to secular aristocrats, rulers, and overbearing prelates. As the ‘ymago’ of the devil, Pluto in malo manifests himself in different monsters: Cerberus (avarice), Furies (concupiscence), Fates (cruelty),

69 

Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 43 (fol. 9rb). 70  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 48–49 (fol. 10rb).

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and Harpies (‘rapina’).71 The Furies signify excessive material desire: ‘Sicut patet quia concupiscencia diviciarum cogitat usuras, rapinas, etc’ (As is evident because desire for riches calls to mind usury, pillaging, etc.).72 Like Proserpina, wife of Pluto and figure of rapina, the Harpies attack others (for example, ‘rapere & acquirere sicut aves’ (seize and acquire as birds do). Consequently, rapacious persons are textually transformed, literally and metaphorically, into greedy beasts or birds. In fact, the literal and the metaphorical are sometimes hard to differentiate in Berchorius’s mythography. Following Fulgentius, Berchorius imagines the rapacious Harpies with talons ‘quia pro certo ad proprium lucrum ambiunt & aliquid rapere & extorquere nituntur et circa hoc continue meditantur’, or more explicitly, ‘Harpie i. malorum ministrorum rapacitas’ (because surely they grab wealth for themselves and endeavor to pillage/rape and extort others and continually plan for this action […]. Harpie, that is, the greed of evil underlings).73 Allegorical discourse subsumes within it ideas and concepts of the physical and the historical. We have noted that fourteenth-century English parliamentary legislation established harsher penalties for raping a virgin than for raping a married or sexually active woman. But following earlier allegorists (for example, Fulgentius) and his own mono-interpretive-logic, Berchorius also reads the Harpies as an image of virginity in malo, that is, rapina, with a striking semantic interpretation supported by scripture: Rapina significatur per Harpias que s. v[irg]ines dicuntur pro eo, secundum Fulgen­ cium, quod omnis rapina sterilitatem & paupertatem comitatur; quia ut com­muni­ ter illi qui libenter rapiunt aliena, virgines i. steriles & pauperes, in­veniuntur. Prov. XI: Alii rapiunt non sua & semper in egestate sunt (Rapine/pillaging is signified by the Harpies, who are called virgins because, follow­ ing Fulgentius, rapine accompanies sterility and poverty, and because com­monly those who freely pillage/rape others, become virgins, that is, sterile, poor ones. Proverbs 11: ‘They pillage/rape others, not themselves, yet they are always lacking.’)74

Here, virginity in malo (feminized in the image of Harpies) signifies moral as well as physical lack. Rather than raping virgins, Harpies greedily pillage others but remain virgins, that is, without moral profit for themselves. In his Confessio 71 

Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 43–44 (fol. 9rb). 72  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 44 (fol. 9va). 73  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 46–47 (fols 9vb–10ra). 74  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 44 (fol. 9va).

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Amantis (Book 5, on Avarice or ravine), Gower’s Genius similarly interprets vir­ ginity in malo as feminized lack, unfruitfulness, and punishment for greed. Within the domain of rapina, Berchorius’s allegorization of Pluto and Proserpina consistently emphasizes social and economic oppression. There are ‘tres species rapinarum […] videl. publice per tyrannos, occulte per usurarios, fraudulenter per exactores & ballivos’ (three types of rapine […] namely, public (rapine) perpetrated by tyrants, secret (rapine) perpetrated by usurers, and fraudulent (rapina = extortion?) perpetrated by tax collectors and baillifs). 75 Rapinae signify a powerful ruler’s moral or political faults or social oppressions, read imaginatively and intertextually (Daniel 7) as bestial acts (‘Unde rapina est iste bestia’).76 This semiotic whirlwind of allegorical associations dismembers Ovid’s narrative and subordinates the pagan text to an allegory of political virtue and Christian critiques of cruel governance and unlawful seizure. However, Berchorius writes Proserpina’s kidnapping and late medieval proscriptions against raping virgins out of the allegorization. In his commentary, Ovid’s narrative of the rape of Proserpina contains a set of figurative signs cloaking an underlying economic and political story in the male-dominated world. Berchorius’s Reductorium morale interprets rulers like Pluto, Saturn, or Jupiter as both positive and negative examples of masculinity. Pluto is an easy Satan. Saturn in bono signifies good prelates who satisfy their subjects but correct them when necessary; Saturn in malo signifies wicked prelates perverted by avarice (rapinus) who nonetheless are overthrown (castrated) by those they have preyed upon. Jupiter signifies alternately a ‘bonus prelatus’, ‘malus prelatus & princeps’, or ‘malus pinceps’. Jupiter in bono represents ‘a good man and a great ecclesiastic or prelate’ (virum bonum & maxime bonum ecclesiasticum vel prelatum), while Jupiter in malo signifies a proud or indeed any evil or violent/shameful ruler (superbus vel eciam quilibet malus dominus vel protervus) because like those evil gods, princes and tyrants have a ram’s head for having persecuted others for a long time (caput arietis dure alios percuciendo).77

Berchorius, like Arnulf of Orléans, Bernard Silvestris, and other commentators, reads bestial transformation as a metaphor for a character’s punishment or moral change.

75 

Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 46–47 (fol. 9va). Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 44–45 (fol. 9va). 77  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, pp. 12–14 (fols 3vb–4ra). 76 

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As with his readings of Pluto and Proserpina, Berchorius’s interpretations of Jupiter — serial sexual predator and serial sign — are permeated by the discourse of rapina. Jupiter violently attacks innocents, servants, and the weak because of his crush­ing pride in his own power (‘ violenterque rapiunt per se viciem’ (violently pillages/rapes on account of his maliciousness). As the figure of a bad, prideful (superba), yet nominally legitimate tyrant, Berchorius’s Jupiter holds the ‘virga’ of temporal jurisdiction and carries lightening bolts of cruelty and rapaciousness (fulmina rapine & crudelitatis). Jupiter tramples on Giants (great and holy men), while his eagles are ‘cruel bailiffs’ (crudeles ballivos) who ‘rape young boys’ (que rapiunt pueros), that is, oppress the innocent (innocentes afficiunt), seize their servants, and advance themselves in the courts (curiis) and other offices.78 Berchorius’s socio-political allegory of rapina here sounds a bit like the travails of the Paston family. Rapina and rapere describe tyrannts’ violence against others and their excessive desire for material goods (avarice), perhaps but not always including actual rape. Berchorius’s collocation of eagles (‘aquilas’) with ‘rapiunt pueros’ echoes Jupiter’s passion for Ganymede and his transmutation into an eagle in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: nulla tamen alite verti dignatur, nisi quae posset sua fulmina ferre. nec mora, percusso mendacibus aere pennis abripit Iliaden, qui nunc quoque pocula miscet invitaque Iovi nectar Iunone ministrat. (Wishing to turn himself into a bird, he nonetheless scorned to change into any except that which can carry his thunderbolts. Then without delay, beating the air on borrowed feathers, he snatched away the shepherd of Ilium, who even now mixes the winecups and supplies Jove with nectar, annoying Juno).79

When we read the Ovidian hypotexts (Pluto and Proserpina, Jupiter) against the grain of the medieval Ovidian archive and Berchorius’s allegorizations, we get a counter reading of gender and authority which exceeds Berchorius’s excessive othering interpretations. Discontinuous reading sets the archive against itself, in both Berchorius’s readings and our own. In the rapina code, the Christian allegorist submerges sexual violence within a more general account of social violence and tyrannical oppression, especially by powerful lords. Berchorius’s embedded glosses on ‘pueros’ — ‘simplices’, ‘innocentes’ — suggest how Christian 78 

Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, p. 14 (fol. 4ra). 79  Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, x, ll. 157–61 (p. 289).

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allegorists, unlike writers of saints’ lives, deterritorialized virginity as a positive moral or spiritual state, rendering virginity in malo or in bono and silencing the sexual crimes connoted by ‘rapere/rapiunt’. In Berchorius’s commentary, rape is almost always read as a sign of something else. Ganymede stands not for divine creation but for male rulers’ social and economic injustice. The masculine ‘pueri’ stand in for all victims of oppression. In this genealogy of medieval mythography, eliding interpretations of Ovid’s rape narratives are subtle kinds of skipping reading which seek to contain the textual letter of the feminine by rewriting a canonical Latin text and deploying a hermeneutic which reads male figures as symbols of power, narrative control, or divinity, women or boys as objects of desire or dangerous attractions, and sexual violence as creation or cosmological union. Retexting the archive resituates the Ovidian hypotexts and exposes the strategies and presuppositions by which the Metamorphoses has been appropriated into the normativizing canon. Berchorius’s readings of overtly sexual narratives are gendered and genderrepressing and violence repressing (the gestures depend on one another). Medieval teachers’ and grammarians’ concerns about how new and accomplished readers interpreted Ovid in Latin or the vernacular were motivated as much by the desire to preserve traditional literate and social power as by the need to train Latin readers and develop proper models for moral reading. Normativizing interpretations are critical for the status quo. As institutional discourses, mythography, textual annotation, and commentary were powerful interpretive strategies for reproducing social order and moral authority through Latin education and guided readings and for shaping gender roles and lay reading through clerical discourses. But literacy education also opened spaces for other readings and retextings, surprises and inventions within the archive.

Daphne and Apollo Reread Besides rereading the originary hypotext, writers and readers can challenge or disrupt the status quo of the archive by producing new hypotexts in different languages. In the late Middle Ages, the composers of the Ovide moralisé (OM), Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan used the vernacular to challenge the Latin mythographers’ authoritative appropriations of Ovidian narratives. These vernaculars writers displace the commentators’ archival authority by producing new texts and new hypotexts in English and French verse which disrupt the received text of and commentary on the ‘medieval Ovid’. In addition, Christine de Pizan and Chaucer’s narratives release poetic and sympathetic affectus as

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a counter-discourse to the mythographers’ mode of reading (studium), which sublimes their erasure of sexual violence as ‘higher spiritual meaning’. In the fourteenth-century, the massive French Ovide moralisé in octosyllabic verse (prose version, fifteenth century) was a key source for many moralizations of Ovid’s narratives, including Berchorius’s (as we have seen) and Christine de Pizan’s. Like Berchorius, the writer or writers of the OM retold the mythic narratives, provided allegorical and moral interpretations for Christian readers, and linked the pagan stories with Biblical accounts of the creation of the world, the rule of the giants, the Tower of Babel, and the giants as rebel angels in Heaven.80 But unlike Berchorius, the OM writers presented readers with more elaborated, nuanced versions of Ovid’s stories. The circulated manuscripts of the OM presented Christine de Pizan with an index of official moral reading and a vernacular archive of classical narratives as well as a concept of metamorphosis as metaphoric reading.81 The extent of Chaucer’s knowledge of the text is less certain, although he was clearly aware of later medieval moralizations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.82 The Ovide moralisé, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan retext Ovid differently from the way the allegorical commentaries of Berchorius and other mythographers do. For one thing, the OM writers represent many of the sexual conflicts in Ovid’s narratives in a direct narrative style. Comparing Ovid’s narrative of Apollo’s attempted rape of Daphne with the allegorizations of the narrative in the OM and Christine de Pizan’s Épistre, we see how different mythographers and commentators negotiated gender representation and moral signification in texts about rape and sexual violence. Some mythographers allegorized Daphne’s problematic transformation — she yields her female body to avoid being raped — as men’s public voices or writing. Christine’s text intertextually reads two hypotexts, Ovid’s narrative and the OM interpretations, and subsequently reorders the Ovidian archive by countering mythographic moralization with courtly aesthetic. In Ovid’s text, Apollo and Cupid argue, whereupon Cupid one-ups Apollo by piercing him with a gold-tipped arrow that arouses sexual desire. And to spite Apollo, Cupid pierces Daphne with a lead-tipped arrow that blunts heterosexual desire.83 So, emulating Diana and ‘fleeing the very word lover’ (fugit altera nomen 80 

‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 1065–1184, 1185–1202 (pp. 84–87). See Akbari, ‘Metaphor and Metamorphosis’, pp. 85–87. 82  See Cooper, ‘Chaucer and Ovid’; Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts, pp. 11–32; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, pp. 1–22. 83  Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll. 466–73 (pp. 18–19). 81 

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amantis), Daphne defies her father’s wish that she marry.84 The mention of Diana implies that amans refers to ‘male lover’, but at this point in Ovid’s narrative Daphne is resisting the idea rather than the reality of hetero-romance. The narrator, however, notes the gap between Daphne’s desire and the effect of her public appearance: ‘ille quidem obsequitur, sed te décor iste quod optas | esse vetat, votoque tuo tua forma repugnat’ (he (her father) acquiesced to her plan, but your beauty itself prohibits you from being what you wish, and your beauty (forma) struggles against your desire).85 Shifting the narrative focus, the Ovidian narrator addresses Daphne directly in the present tense and juxtaposes veto (prohibit) with votum (desire, promise to a god). When Apollo, struck by Cupid’s golden arrow of desire, sees Daphne, he becomes completely enthralled with her beauty. First, he woos her by presenting his credentials as a worthy lover: son of Jupiter, founder of medicine, creator of music. But Daphne runs away, and as the wind stirs her clothes, Apollo becomes even more aroused by the sight of her body, her soft skin surrounded by swirling hair. He pursues her, and as Daphne’s strength wanes and Apollo gains on her, the woman prays to the river god Peneus: ‘“fer, pater,” inquit, “opem, si flumina numen habetis; | qua nimium placui, mutando perde figuram”’ (‘If your rivers really have divine powers, father, do something, and by transformation destroy this beauty which makes me please all too well’).86 Both the narrator and Daphne suggest that her beauty makes her vulnerable, and she disdains her figura (body, shape, image). The word figura links narrative representation and writing. In Latin grammar, figura is the term for orthography (letter shape) or morphology (compound, derivation). The narrative is misshaping Daphne. Publicly, she is willing to disfigure herself to avoid both marriage and rape. Then, just as Apollo reaches her, the river god answers Daphne’s pray and turns her into a laurel tree. Apollo embraces the laurel as if it were Daphne’s body, saying, ‘“at quoniam coniunx mea non potes esse, | arbor eris certe” dixit “mea”’ (‘Since you cannot be my bride, you will surely be my tree’, he said).87 Apollo’s possessive declaration parodies Roman imperial, heroic verse, but diegetically his claim has real effects. Apollo declares that the laurel will be sacred to him forever and prophesies, with the accurate foresight of a fictional character, that the laurel will adorn Caesar Augustus’s doorways and become an imperial symbol of triumph and victory. 84 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, l. 474 (p. 19). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll. 488–89 (p. 19). 86  Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll. 546–47 (p. 22). 87  Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll. 557–58 (p. 22). 85 

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However, Ovid’s narrative destabilizes this triumphal ending with a final twist of subjunctive (utque) ambiguity: ‘factis modo laurea ramis | adnuit utque caput visa est agitasse cacumen’ (the laurel tree nodded her newly made branches and seemed to shake her leafy top, as if it were a head giving consent).88 Ovid’s narrative language complicates any single reading and engages with the problematics of rape narratives and consent. Ovid’s syntax — ‘seemed to nod […] as if it were a head’ — and substitution of ‘the laurel tree’ for Daphne as the subject of the clauses point to the gap between Daphne’s new mutated (mute) being and Apollo’s interpretation of the tree’s behaviour. The god interprets Daphne as if, that is, according to his, not her desire. Apollo’s rivalry with Cupid suggests how Ovid ironizes romantic narratives and posits homosocial rivalry as a motivation for Apollo’s heated desire for Daphne. Moreover, Apollo fails in his quest for Daphne, first when he woos her verbally, then when he chases her. Apollo is no Jupiter, whose shape-changing and forceful seductions or rapes are more successful. Still, Apollo gets the ironized if not the final word, when in mock-Homeric style he links himself with Daphne and the laurel for eternity. Apollo’s over the top declaration reimagines Daphne as the origin of an imperial symbol — Ovidian undercutting of Augustan mythmaking. Although Apollo embraces Daphnebecome-wood, a woman who has given up her humanness to save herself, the narrative continues to separate Daphne’s voice from later utterances and receptions of her story, unlike the female crow who tells her own story of trans­formation to avoid Neptune’s rape.89 As a victim of attempted rape, Daphne also loses narrative or interpretive control over her own experience. The transformation of Daphne’s soft skin into bark, branches, and leaves, the same skin which had excited Apollo as he chased her, suggests the alienating, disfiguring self-loathing she experiences as she escapes from the potential rapist. In many ways, Ovid’s Daphne and Apollo narrative is a paradigmatic story of attempted rape, although it is sometimes read as an attempted seduction or interpreted as an historical or moral allegory. Medieval mythographers tended to interpret the story as a euhemerist representation of Augustus’s relation with Livia or an allegory of Christ’s wooing of the soul. Some medieval allegorizations of Ovid’s narrative nearly erase Daphne from the narrative and focus instead on Apollo’s connection with the laurel.90 These Daphnes complicate the idea of 88 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll. 566–67 (p. 22). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, ii, ll. 569–88 (pp. 52–53). 90  See, for example, Fulgentius, Mitologiae, ed. by Helm, i, 15 (LLT, p. 25). 89 

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consent to their Apollos’ desires. Many tropes of medieval courtly love explicitly replay Ovid’s narrative of Daphne and Apollo: love at first sight, irresistible love, female hesitation (in Daphne’s case, sheer flight), a male suitor pursuing against all odds, the problematic role of female beauty in the seduction or rape narrative, an ambiguous resolution deploying female consent as the ‘all clear signal’ but ambiguating that sign with Apollo’s eager reading of natural ‘tree’ behaviour as an intentional linguistic sign. The Ovide moralisé takes a different route through the narrative. The verna­ cular text rehearses Ovid’s narrative in detail and then gives an elaborate allegorical interpretation of the story.91 The narrative follows Ovid’s text fairly closely, but transposes the characters into the vocabulary of vernacular rom­ ance, probably incorporating sections from Chrétien de Troyes’s version of the Ovidian tale. Phoebus argues with Cupid about whose arrows are more powerful. Phoebus pleads with Daphne (referred to as ‘Belle fille’, ‘la pucele’, ‘chiere amie’) to marry him, but she refuses, wishing to remain unwed in order to protect her maidenhood (‘vuel garder mon pucelage’).92 Like a medieval courtly lover, Phoebus is completely in love with Daphne and praises her beauty in a courtly blazon of dismemberment (arms, eyes, hair, mouth, etc.). Then, as in Ovid’s narrative, Phoebus presents Daphne with his credentials as a potential lover/husband, Daphne refuses to consent, and she flees. Apollo is aroused by the glimpses he gets of Daphne’s body as the wind stirs her clothes. Despite her fatigue, Daphne races on because she does not wish to lose her virginity (‘Com cele qui pas n’atalente | De perdre sa virginité’). Just as she is about to be caught, Daphne pleads to Peneus to save her from sin (‘a perdicion’), an ambiguous utterance which echoes Ovid’s narrative in which Daphne feels she is partly to blame for her attempted rape.93 Daphne is then turned into a tree, which Apollo takes as his sacred ornament, prophesying that the laurel will be a sign of nobility, love, and glory for all those who are victorious.94 This vernacular retelling of the Daphne and Apollo narrative follows Ovid’s Latin text closely, but it omits Ovid’s narrator’s consistent irony and streamlines the psychological narrative. Moreover, the Ovide moralisé is more overtly a guided reading than is Ovid’s narrator. Along with recoding the classical Latin in vernacular courtly language (for example, honneur, pucelage, chevalrie, d’acomplir 91 

‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 2737–3064, 3065–3260 (pp. 120–31). ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 2838, 2856, 2907, 2857–58 (pp. 122–23). 93  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 2992–93, 3024 (pp. 125–26). 94  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 3044–51 (p. 126). 92 

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son plesir), the OM writer presents multiple readings — naturalist, historical, moral — of Phoebus’s attempt to rape Daphne. Thus the OM’s version of Daphne and Apollo links Ovidian narrative, courtly vernacular discourse, and mythographic interpretations in a more differentiated textual space. A good index of how much the Ovide moralisé differs from more orthodox mythographies is the way the text’s Daphne and Apollo interpretations, especially the historical reading, address rape in legal and social terms rather than elide it or allegorize it away. According to the OM writer, the narrative can be read naturaliter as a geographical allegory which explains how the river Peneus and the sun nourish the laurel tree. Quickly turning to an ‘Autre sentence’, the commentator interprets the story historialiter as how a young woman, daughter of a great family (‘un damoisele | […] | Riche et de grant nobilité’), wants to defend her virginity (‘Sans violer son pucelage’). She flees a young suitor who wants to force her, seize her virginity (‘Aprez la cuida forçoier | Et tolir li son pucelage’), and deflower her (‘Et malgré sien la desflorast […] Ains que cil l’eüst desflorée’).95 Whereupon the woman dies at the foot of a laurel tree. In the historical allegory, Daphne becomes an emblem of chastity preserved even to the point of death. Unlike other mythographers, the writer of the OM explicitly reads the letter of Ovid’s story as attempted rape. Daphne’s desire to remain a virgin is foregrounded by the aristocratic vocabulary of honneur and pucelage. The OM represents Apollo’s desire for Daphne with the legal term for forced sex ([e]forçoier) and a narrative pun on desflorier. The Old French desflorier associates by semantic inversion twelfth-century legal vocabulary with literal mutation in Ovid’s narrative, thus connoting sexual violence and vernacular vocabulary to foreshadow Daphne’s floral escape from Apollo. Historialiter, then, Daphne’s desire to remain chaste is represented as an escape from both marriage and attempted rape. The OM writer uses the vernacular intertextually to subvert legal vocabulary by alluding to the Ovidian text and its complicated representation of female vulnerability and resistance to male aggression. The vernacular pun rereads Ovid against late medieval legal discourse on sexuality and rape. The Ovide moralisé writer then turns to an ‘Autre sentence profitable’, an interpretation moraliter.96 Here, the commentary reproduces orthodox mythographic readings. Daphne’s physical coldness, noted by the river god, signifies her virginity, while her ‘perfect’ virginity is represented by her trans­ 95  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 3065–74, 3075, 3077, 3079, 3081, 3092–93, 3098, 3101 (pp. 126–27). 96  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, l. 3110 (p. 127).

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for­mation into a tree, motionless and non-fruitbearing. Once again, Daphne’s sterility is ambiguously coupled with her figural purity and narrative fate. This ‘profitable’ moral interpretation uses textual features not explicit in Ovid’s narrative. Yet, as in Ovid’s text, the OM depicts the beautiful, desirable Daphne as choosing to disfigure herself in order to escape rape. Apollo is glossed as the god of wisdom, following Garland’s Integumenta Ovidii.97 The moral allegory renames Apollo’s desire for Daphne as wisdom’s desire for purity and spiritual virginity which transcends the body. In this vernacular interpretation, Apollo’s sexual arousal and desire are reread spiritually as the desire for spiritual transcendence, a reading not inconsistent with the transcendent code of romantic courtly love. Just as Daphne’s body is transformed literally into a tree which Apollo ultimately can embrace and claim for himself, so Daphne’s actions are assimilated by the moralizing commentator into a signifying system in which the masculine Apollo is the agent and the feminine Daphne is the object of desire and, significantly, mute. Despite the OM writer’s direct engagement with the story as an attempted rape, this ‘profitable’ Christian allegory retexts the rape scenario as a narrative of transcendent desire. Ovid’s ‘wise’ Apollo, who interprets the laurel tree’s ambiguous motion as signifying consent, becomes in the OM’s moral reading the masculine soul desiring the fleeing Daphne, who fills in as the object of the soul’s yearning for purity and salvation. Apollo as the soul regains himself by seizing another, although the object of his desire wants nothing to do with him. A most curious narcissicism. With this moraliter reading in place, it is not a stretch for the Ovide moralisé allegorist to move on to Christology, spiritualiter. Daphne is glossed (gloser) as the Virgin Mary (‘Cele glorieuse Pucele’), cherished by all who stand in the ‘light’ of spiritual understanding. Apollo (light) is crowned with the laurel, that is, with Daphne herself in the image of the Virgin, just as God/Christ is enclosed within the body of his mother.98 In this Christological interpretation, found in other Christian mythographers, Apollo’s signification controls the allegorical code. In the allegory historialiter, Apollo’s desire signifies a young male aristocrat’s desire to sexually overpower the maiden, and Daphne is a figure of chastity and moral purity resisting a rapist. But in the allegory moraliter and spiritualiter, Apollo’s desire is transformed into something spiritually pure, while Daphne must again submit to a masculine interpretive moral discourse which reads rape in other terms controlled by masculine desire. These different retellings and interpretations of 97  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, l. 3126 (p. 128). See John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, ed. by Ghisalberti, l. 91; Arnulf of Orléans, Allegoriae, ed. by Ghisalberti, p. 202, 1. 8. 98  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, i, ll. 3216–17, 3221–36 (p. 130).

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the Daphne and Apollo myth suggest how the OM is a hybrid commentary whose parts don’t entirely cohere. In the assemblage of retexted myth and commentary, the interpretations moraliter and spiritualiter are displaced by courtly vernacular translations of Ovid’s Latin and reinscriptions of secular and literal versions of Ovidian myth as counterdiscourses within the archive of ‘medieval Ovid’. Though written later, Berchorius’s mythographic interpretations of the Daphne and Apollo narrative are much more traditionally male-centred and more conventional than the Ovide moralisé retelling. Berchorius reads the myth negatively as a secular allegory of men’s misguided search for worldly fame and sexual delights. Daphne is ‘pulcherrima puella i. mundi gloria’, a conventional figure of the sensuous world. When she is a transformed into a tree, she becomes an array of delightful membra, head, arms, eyes, a variant of e. e. cumming’s ‘my sweet etc’. Apollo is ‘vaingloriosis’. Daphne is read more positively according to Christian ethics as either virginitas threatened by the Devil (Apollo) or ‘naturam humanam’ wooed by ‘deus sapience i. Xristus’. In one reading Daphne’s tree form is her spiritual armor, in another the laurel tree is the Cross.99 Christine de Pizan clearly read the Ovide moralisé as she worked on her own Ovidian mythography, Épistre Othéa (c. 1400; English translation by Stephen Scrope, c. 1440).100 Composed as advice for a young prince, Épistre Othéa was one of Christine’s most popular works. Christine closely supervised the production of the Épistre, which is explicitly subdivided into text, gloss, allegory, and illustrations.101 Like other mythographic writers (for example, Fulgentius, Gower), Christine organized the Épistre with a fictional frame narrative: the wise and prudent Minerva/Othea writes to Hector during the Trojan War to instruct him in proper heroic behaviour. Within the frame genre of female advice literature, Christine weaves a polylogic mythography from three narrative and interpretive discourses, each associated with the female voice/writing of Minerva. Continuing the OM’s courtly vernacular translation of Ovidian language, the glossator/commentator redescribes classical narratives as examples of ‘droite chevalerie’, ‘parfaicte chevalerie’, and ‘l’esperit chevalereux’.102 Christine’s mytho­graphy privileges a society which is Christian and aristocratic. It is also frequently male-centred. 99 

Van der Bijl, ‘Petrus Berchorius’, pp. 3, 29, 33. Christine de Pizan, ‘The Epistle’, ed. by Bühler. 101  Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, pp. 32–36. On the production of the text, see: Hindman, Christine de Pizan’s ‘Epistre Othéa’, pp. 63–77, 92, 98; Meiss, French Paint­ ing, i, 8–15. 102  Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, Prologue, p. 201, ll. 135, 139; p. 202, l. 149. 100 

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Like the Ovide moralisé, Christine’s mythography vernacularizes Latin narra­ tives and glosses and allegorizes each narrative ‘Texte’. Christine uses verse for the myth and prose for the commentaries. Whereas the OM writer reads Ovidian narratives in multiple, sometimes contradictory ways, Christine’s narrative Textes are too brief for much complexity. The Glose expands somewhat the verse narrative and interprets each episode with a classical moral teaching to illustrate proper chivalric attitudes. The Allegorie elaborates the spiritual implications of the narrative with citations from Scripture and Christian auctores. In the Prologue, Minerva says that her stories are exempla: ‘Je leur lis leçons en chayere | Qui les fait monter jusqu’au cieulx’ (I read/teach them lessons in charity, so they can climb to heaven). The allegorist identifies the audience as Christians, not as men or women, but the advice focuses almost entirely on male knighthood.103 While medieval mythographies recontextualize pagan myths and narratives for Christian audiences, the Épistre juxtaposes the ancient world with Christian and chivalric readings of Ovid’s narratives. The allegorist’s voice is figured as the female Minerva, but the commentary’s referent is fifteenth-century male knighthood fortified by ancient heroic ideals. In Épistre, the fiction of the wise woman counselor suggests that the allegori­ zation of Ovid’s narratives might address the stories’ sexual politics differently from other mythographies, and to some extent the text does present alternative ways to read rape narratives. Christine de Pizan’s role in restructuring later medieval women’s textual and public voices is well known. So too is her explicit criticism of rape narratives and masculinist ideologies of women’s rape fantasies. Diane Wolfthal has argued that Christine de Pizan ‘disrupts the traditional rape script, first by refusing to imagine women as victims of sexual violence and then by visualizing them as forceful avengers’.104 Responding to the story of Lucrece and the misrepresentations of women’s desires by male writers, the vision character Rectitude in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) tells Christine the dreamer: ‘“N’en doubtes pas, amie chiere, que ce n’est mie plaisir aux dames chastes et de belle vie estre efforciées, ains leur est douleur sur toutes autres”’ (‘Rest assured, dear friend, chaste ladies who live honestly take absolutely no pleasure in being raped. Indeed, rape is the greatest possible sorrow for them’).105 The text explicitly uses the French legal term efforcier, but shifts the ground from rape as crime to the violence against women perpetrated or normalized by male rape fantasies. 103 

Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, Prologue, p. 198, ll. 57–58; p. 199, l. 82. Wolfthal, ‘“Douleur sur toutes autres”’, p. 42. 105  Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame, ed. by Richards, p. 328; Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. by Richards, pp. 160–61. 104 

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However, in her mythographic Épistre, Christine treats rape narratives some­ what differently. We can’t know for certain, but the difference suggests how auth­ ori­tative mythographic reading influenced learned readers such as Christine de Pizan. In Le Livre de la Cité, Lucretia and the Galatian queen occupy a central place in the catalogue of violated females. But retexting the Ovidian hypotext, the Épistre only gestures toward many of the rape narratives (kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, as well as sexual violence) from Metamorphoses, including Proserpina/Pluto, Aurora, Ganymede, Orpheus/Eurydice, and Daphne/ Apollo.106 Nonetheless, the Trojan War frame narrative and Minerva’s advice to Hector make Helen’s abduction a key narrative and interpretive motivation. The Épistre refers to raped women or men as being forced (efforcier; for example, Eurydice, Ganymede) or kidnapped (ravir; for example, Helen, ‘que en Grece raviroit Helayne […] ou Paris ravi Helayne’; Proserpina, ‘que Pluto ot ravi’). 107 The narrator uses the Latin rapina in the vernacular allegory of Aurora, citing Psalm 61 [62] (‘Nolite sperare in iniquitate, rapinas nolite concupiscere’ (Don’t trust in extortion; don’t put your hope in pillaging) to counsel the reader to avoid covetousness (rapina = avarice), signified by Aurora’s weeping for her lost son.108 Recall that in Berchorius’s allegorizations, rapina usually signified seizure of property rather than a sexual crime. Through narration and interpretation, Christine de Pizan’s text disrupts many authoritative male commentaries and expands the mythographic lexicon so that rapina, raptus, and efforcier signify both property crimes and crimes against person, sexual crimes. Despite her malechivalric focus, Christine returns the mythographic language of rape to the body. The Épistre’s text, gloss, and allegory of Daphne and Apollo depart from earlier mythographies, including the Ovide moralisé, in other significant ways. Wolfthal notes that Christine’s visual and verbal representations of women often resist depicting them as rape victims, but not always or entirely, as we shall see. I’ve noted that the Épistre’s glossing and allegorizing are much more concerned with chivalric codes of male knighthood than with conflicts between male and usually female characters. More surprisingly, Daphne is almost entirely absent from Christine’s verbal allegorization of the Ovidian narrative. However, some Épistre manuscripts illustrate Daphne not in the traditional iconography of the raped woman (grabbed by a man), but as a monstrous tree-woman. Her head 106 

Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, pp. 3, 44, 53, 70, 87. Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 297, l. 11; p. 274, ll. 2, 10; p. 294, ll. 7–9; p. 240, l. 8. Compare Malory, Works, ed. by Vinaver, p. 77, ll. 26–37. 108  Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 44; p. 262, ll. 29–34. 107 

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has become laurel branches, her skin is scarred as bark. She is a grotesque figure, a disfigured body, a parody of the medieval female nude — the mutated, faceless and mute, Daphne. The Épistre Glose multiplies the textual letter: ‘Plusieurs entendemens peut avoir la fable’ (The fable can have many meanings), historical as well as moral.109 The moral gloss interprets the rape as a representation of the knight’s worthy pursuit of ‘une dame’. Dame is phonetically close to Christine’s French form for Daphne, ‘Damné’ (as a sign of the victory which he had over his love beneath the laurel. And perhaps also, the laurel is taken for gold, which signifies nobility).110 In the moral Glose, Christine rewrites the attempt to rape Daphne as a chivalric allegory of a male knight’s successful pursuit of a woman, or glory. So much for female advice and reading moraliter. Christine’s first interpretation, her historical reading, is striking for what it does not say. According to the glossator, the story of Daphne and Apollo might represent historialiter how ‘un poissant home’, after much wooing, finally ‘attaigni a sa voulenté’ (a powerful man […] accomplished his desire) with his lady under a laurel tree.111 (Christine uses the phrase a sa voulenté explicitly in a sexual sense in the story of Pygmalion: ‘En la parfin tant la pria et tant se tint pres que la pucelle l’ama a sa voulenté et l’eut a mariage.’112) In the Daphne story, Christine substitutes the contextually more ambiguous attaigni a sa voulenté for the Ovide moralisé’s sexually explicit and legally inscribed efforcier to describe what went on under the laurel tree. Again, Christine focuses narrowly on the male lover’s point of view, unlike Ovid or the Ovide moralisé writer. As a result, her gloss erases Daphne’s motives and actions even from the historical level of the text. In both the historical and the moral interpretations, Christine’s mythography uses Ovidian narrative to exemplify the knight’s romantic or chivalric quest. At the same time, Christine’s language and textual erasure open up Daphne’s motives to multiple interpretations. Could the lady signified by ‘Damné’ have consented to the knight’s pleas? Christine’s rereading and rewriting of Ovid’s narrative leaves open the question of Daphne’s consent. Although the glossator’s attaigni a sa voulenté might be sexually more discreet, later readers were not necessarily taken in. Unlike Scrope, Anthony Babyngton, another fifteenth-century English trans­ lator of the Épistre, omitted lines 21–24 of the French text from his translation. 109 

Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 323, ll. 20–21. Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 323, ll. 7, 22, 25–27. 111  Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 323, ll. 21–24. 112  Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 235, ll. 33–35. 110 

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In the Allegorie of Daphne and Apollo, Christine’s allegorizing voice em­ pha­sizes the good knight’s quest: ‘se le bon esperit veult victoire glorieuse avoir, il lui couvient perseverence qui le menra à la victoire de paradis dont les joyes sont infinies’ (if the good soul wants to have a glorious victory, he must have perseverence, which will lead him to victory in paradise, whose joys are infinite).113 The allegory is decidedly aristocratic, unlike Berchorius’s more clerical interpretation of the story. For Berchorius, the story shows how the laurel in bono is sacred to Apollo and signifies wise men of right learning (‘sani ingenii’) or the image of the poet or light or truth or knowledge or ‘virum iustum’, ‘qui bene interpretatur exterminans pro eo quod iste in se exterminat omne mal(i) um’ (the just man […] who is well understood as banishing [a banisher?] because he rids himself of all evil). 114 The laurel in malo signifies ‘la[s]civos iuvenes & mulieres’ (lecherous young men and women).115 Both Berchorius and Christine read the myth historialiter, implying that their literal readings retrieve what Ovid intended. But unlike Christine’s successful male lover, Berchorius’s Apollo in malo suggests dangerous sexuality in young men and women. Berchorius’s elaborate moralization contrasts with Christine de Pizan’s mythographic readings, which focus on male aristocratic codes and the promotion of ‘l’esperit chevaleureux’. Whereas Berchorius’s allegorization says nothing about Daphne, Christine’s allegorization does recognize Daphne as a narrative goal or object of desire. In Ovid’s narrative, Daphne resists an unwanted male lover by becoming disfigured and giving up control of her voice. But in Christine’s text, the verbal and visual representations of the myth perform an ambiguous dialogue. The glossator imagines the story as a male knight’s successful wooing or seduction of his lady. The allegorist, continuing the text’s masculine orientation, interprets Apollo as the masculine soul, persistently pursuing heavenly glory, despite worldly difficulties, signified by Daphne. In the allegory, the female figure embodies flesh and the world and links the romance hero’s pursuit of the object of his sexual desire with the hero’s spiritual quest for salvation. Daphne’s disfiguring resistance is silenced in the text. However, some manuscript illustrations for Épistre provide Daphne with a visual analogue to voice, depicting her as a female figure without head or tongue, a mute and mutated Daphne beyond Apollo’s grasp. Nonetheless, in at least one manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 606, fol. 40v), Apollo might still have the last word, as he is shown plucking 113 

Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 324, ll. 36–39. Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, (fols 4vb, 5rb–5va, pp. 18, 21). 115  Berchorius, Reductorium morale, ed. by Engels, (fol. 5ra, p. 19). 114 

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Daphne’s leaves, gathering pieces of her tree-body into his self-decorating crown, thereby retexting Daphne/laurel as the symbol of someone’s poetic achievement. But whose? In the final section (no. 100) of the Épistre, the allegorist cites Hugh of St Victor’s famous remark on reading according to the letter of the text and not the presumed intention of the writer: ‘il ne considère point qui c’est parle mais que c’est que il dit’ (the reader (should) not pay attention to who is speaking but to what is said).116 Trust the tale, not the teller. Attend to the utterance, not the utterer, to what is said and how rather than to the authority of the speaker. Ironically, this effacement or disavowal of authorship in Christine’s text is produced by citing and vernacularizing an authority in the hyperliterate archive. The reference to Hugh of St Victor associates the Épistre Othéa with masculine commentary discourse and learned, clerical Latin authority upon which Christine de Pizan’s mythography ultimately depends. But the citation from Hugh on textual authority seems at odds with the textual situation of the vernacular Épistre. For one thing, Christine’s text and frame narrative are explicitly identified with female speakers, which rhetorically disrupts the male-centred moral and clerical discourse of mythography. Moreover, Hugh’s privileging of ‘content’, ‘textual form’, and ‘message’ does not correspond directly with the manuscript and discursive differentiation in the Épistre between Texte, Glose, and Allegorie. As we have seen in Ovid’s narrative of Daphne and Apollo, female utterances and gestures can be disregarded by desiring men or read according to what men desire to know. The allegorizing mythographies reveal how authoritative interpretive discourse can disregard or silence parts of the text or generalize characters (Daphne) into walking concepts or male heroes’ goals, thereby depriving women of voice, autonymy, and textual subjectivity. Christine de Pizan’s versioning rewrites Ovid’s narratives and those of earlier mythographers, especially with respect to depictions of women in danger. In the Daphne and Apollo story, Christine’s historical gloss multiplies the significations of Woman in the textual field: object of the knight’s desire, feminine symbol of chivalric goals, a woman who may have consented to the knight’s romantic suit. But Christine’s complicated rewriting of the Daphne and Apollo story also reveals how authoritative mythographic discourses, which silence narratives of rape or transform them into other utterances, were not produced only by male interpreters and readers. The institutional authority of moralizing mythographies and Ovidian commentaries was extended by vernacular compilations such as the Ovide moralisé and Christine de Pizan’s Épistre. 116 

Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. by Parussa, p. 341, ll. 40–42.

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But as retexts the vernacular Ovide moralisé and Épistre also constructed alter­ native textual subjectivities and hypotexts within the archive of canonical Latin texts and orthodox interpretive procedures. These alternative texts included some strong allegorical readings of Ovid in the vernacular as well as more literal translations of Ovid’s Latin into vernacular discourse. These more literal vernacularizations altered the Ovidian hypotext which allegory claims to speak for.

Other Voices, Other Texts: Daphne and Philomela Chaucer was Christine de Pizan’s near contemporary and equally at home with medieval mythography. Scholars have reconstructed Chaucer’s knowledge of Ovid’s erotic writings and mythography, as well as his connections with Ovidian texts and mythographies such as Berchorius’s Reductorium morale and perhaps the Ovide moralisé. Chaucer of course translated at least part of the Roman de la rose. Two of Ovid’s stories, Daphne and Apollo and Philomela and Tereus, are especially important for Chaucer’s rewriting of the Ovid hypotext. The story of Daphne and Apollo appears only twice in Chaucer’s writings: in the description of Diana’s temple in the Knight’s Tale and in Troilus and Criseyde, Book Three, when Troilus anxiously waits to enter Criseyde’s bedroom. Chaucer’s allusion in Troilus suggests broader aspects of medieval readings of Ovid because of its textual collocations. Troilus prays to a number of gods — and all seven planets! — to strengthen him as he waits for Pandarus to give him the go-ahead to approach his beloved. In one stanza, Troilus invokes Jupiter, Apollo, and Mars, all three in their narrative roles as dominant males: raping Europa, attempting to capture Daphne, and standing for male warriors covered with a ‘blody cope’.117 Two of the three gods are specifically rapists, one successful, one not. Troilus’s emphasis on sexually dominant males differs markedly from the moral-allegorical interpretations of Jupiter’s rape of Europa in the Ovide moralisé, where Jupiter’s transformation into a bull and assault on Europa are re-signed as an allegory of Christ coming to earth to save humanity. 118 Even though the Ovide moralisé allegorist specifically narrates the story as a rape narrative (‘ravir’), the Christological allegory constitutes a powerful counter-reading, a dramatic appropriation of Ovid for moral education and official literacy.119 In addition, 117 

Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, i, ll. 2062, 2064 (p. 53); Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, iii, ll. 722–28 (p. 523). 118  ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, ii, ll. 4937–5138 (pp. 276–80). 119  See, for example, ‘Ovide moralisé’, ed. by Boer, ii, ll. 5063, 5101 (pp. 278–79).

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Troilus’s description of Mars as another ‘action male’ contrasts with many medi­ eval mythographic readings of Mars and Venus which read the story as depicting public male virtue lured or seduced from proper masculine duties by private female pleasure or luxuria.120 Like Christine de Pizan’s allegory, Troilus’s reference contextualizes the Daphne and Apollo narrative primarily from the point of view of the male pursuer and potential rapist’s experience. Chaucer’s retelling of Philomela’s rape in Legend of Good Women deliberately reengages with Ovidian narrative. Chaucer uses the tale’s literacy subtext to question the very genealogy of Ovidian reading we have been outlining. A vivid version of the Philomela narrative, probably by Chrétien de Troyes, was incorporated into the Ovide moralisé, with graphic illustrations of Tereus’s mutilation of Philomela. Mythographers often included the story in their texts, as does Gower in Confessio Amantis, Book Five (as one of Genius’s exempla of avarice, rapina, and male infidelity). But Christine omits the grim story from her Épistre, even though Ovid’s narrative includes a female revenge plot. Rather than allegorizing the story, Chaucer’s version is set within a collection of stories (much like Ovid’s Heroides) about virtuous yet wronged women, stories written by the male poet as penance for what queen Alceste describes in the dream vision as the poet’s negative portrayals of female characters in earlier texts (especially Criseyde). Chaucer’s fictionalized writing situation in Legend of Good Women recalls the accessus biographies of Ovid, where Ovid is said to have written the Heroides and other texts to redeem himself in Augustus’s eyes. Whereas many mythographic commentaries either depicted women as rape victims or erased rape altogether from the narratives, Chaucer’s narrative, like Ovid’s, specifically represents Philomela as a raped and mutilated woman. But unlike Ovid’s, Chrétien’s, and Gower’s versions, Chaucer’s text cuts off (castrates) the final bit of the narrative in which Philomela and her sister Procne get their revenge on Tereus. Chaucer’s textual mute(ilation) problematizes both Ovid’s narrative and the Legend of Philomela by reading together rape and women’s writing and experience. Ovid’s narrative graphically depicts not only a violent rape and mutilation but also a dionysiac revenge plot in which the sisters brutally kill Tereus and Procne’s son Itys and serve him up as dinner to his father. Ovid also embeds a literacy narrative within the larger story. Philomela, covered with blood, holds the boy’s head in front of his horrified father. Enraged at the loss of his patrimony, Tereus chases after the women, but they are magically transformed into birds, one (not 120 

For example, Fulgentius, Mitologiae, ed. by Helm, ii. 7 (LLT, p. 47); see Amsler, ‘Mad Lovers’; Amsler, ‘Genre and Code’; Irvine, ‘Heloise and the Gendering’.

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clearly identified in Ovid’s text) bearing the ‘traces of the murder’ in her bloody feathers. Earlier, Tereus had cut out Philomela’s tongue to prevent her from reporting his crime, but the woman manages to weave a text with purple thread and write (‘purpureasque notas’, where notae are letters) the story of her rape and mutilation.121 Tereus’s cruel attempt to silence Philomela does not prevent her from producing a written narrative. When Procne reads the text, she falls silent, a reading response (affectus) which suggests her empathy with her sister’s muteness. Unlike Philomela, Procne is unable to speak because she cannot adequately rep­re­sent her rage in language: ‘verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae | defuerunt’ (when she sought words, words bitter enough were absent from her tongue).122 As a further foregrounding of rape narratives, Ovid links the rapes of Daphne and Philomela intertextually by repeating the language of Apollo’s desire for Daphne in Tereus’s more bluntly represented lust for Philomela.123 Some medieval mythographies and accessus to classical texts harshly condemn Philomela and her sister for their violent revenge at least as much as they condemn the rapist Tereus. Bernard of Utrecht, in his commentary on Theodulus’s Eclogue, reads Philomela as an example of the evil woman. His commentary downplays the rape and mute-ilation, focusing instead on the fact that the mother and aunt kill Itys. Bernard’s commentary then reads the transformations of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela into birds as a sign of their alienation from human society on account of all three’s crimes.124 Bernard’s commentary equates the sisters’ revenge, which uses Tereus’s patrilineal capital against him (emphasized in Ovid’s text when Procne notes the resemblance between the boy and his father), with the rape itself. Both are heinous crimes. While Tereus violates the taboo of incest, the sisters violate the taboo of cannibalism, not to mention the code of feminine politeness. The first two Vatican mythographers often interpreted classical myths as representations of divine creative processes or natural generative processes. But they implicitly condemned illicit sex and rape among gods and humans by delineating genealogies, patrilineal chains, in which the offspring of rapes repeat the errors of the parent(s) or continue to suffer for their father’s crimes.125 Jupiter’s 121 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, vi, l. 577 (p. 173). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, vi, ll. 584–85 (p. 174). 123  See Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. by Tarrant, i, ll.  492–96 (p. 19) with vi, ll.  451–60 (pp. 168–69). See Jacobsen, ‘Apollo and Tereus’. 124  Bernard of Utrecht, Commentum, ed. by Huygens, iii, 895–904. 125  Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, pp. 79–81, 90; see Chance, Medieval Mytho­ graphy, i, 199. 122 

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rape of Leda initiates a chain of abducted and revengeful women, some of whom, like Clytemnestra, get back at their fathers in violent ways. Helen, daughter of Leda by Jupiter, is abducted (raptus), thereby initiating another dynastic catas­trophe.126 In the First Vatican Mythographer’s genealogy, Philomela’s rape initiates a chain of violence in a series of rapes, marriages, and offspring: ‘Philomela married Tereus and gave birth to Itys, Procrin, and Orithia. Procrin had Cephalus, who was engendered by Aeolus. Boreas raped (rapuit) Orithia and be­g at from her Zetus and Calain.’ Rape continues to infect Pandion’s lineage, as much because of his daughters’ violent, taboo-violating revenge as because of Tereus’s sexual violence and mutilation of Philomela. In this respect, the First Vatican Mythographer’s vocabulary for sexual crime attempts to mute the theme of infected genealogy. Tereus abducts the young woman (‘abducit puellam’), then conquers her (‘viciavit’).127 The mythographer does not use the verb rapere or the noun raptus, preferring the more legal, but less sexual, abducere, and the neutral rem. However, the mythographer does indicate that Tereus uses force (viciare) against Philomela. While the mythographer heightens the pathos of Philomela’s mutilation by altering her purple letters (notae in Ovid) to ‘veste suo cruore’ (her bloody tapestry/cloth), the rewrite also obscures Philomela’s status as a writer.128 For the First Vatican Mythographer, rape in ancient narratives is ambiguous: sexual violence is read allegorically as signs of natural processes and divine creativity, but rape also ignites a frenzy of violent repetition. Rape begets rape and bloody disaster; the commentator historicizes human history as a tragic repetition of violence. According to the mythographer, the Thebans’ foundational crimes are fratricide and self-destruction, whereas the Trojans’ foundational crimes are rape and betrayal of kin.129 The Third Vatican Mythographer, probably Alexander Neckham (1157– 1217) or perhaps Alberic of London, reorganized the texts of the First and Second Vatican Mythographers and streamlined the allegorical interpretations of Ovid’s narratives. (Unfortunately, there is no modern critical edition of the Third Vatican Mythographer’s work, De diis gentium et illorum allegoriis).130 The Third 126 

Fulgentius, Mitologiae, ed. by Helm, ii, 13 (LLT, p. 54); Second Vatican Mythographer, Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, pp. 217–18; Bernard Silvestris, The Commentary, ed. by Westra, x, 470–73 (p. 240); Chance, Medieval Mythography, i, 477. 127  First Vatican Mythographer, Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, pp. 4, 81. 128  First Vatican Mythographer, Mythographi Vaticani i et ii, ed. by Kulcsár, p. 4. 129  Chance, Medieval Mythography, i, 189–91. 130  On the identity of the Third Vatican Mythographer, see Rathbone, ‘Master Alberic

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Vatican Mythographer expands the interpretation of Pluto and Proserpina into an encyclopedia of mythographic readings of the narrative through euhemerist, poetic, and philosophical filters.131 The Third Vatican Mythographer reads De diis gentium as a polysemous text and frequently compares different etymologies of individual character names, thus making his text into a convenient-to-use running index of Ovidian mythography. The mythographer was frequently cited by Chartrian commentators on classical myth and by Robert Holkot in his commentary on the Book of Proverbs. Chaucer’s narrative of Philomela’s rape moves provocatively against the grain of mythographic allegorizations. As a truncated — mutilated, mutated, transformed — text, Chaucer’s narrative erases the bloody revenge which many mythographic commentators used to condemn Procne and Philomela as bad women, and which Ovid’s narrative exploited as an outbreak of dionysiac payback and feminine rage. More important, the Chaucerian narrator explicitly gestures toward his textual truncation: ‘The remenaunt is no charge for to telle, | For this is al and som.’132 In one respect, the textual manipulation (a cutting off and silencing, thematically similar to Tereus’s mutilation of Philomela) makes the story more appropriate as a ‘legend’ in a collection of narratives about wronged, virtuous women. But the textual elision leaves open the question of sexuality and reading in the narrative and the question of how women’s writing is read. In one sense, Chaucer’s textual erasure protects Philomela and Procne from the authoritative mythographic discourse which condemns the two, especially Procne, as vengeful, bad women who transgress their natural, feminine, maternal natures by committing infanticide and cannibalism. However, the textual mutilation problematizes the relationship between the male writer/narrator and the rapist. The narrator repeats Tereus’s attempt to silence part of a woman’s story, but for supposedly ‘good’ reasons. Whether Alceste would agree is not clear. Chaucer’s legend of Philomela returns us to a theme of Ovid’s narrative not attended to by most medieval mythographies: writing and reading, in particular, the writing and reading of rape narratives. The text specifically identifies the mute Philomela as a literate, aristocratic woman who heroically tells her own awful story: of London’. The Latin text, identified as ‘Mythographor Vaticanus iii 1984’, (‘Mythographor Vaticanus iii’, ed. by Bode) is in Scriptores rerum mythicarum Latini tres Romae nuper reperti. 131  ‘Mythographor Vaticanus iii’, ed. by Bode, pp. 173, 197. 132  Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2383–84 (p. 626).

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She coude eek rede and wel ynow endyte, But with a penne coude she nat wryte, But lettres can she weve to and fro, So that, by that the yer was al ago, She hadde ywoven in a stamyn large How that she was brought from Athenis in a barge, And in a cave how that she was brought; And al the thing that Tereus hath wrought, She waf it wel, and wrot the storye above, How she was served for hire systers love.133

Many mythographers mentioned that Philomela wove her story in a tapestry or cloth. But Chaucer’s text reproduces the letter of Ovid’s Latin. The narrator says that Philomela embroiders letters (Ovid uses the more ambiguous notae). As a literate woman, she can read and compose, but she weaves a text rather than wielding the phallic pen.134 Chaucer’s text is also ambiguous about the kind of text Philomela weaves, although we can imagine possibilities from the numerous surviving medieval examples of actual woven texts with images, including the Bayeux Tapestry and the interesting silk burial pall woven by Yephimia (d. after 1405) which contains a panegyric in silver letters for Prince Lazar.135 Does Philomela write her story in words or create an illustrated text? Does her embroidered cloth contain a pictorial representation of her rape with a text written above it (‘She waf it wel, and wrot the storye above’), or does the narrator mean that the text she wove into the cloth was the text we have just read? Does above refer to the text she makes or the one we have just read? The reference to Progne’s reading — ‘And whan that Progne hath this thing beholde’ — does not disambiguate the earlier line.136 Either way, Philomela is the first writer of the story which Ovid repeats and which Chaucer truncates. But the point is made more forcefully with respect to Philomela’s writing and Chaucer’s text if we read above as referring to the text we have just read. Philomela is the first writer of her story, Progne the first reader. Chaucer’s version reproduces Philomela’s original narrative, that is, the raped woman’s story without the revenge plot, and thus highlights the originary myth as a female textual community. 133 

Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2356–65 (p. 626). See Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 81; Joplin, ‘The Voice of the Shuttle’. 135  See Larrington, Women and Writing, pp. 250–51. 136  Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2364, 2373 (p. 626). 134 

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Progne’s response to Philomela’s writing provokes us to consider the multiple responses a text might produce. When she reads Philomela’s unglossed text, Progne becomes mute, ‘for sorwe and ek for rage’. In Chaucer’s text, Progne’s voiceless response to Philomela’s text empathetically identifies Progne with her violated and lacerated sister. Later, when she discovers her sister, ‘Wepynge in the castel, here alone’, Progne vocalizes the emotional distress for both of them: ‘Allas! The wo, the compleynt, and the mone | That Progne upon hire doumbe syster maketh!’.137 The genre gloss compleynt echoes Ovid’s description of Philomela’s writing as a carmen. Compleynt also supplements Progne’s role as a reader with that of being a possible writer of Philomela’s story, someone who produces an emotional poetic response to the rape, parallel with her sister’s narrative of her rape and woe. A mute woman’s rape narrative begets another woman’s vocalized complaint, orally expressing the women’s sorrow and rage (‘for sorwe and ek for rage’) for the violence Philomela has suffered. But, unlike the mute Philomela’s writing, Progne’s oral compleynt paradoxically goes unrecorded, unlettered, unliteral. Chaucer’s narrator describes her compleynt rather than inscribing it in the poem. In the genealogy of medieval mythographies from the Carolingians to Chaucer and Christine de Pizan, few women characters are granted the opportunity or the power to tell their own stories. Philomela’s female literacy, represented in a vernacular narrative, gives her a public mode of expression by which she can make known the crimes she has suffered and who’s responsible. The first reading of the story, by Progne, gives rise to an affective, oral response, but not the last word. Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Philomela’ foregrounds the multiple ways in which rape narratives are read. Philomela’s writing of her own story and Progne’s response are framed by the narrator, who inscribes his reading responses to the story at the beginning and the end of the text. In a startling supplement to the Ovidian narrative, Chaucer’s text opens with two narrating-time utterances. The narrator first asks God/Jupiter, ‘Whi sufferest thow that Tereus was bore … ?’, thus situating Tereus the rapist within an ethical discourse on why evil exists in the world. Here, the narrator inscribes in the metanarrative utterance the accessus discourse which foregrounds reading’s ethical utilitas. The second narrating-time utterance foregrounds possible affects of reading rape narratives: And, as to me, so grisely was his dede That, whan that I his foule storye rede, Myne eyen wexe foule and sore also. 137 

Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2374, 2378, 2379–80 (p. 626).

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Yit last the venym of so long ago, That it enfecteth hym that wol beholde The storye of Tereus, of which I tolde.138

In this second metanarrative addition to the beginning of Ovid’s text, the narrator inscribes himself as a male reader linked with Tereus, the rapist, and worries about how reading a text about rape might ‘enfecteth’ him when the writing injects him with images of narrative ‘venym’ through his eyes. In a gendered reading of identification, the female reader Progne is associated with Philomela and her sorrow, while the male writer/reader inscribed in the text is associated with Tereus and his crime. The narrator’s initial anxiety about knowing or repeating Tereus’s crimes is echoed in the narrator’s later mutilation of the Ovidian text. The narrator represents his reading of Ovid or an Ovidian text as possibly infectious, poisoning rather than pleasurable. The narrator displays some of the ambiguity of Guibert de Nogent and others for whom Ovid is the archetypal erotic read and possibly corrupting. What’s going on here? Chaucer’s narrator omits the ethical context which Guibert and others provide for their moralized accounts of reading: the pleasure of reading Ovid’s narrative is itself the poison, the vice, the corrupting image both desired and feared. But for the narrator of the ‘Legend of Philomela’, the danger of reading is structured within the problem of reading a text with different points of view and different opportunities for identification. Once read, how can the story of Tereus be replaced in the reader’s imaginative archive with the story of Philomela, that is, how can the story be recontextualized and narrated or read from the raped woman’s point of view rather than the rapist’s? None of the mythographers ever considered the problem of interpreting Ovid in terms of narrative point of view in Ovid’s texts. The Chaucerian textual mutilator inverts Tereus’s action and severs the story from the mythographers’ authoritative moral discourse, in which female behaviours and women’s bodies are read as signs of luxury, danger, and lust. But unlike Gower’s Genius, Chaucer’s narrator presents the severed text of Philomela as a rumination on rewriting/retexting stories and on representing and reading sexual violence. The narrator’s second inscribed response occurs at the end of the narrative. After Progne’s initial reading of Philomela’s text and her vocal response, the narrator cuts off the end of the Ovidian text — ‘The remenaunt is no charge for to telle, | For this is al and som: thus was she served ’ — then adds a moral: 138 

Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2234, 2238–43 (p. 624).

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Ye may be war of men, if that yow liste, For al be it that he wol nat, for shame, Don as Tereus, to lese his name, Ne serve yow as a morderour or a knave, Ful lytel while shal ye trewe hym have — That wol I seyn, al were he now my brother — But it so be that he may have non other.139

Like Philomela’s bloody, lacerated bit of tongue in Ovid’s narrative, the gendered moral, separated from the text, comes creeping back across textual space in the narrator’s interpretive gloss. The narrator moralizes the text, Philomela’s text, not as a mythography, erasing or assimilating rape to masculine Christian allegorizing, but as an exemplum, an object lesson in male infidelity in love. The pronoun of address ‘yow’ seems gendered and directed toward women in the (reading? listening?) audience. Unlike other, institutionally legitimated guided readings, Chaucer’s glossing narrator here seems more casual, or uncertain, about his lesson: Beware of men if you want or if you listen (‘liste’). The ambiguity of the ME verb is crucial. First, liste means listen: The male Tereus is specifically redescribed in the gloss as violent (‘a morderour or a knave’) and inherently untrustworthy. The narrator’s second response to Philomela’s story replaces his first, not because he has avoided becoming Tereus nor because he has avoided the infection which the narrative of Tereus’s actions might produce in him, but because he acknowledges that Tereus, beneath the violent rapist behaviour, is a more fitting image for men than he initially cared to admit: ‘For al be it that he wol nat, for shame, | Don as Tereus, to lese his name, | Ne serve yow as a morderour or a knave’. Second, liste means wish to: If women readers want to understand Tereus as an exemplum of infidelity and untrustworthiness, and not just an example of violent male domination, they can do so, and no one can stop them. Not the mythographers, not the allegorizers, not the narrator. This critical genealogy of reading Ovid’s rape narratives in the late Middle Ages focuses on the complex construction of interpretations to control or explore the fear of poetic reading and poetic affect. Latin and vernacular readers interpreted these narratives variously as cautionary tales for women, moral or Christian allegories, erotic imaginings for men, infectious violent narratives. Articulating an ethical discourse, medieval authoritative commentary, allegory, and glossing, 139 

Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2383–84, 2387–93 (p. 626).

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by male writers and at least one female writer, sought to contextualize such narra­tives in order to maintain Ovid’s canonical position in the grammatical curriculum. They read rape metonymically as signifying something other than itself, or else erased rape altogether from some classical narratives, or subordinated rape to a broader interpretive scheme designed to produce ‘profitable’ readings of potentially scandalous texts. Ovid’s rape narratives received some of the strongest allegorical readings and vernacular versionings in the late Middle Ages. Within medieval reading practices, Ovid’s texts, not only the erotic texts but also his mythography, constituted a problem for official literacy. Grammarians, commentators, and mythographers tried to appropriate Ovid’s narratives for ‘proper’ reading and keep readers from the sort of dangerous affective pleasures which Guibert of Nogent and others described and which teachers and moral guardians explicitly feared. Reading for pleasure was often figured as immodest stirrings of desire and sexual thoughts, whereas ethical reading was represented as useful reading and an appropriate mastering of canonical classical texts. Ethical or useful readings for women may not coincide with ethical readings for men. Reading the vernacular text without gloss was considered especially dangerous, so readers were thought to need guidance, authoritative commentary, and ethical interpretations with proper, sanctioned utilitates provided by informed interpreters, translators, and paraphrasers. However, as ethical discourses, official mythographies and allegorizations almost never considered how women’s texts and stories might be read differently from men’s or how men and women’s experiences might create different reading formations. Christine de Pizan’s verbal and visual depictions of rape narratives in her Épistre Othéa ambivalently rewrite Ovidian narratives, reenforcing a male aristocratic viewpoint as the allegorical centre of her readings even as she resists representing women as rape victims. The complexity of reading differently is a point Chaucer dramatizes several times in his fictions, in the Hous of Fame, in the Parlement of Fowles, with Philomela, with Progne, with Alisoun of Bath. Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Philomela’ inscribes textual mutilation as rewriting and reaffirms a woman writer’s story as the origin of a rape narrative. The text also inscribes Progne as a female reader, the first reader of Philomela’s story, but dampens her revenge against her husband by representing her response not as bloody violence but as an oral, affective, and empathetic response to her sister’s sorrow. Finally, the fictional narrator (after Philomela and Ovid) of the legend inscribes his own reading responses to the story, acknowledging Tereus as a possible exemplum of male untrustworthiness and again bracketing the Ovidian narrative’s sexual and dionysiac violence.

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Chaucer reproduces this narrative of reading rape once more when he inter­ textually links, in Ovidian style, Tereus’s rape of Philomela with the Wife of Bath’s story of the rapist Arthurian knight. In the ‘Legend of Philomela’, the narrator says: By force hath this traytour don a dede, That he hath reft hire of hire maydenhede, Maugre hire hed, by strengthe and by his might.140

In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the narrator Wife describes the bachelor’s rape of the maiden with almost identical language: He saugh a mayde walkynge hym biforn, Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, By verry force, he rafte hire maydenhed.141

Chaucer’s repetition of the language of sexual violence opens a broader intertextual and thematic association. Both passages use the English reft/raft, which emphasizes the rapist’s use of force and echoes the medieval French legal term eforcier. ‘Force’, together with whether the woman cried out, was the criterion often used in fourteenth-century French and English law to determine whether a woman had in fact consented to the rapist’s sexual advances. By repeating this narrative description from the ‘Legend of Philomela’, the Wife of Bath’s tale of a redeemed rapist retexts, inverts (mutes, mutilates) the Ovidian narrative and the theme of transformation. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, many female characters escape physical rape by being transformed into animals, trees, water, etc., but Daphne and others often do not control how their reputations and stories will be told. In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, however, the Hag transforms herself into a beautiful young woman specifically for a young knight who has committed violent rape but is later said to be redeemed when he gives up interpretive and marital control to a woman. Female tellers, writers, and readers teach us to read differently, and to imagine different narratives. Like the ‘Legend of Philomela’, the Wife of Bath’s Tale revises the story of Tereus and Philomela by deleting the sisters’ revenge, but the text substitutes a new version of the rapist, a redeemed knight who has acknowledged women’s power and control. Rather than all the characters becoming birds, the hag is transformed into a young woman and the couple marry. Chaucer’s two texts, a wish-fulfilling lai and a pseudo-hagiographic narrative, problematize Ovid’s authority within the archive of medieval mythographic 140  Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, ll. 2324–26 (p. 625). 141  Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, iii, ll. 886–88 (p. 117).

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discourse. (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue deploys a third critique of traditional commentary on women by men, though one less explicitly addressing Ovid’s hypotexts.) Both the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the ‘Legend of Philomela’ mute or erase women’s revenge for their sexual violation, and in the Wife’s tale the knight escapes death and in some sense is rewarded, at least by women’s generosity. However, in the ‘Legend of Philomela’ the sisters’ grief prompts the narrator to caution against men’s unfaithfulness. In these dialogues with(in) the mythographic archive, Chaucer’s evocation of complex, ambiguous reading effects dislodges and relocates gender codes which govern interpretations. The ‘Legend of Philomela’ mutilates Ovid’s narrative so as to uncouple women from the mythographers’ miso­g ynist moralizing. Whereas Christine de Pizan ambiguously represents Daphne as the silenced, disfigured, allegorical object of male knighthood, late medieval mythographers repeatedly moralize or allegorize rape and sexual violence as signifiers of cosmological, ethical, or spiritual meanings. Reading the pagan text as plural, mythographic allegory seeks to separate women’s voices from their own stories. Chaucer retexts the Ovidian story of Philomela as a countertext which resists the mythographers’ male-privilege and dramatically questions masculine reading. His vernacular narrative reproduces Philomela as an originary female writer and foregrounds multiple gendered reading scenes in the text. The genealogy of reading in the Ovidian archive uncovers the erotics, textual attractions, sexual politics, and transformative intertextual engagements between vernacular translation and Ovid’s Latin text, between affective literacy and commentary discourse, between engagement and study, between empathy and objectification.

Chapter 6

Grammar of Unruly Latin in Middle English Writing Give us this day our jelly bread. Un petit d’un petite | C’est en du wal. ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy. Kyrie aleyson.

L

et’s begin with agreement, or what is perceived to be agreement — a con­sensus story about medieval vernacularization. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, courtly vernacular lyric and romance established the idiom of poetic self-consciousness and interiority in languages addressed to lay aristocrats. Then, beginning in the thirteenth century, many pastoral and devotional texts, traditionally composed in Latin, were written in or translated into the vernaculars, especially French and English, and sought after and used by priests and lay men and women. With these vernacular examples, other writers composed theological and devotional texts in the vernacular, thus creating an alternative discourse of ‘vernacular theology’. By the mid-fourteenth century lay readers and writers had several ways of accessing religious and learned writing: group reading of catechetical and devotional texts with clergy (Lay Folks’ Cate­ chism, Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests), vernacular and bilingual primers, and vernacular devotional writing and sermon collections such as Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne and Mirk’s Festial.1 In England, religious literacy in Latin and the vernaculars was augmented by the increased use of standardized writs and formulae in legal writing and proceedings. In 1362, Parliament scribes indicated that the language of address is English. In that year, Parliament also passed a law stipulating that court proceedings be conducted in English, although the language of written record remained French or Latin and the law was not always enforced. Together, religious and legal literacies encouraged greater lay literacy 1 

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 53–87.

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in English and French as well as in Latin.2 After 1370, English vernacular poetic writing flourished, with Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and new women writers. On the continent, French, German, Italian, and Spanish vernaculars created wider, more volatile, and more empowered writers and audiences for religious, poetic, secular, and business texts. This convenient story of vernacularity’s progress directly addresses the explosion of vernacular literacies in Western Europe after 1250. But it also has several shortcomings. For one thing, it brackets out pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon culture, Europe’s earliest multilingual literacy. The story also presumes that the line between Latin and vernacular literacies was consistently stable and that translation was unidirectional, Latin to vernacular. However, late medieval literacies functioned in more complex multilingual contexts. As we have seen (Chapter Two), vernacular discourse was sometimes ‘latinized’ to make it appropriate for official literate culture, and many people wrote using two or more languages at the same time. The triumphal story of monologic vernacularity also downplays how post-1215 translation and vernacular writing, religious and secular, sometimes encouraged rather than repressed or replaced lay uses of Latin in speech and writing. Widening vernacular literacy encouraged Latin literacy precisely for the reasons that Latin grammar encouraged vernacular literacy: cross-over (transferable) literate competence. Learning to construe letter-sound correlations in elementary Latin texts meant that readers could also begin to parse vernacular texts written in the same alphabet. Latin grammar was often the foundation for teaching Latin and vernacular literacies, and it was the privileged language of grammar, rhetoric, liturgy, and learning even as those knowledges were increasingly deployed in vernacular cultures after 1300. Wider access to religious and learned writing meant that many lay readers and writers, but not all, became more invested in Latin discourse itself. In Piers Plowman (Passus 7), Piers replies to the priest with whom he is reading by discussing doctrine and reciting bits of devotional Latin. In this scene of reading, the angry priest is astonished at the layman’s basic Latin literacy. The priest is also irritated at literate religious women (‘Abstynence’) who teach Latin to the laity, thereby disrupting male clergie’s privileged status: ‘What’ quod þe preest to Perkyn, ‘Peter! as me þynkeþ Thow art lettred a litel; who lerned þee on boke?’ ‘Abstynence þe Abesse myn a b c me tauȝte, And Conscience cam afte[r] and kenned me [bettre].’3 2  3 

Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 90–92, 207–12. Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by Schmidt, B. vii. 136–39.

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Lay literacy and Latin literacies certainly strengthened orthodox religious views and the reception of dominant ideology. But as the fictional Piers and Wife of Bath and the real-life Margery Kempe and Lollards suggest, new readers and writers also appropriated or poached textual strategies and literate forms for different purposes or pleasures, including self-interest, religious dissent, reform, and new-found social agency. Rather than being a neutral technology, the Roman alphabet was situated within different literate networks. The alphabet’s arbitrariness made possible writing in and across multiple languages and different discourse communities. In this chapter, I read normative theories of grammaticality in medieval lan­ guage ideology against unruly speech and writing in some multilingual medieval English texts from the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: charms, lyrics, The Booke of Margery Kempe, and the morality play Mankynde. Writers and readers used various microtactics and macrostrategies to mobilize the languages (Latin, one or more of the vernaculars, perhaps Hebrew or Greek) they wrote and read, the orthography they used to inscribe Latin and vernaculars, and the various interpretive strategies they used to negotiate the relative autonomy of reading situations and different purposes or functions which literacy served. Many of these tactics and strategies involved reading and writing across languages, that is, multilingual literacies. Literate ideology, figural discourse, and textual practices were reframed within late medieval multilingual writing. ‘Multilingual literacy’ includes not only writing in more than one language but also writing and reading one language in a multilingual community. The marker model foregrounds how late medieval literacy was structured as a domain of competing signifying practices and linguistic performances, where readers and writers engaged in and were produced by relations of power and textual strategies of consent, dissent, or difference. Utterance, intention, and interpretation are configured within marker discourse. After 1150, the privilege of Latin and its normalizing practices were challenged on a number of fronts: as official discursive space, as language ideology, as literacy myth, as authoritative language. These challenges were enacted not only by nontraditional readers but also by official and consenting readers, setting in motion a broad cultural shift in European multilingual consciousness at the end of the Middle Ages. By poaching, deterritorializing, reterritorializing, and retexting Latin as well as vernacular discourses, new and different readers and many newly empowered readers and writers deployed unruly or transgressive literacies for new pleasures, social agency, personal or family status, or theological debate. Many of these transgressive writers and readers reimagined marginal language, textualities,

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and subjectivities as productive, even desirable counterhegemonic practices in discursive or poetic space. The relations between Latin and the vernaculars were complicated, uneven, and inconsistent. Earlier, we saw how the clericus and laicus distinction was being assimilated to a more fluid distinction between literatus and illiteratus; one’s ability to read or use Latin texts was a social marker as well as a technology. Latin was the governing language of grammar, textuality and literacy education, as well as of scripture, liturgy, and learned discourse. A fourteenth-century person who could read and write often learned to do so by first construing letters and syntax in elementary Latin texts, some Christian, some pagan. But a man or woman could also learn to read and write by learning letter-sound correlations and working from spoken English or French to written forms, as suggested by Walter Bibbesworth’s Tretiz de langage (late thirteenth century). But Bibbesworth’s text, a French vocabulary and grammar with English interlineations, was intended for young native English speakers who already possessed a working knowledge of general Anglo-Norman and who wanted to or were expected to improve their understanding of specialized vocabulary.4 If forty to forty-five per cent of the male witnesses (cleric and lay) in an English shire were identified as at least minimally or pragmatically literate in Latin, the general vernacular literacy rate was likely to be even higher.5 By 1400, many English readers and writers were not members of the clergy, despite what the medieval socio-literate imaginary declared, and they may or may not have read Latin. The same situation occurred in Florence, Venice, and other Italian city states and across France and Spain. In late fourteenth-century England, Latin was also part of a far-reaching social and political struggle, focused around Bible translation and the English Rising of 1381. Following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), the Church had advised using vernacular translations of penitentials, homilaries, and other pastoral texts to ensure conformity, assist Latin-deficient or ill-trained clergy with their duties, and confirm the laity in key elements of Christian doctrine. But the conflict with Wyclif and others over Bible translation and clerical power changed the debate over vernacularization. The conflict came to a head in 1401 when Parliament passed De heretico comburendo, authorizing the Church to turn over relapsed heretics to the Crown for punishment and execution.6 Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s notorious Constitutions, drafted in 1407, published in 1409, extended 4 

See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, pp. 197–200; Rothwell, ‘The Teaching of French’; Rothwell, ‘The Role of French’, p. 463; Rothwell, ‘The Trilingual England’. 5  For example, Kauper, ‘Two Early Lists’. 6  Statutes of the Realm, ed. by Luders and others, ii, 125–28 (2 Henry IV, stat. 15).

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the regime of De heretico and prohibited anyone from owning, copying, or disseminating vernacular Bibles or translating the Latin Bible, or even individual phrases, into English without first obtaining the bishop’s permission (Article Seven).7 Arundel’s Constitutions try to reverse or halt the flood of bilingual writing and scriptural translation and paraphrase which was increasing across fifteenth-century English society. Like the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, De heretico comburendo is a key document not only for Church-State relations but for the history of literacy. The parliamentary act connects literacy, schooling, and ideological state apparatuses with a condemnation of religious heterodoxy. The written parliamentary act performatively establishes power and means for dominant culture to legislate and control the writing and reading of dissident others and to mark their literacies as different when in fact there was often little difference between those so-called orthodox and heterodox literate practices except, and it’s a big ‘except’, in their interpretations of canonical texts and a preference for certain scriptural texts and Latin or vernacular writing. The statute specifically charges Lollards with criminal, blasphemous literacy against social order, the Church Universal, and the English Church in particular. Lollards are a ‘diversi perfidi et perversi cuiusdam nove secte’ [diverse, false, and perverse people of a certain new sect] who usurping the office of preaching (praedicantis officium), […] preach and teach these days, openly and privily (publice et occulte), divers new doctrines and wicked, heretical, and erroneous opinions, contrary to the same faith and blessed deter­minations (determinacionibus) of the Holy Church. And of such perverse and wicked (per­ verse et maliciose) doctrine and opinions, they make unlawful conventicles and confederacies (conventiculas et confederaciones illicitas), they hold and exercise schools (scolas), they make and write books (libros conficiunt atque scribunt), they do wickedly instruct and inform people, and as much as they can, excite and stir them to sedition and insurrection (sedicionem seu insurreccionem), and make great strife and division among the people, and do daily perpetrate and commit other enormities horrible to be heard, in subversion of the said Catholic faith and doctrine of the Holy Church, in diminution of God’s honour, and also in destruction of the estate, rights, and liberties (status, jurium et libertatum) of the said English Church.8 7 

See Concilia, ed. by Wilkins, iii, 314–19. My thinking about the politics of literacy and translation is indebted to Hudson, The Premature Reformation, esp. pp. 390–445. On the consequences of the Arundel legislation for English literacy, see also the important discussion in Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’. For a reconsideration of some of Watson’s conclusions, see Somerset, ‘Expanding the Langlandian Canon’. Somerset reframes Lollardy within a multilingual rather than strictly vernacular sociocultural context. 8  Statutes of the Realm, ed. by Luders and others, ii, 126.

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We find similar linkages of literacy, heresy, and social order in the Church’s earlier attacks on Waldensians and in Innocent III ’s letter on heresy and vernacular Bible translation (1199). With De heretico, Lollards were marked in official discourse and public opinion by their speech and associational behaviour as much as by the books they owned, read, or circulated. Although Lollard schools probably had many of the same curriculum goals and teaching methods as other grammar schools, Lollards were targeted in England by those wanting to guard religious texts in Latin against lay involvement and thus maintain the power which Latin stood for in discursive space.9 From orthodox and conservatives’ point of view, Lollards’ intense interest in public and private reading of scripture, sermons, and tracts and their advocacy of lay education and theological discourse clearly showed that heretics and heterodox literacy threatened status quo power and the Latin language ideology which supported that power. And they were right. The problem with the Latin vs vernacular debate as it was often staged is that neither Latin nor English nor French could completely carry the claims, values, and communities it was associated with. Much has been said in the past forty years about Lollardy and literacy, but our understanding of key aspects of fifteenthcentury social and intellectual culture have been rewritten by new approaches to Lollardy. Kantik Ghosh argues persuasively that the diverse forms and voices of Lollardy reveal how the movement was driven by strong attitudes of intellectual questioning and criticism, fostered primarily through scholastic, academic thinking often in Latin discourse and supported by the writing and reading of English-language books. Lollardy, he writes, was ‘as much a symptom as a cause of larger changes taking place in late-medieval scholasticism’.10 Elsewhere, Ghosh rejects the rigid orthodox-heretical binarism of some historians and points rather to a ‘more or less coherent dissenting mentalité, characterized pre-eminently by an intelligent and informed criticism of authority’ which characterizes later medieval social and intellectual struggle. Given Lollardy’s concerns with literal meaning, revelation, antisacerdotalism, intentionality, vernacular literacy and learning, and increasingly public forms of intellectual debate which challenged the received authority of religious and legal institutions, Lollardy’s sociocultural forces of argument and dissent were always centrifugal. If anything, what made fifteenth-century Lollardy and dissent cohere was the hardening of the orthodox mainstream institutional response to Lollardy and its Wycliffite origins. On the 9  Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, pp. 32–33; Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text, pp. 20–32. 10  Ghosh, The Wyclif Heresy, pp. 213–16 (the quotation is on p. 214); Ghosh, ‘Bishop Reginald Pecock’, p. 252.

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one hand, English Lollardy and its continental heritage did question and criticize the status quo, and Lollardy was committed to the advancement of vernacular public literacy practice in practice as well as theory. But Lollardy was not exclusively a vernacular social reform movement nor were Lollard discourses restricted to written vernacular forms. Reference, then, to ‘vernacular theology’ downplays the multilingual and literate situations within which wider, transformative religious and social discourses were elaborated. Lollardy was born as a reformist discursive thread within the Church, and Wyclif, the Lollard ‘source’ text, wrote, debated, and commented on texts within the institutional discourse of academic Latin culture. But at the same time, Wyclif ’s writings were investigated and condemned in 1377, then again in 1382, following the Peasants’ Rising, and his work was increasing connected with dissent and heresy. In one sense, Wycliffism was an institutional critique at odds with itself. Wyclif used Latin academic discourse to argue that lay Christians ought to be given access to vernacular translations of scripture and devotional texts in order to live full Christian lives. Post-Wycliffite Lollard texts circulated in both vernacular and Latin forms, sometimes deploying, other times rejecting traditional scholastic modes of argument and exposition. Deploying these multilingual and sociolinguistic circumstances should shift our terms for understanding the relations between heresy, writing, and Latin language ideology in the later Middle Ages. Heretical or transformative discourses did not necessarily or strictly stand outside Latin literacy. Sometimes, Lollard arguments were disseminated jointly in English and Latin, for example, William Taylor’s 1406 St Paul’s Cross sermon, or were unintentionally disseminated in multilingual contexts, as we saw with Dymmok’s Latinizing of Lollard English public statements. 11 Other Lollard texts, intended for public reception, included Latin and English materials. The writer of the intriguing Lanterne of Liȝt (written c. 1409–15) extensively quotes Latin scripture and a few patristic texts, although the writer almost always adds an English translation, paraphrase, or summary of the passage. 12 Dives and Pauper (written c. 1405–10) represents both the friar (Pauper) and the learned lay­man (Dives) as understanding Latin scripture as well as vernacular religious texts. Despite their mutual understanding of Latin scripture, Dives argues that good vernacular translations of scripture and devotional texts are essential to lay people’s spiritual health, and the Dives and Pauper writer skilfully uses hyper­literate discontinuous reading to translate Latin scripture quotations into 11  12 

Hudson, The Premature Reformation, pp. 30, 177–78; Hudson, ‘Laicus litteratus’, p. 228. For example, The Lanterne of Liȝt, ed. by Swinburn, pp. 14, 37, etc.

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idiomatic Middle English which are attributed to both the friar and the pros­ perous layman.13 In Chapter Three, I discussed similar multilingual practices in the Ancrene Wisse (thirteenth century). Some Lollard writers, compilers, and bookmakers exploited bilingual textuality by interpolating reform discourse within copies of orthodox or canonical Latin texts.14 These multilingual texts and contexts created horizontal as well as vertical palimpsests of codemixing which seized and retexted orthodox texts for counterhegemonic or heterotopic religious discourse. Records of heresy trials in England from 1390 on indicate that some of the accused were reading, heard read, or used Latin as well as English books.15 In her self writing, Margery Kempe alternately uses and disavows her knowledge of Latin, especially religious Latin. Kempe’s narrative models how nonclergy might negotiate or challenge dominant literate discourse and how clerical and nonclerical collaborating readers and writers might transform clerical Latin literate culture. Latin language ideology in the service of traditional literate power depended on a dividing practice which, rather than preserve an existing linguistic situation, actually tried to disrupt the available living, real situations whereby lay people had access to Latin and one or more vernaculars in speech or writing. English Lollards, Lollard discourse, and fellow travellers represent a leading counterhegemonic edge for wider lay participation in multilingual literacies. Nonetheless, many clergy and even their higher status lay supporters refused to acknowledge that a more complex linguistic and textual world had emerged by 1375, a world in which Latin and vernacular writings were part of lay and clerical experiences in secular and religious contexts. What I ’m arguing is that both widening Latin literacy and widening vernacularization enhanced multilingualism, for secular as well as clerical readers and writers. Of course, many English lay people could not recite their Pater Noster or Creed in Latin or a vernacular, let alone competently read Latin scripture or a chronicle. But nearly half the English male population probably could and at least a third of the female population could as well. Medieval books of hours and devotional texts show that English men and women could acquire a minimal, functional knowledge of Latin for devotional or legal purposes without great effort or special opportunities. 16 Many people could participate in literate culture by listening to texts read aloud. 13 

For example, Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum, i. 1, 57, 319–20; i. 2, pp. 12, 17–18. Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 209–12; Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 181–91. 15  For example, Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner. 16  Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, esp. pp. 55–87, 220–21. 14 

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Conversely, being a member of the clergy did not necessarily mean that one was competent or fluent in spoken and written Latin discourse, as indicated by the numerous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century complaints about clerical and teachers’ pronunciation and interpretation. Moreover, English Latin literacies did not necessarily correspond exactly with those on the continent. In other words, the debate in England over lay readers’ uses of Latin was about literate status, power, and position, and Latin texts themselves became sites of discursive conflict within multilingual situations. The debate was intensified because Latin literacy evolved on more than one social level and within different sociolinguistic networks. Written and spoken Latin pervaded late medieval secular and religious linguistic and textual domains. Many lay literates acquired some reading knowledge of Latin in order to engage with and use religious, legal, or medical texts. Below this level of Latin literacy, a marginal Latin literacy also existed, where Latin phrases, tags, formulae, and brief texts circulated in writing as well as in collective, ritual, and individual memory. Latin legal phrases and terms were familiar to those involved with secular and ecclesiastical courts, and a strong majority was. Prayers, liturgical responses, and charms were public forms of Latin discourse, and learning to read one’s primer in Latin was often the beginning of basic literacy education. It’s hardly surprising, then, that many English popular narratives, plays, songs, lyrics, and ballads made use of Latin phrases, primarily from Biblical, liturgical, and penitential discourses. What is surprising and provocative is just how often they did so for parodic, transgressive, and intertextual purposes. Using Latin in a multilingual discourse was a strategy for twisting language and retexting discourse across languages. How might we rethink Latin within the late medieval domain of multilingual literacy? One way is to consider the language theory, grammatica, against which marginal Latins and multilingual literacies functioned. As I argued in Chapter Two, late medieval literary and pragmatic challenges to Latin as dominant language ideology were based partly on earlier philosophical grammarians’ critiques of Latin grammaticality and semantic authority. These debates pluralized or at least enlarged the domain of grammatica. For example, the thirteenth-century Roman de la rose inverted Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae by combining grammatica with poetics as a resistant rather than conservative discourse. Jean de Meun, in his continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s allegorical poem, deploys a provocative multilingual intertextuality which questions in French verse Latin’s ideological and cultural authority. In her debate with Amans, Reason (Ratio) recounts the myth of Saturn with vernacular vocabulary which violates linguistic decorum:

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Justice qui jadis regnoit Au temps que Saturnus vivoit Cui Jupiter copa les coilles Son fis, cum ce fussent andoilles, Puis les geta dedans la mer, Mout ot ci dur fiz et amer Don’t Venus la deesse issi Car li livres le dit issi. ( Justice who reigned formerly when Saturn ruled, whose balls his hard and bitter son Jupiter cut off, as if they were sausages, then threw them into the sea, from which the goddess Venus was born, as books tell it.)17

When Reason narrates the story of chaste Virginia, the Lover belatedly criticizes Reason for having used the improper word coilles, though she says nothing about metaphorical sausages.18 The debate about linguistic usage and propria nomina becomes a running thread in the Roman. The Roman passages intertextually connect with the debate about diction in Abelard’s Historia calamitatum. Abelard had repressed the Latin word for male genitals (testes) in the castration episode. He euphemistically and disingenuously surrounds the absent signifier with a denial that the genitals have no proper (i.e. Latin) name of their own. Of course, Abelard is a fine Latinist and knows better, but his narrative syllepsis marks the point where Abelard’s writing inscribes within itself the ideology of Latin purity and propriety, latinitas. In the Roman, however, Reason’s ‘natural’ vernacular rewrites Abelard’s ‘artificial’ Latin as an intertextual vernacular enunciation (or fictional inscription) of what Abelard’s Latin text would not say. Rather than reproduce the Latin text, the OF text supplements and completes it by filling the lexical gap (coilles). The Roman supplies the absent Latin word in an improper vernacular differend, which makes present in the text the linguistic name which Abelard suppressed but which was surely available to readers.19

17 

Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Poirion, ll. 5535–42. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Poirion, ll. 6928–31. 19  For a different but related reading of this passage, see Nichols, ‘On the Sociology’, pp. 66–69. 18 

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The problem of naming and propria nomina in the Roman provokes the wider question of Latin’s authority. Amans’s courtly speech is aligned with feminine chastity and Latin propriety. Amans hedges his condemnation of Reason’s more proper, referential vocabulary by mentioning (reporting) but not actually using, saying without saying, the controversial word: Si ne vous tienz pas a cortoise Que ci m’avés coilles nomees, Qui ne sont pas bien renomees En bouche a cortoise pucele. (Besides, I hold you were not courteous When you referred to ‘cullions’, Which are not good usage (bien renomees) In the mouth of a courteous maiden.)20

The vague sexual reference here links orality and sexuality in language and poetics. But female Reason insists the debate return to the language question. She asserts that both Latin and vernacular words have equal claim on proper naming, unimpeded by politeness or glossing: Biaus amis, je puis bien nommer, Sanz moi faire mal renomer Proprement, par le propre nom Chose qui n’est sebonne non […] Onc en ma vie ne pechié Se je nomme les nobles chose Par plain texte, sanz metre gloses. (Fair friend, without disgrace I well may name Quite openly (proprement) and by the proper term (le propre nom) A thing that’s nothing if it’s no good […] It is no sin If I name such noble things In open text without resort to gloss.)21

When the modistae and other philosophical grammarians discussed naming and reference, they usually posited a universal language beyond any material form, including Latin, but then went on to articulate the ideal linguistic form in Latin, the material language of academic discourse, conventional epistemological cate­ 20  21 

Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Poirion, ll. 6928–31. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Poirion, ll. 6945–48, 6955–58.

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gories, and rational terms. By contrast, the vernacular Roman foregrounds the semantic referent which Abelard’s textual Latin, the linguistic norm of what can be written and enunciated (vox articulata), represses but paraphrastically inserts. Reason’s vernacular redescribes Abelard’s Latin discourse as circumlocutionary, improper, neither natural nor proper. Reason’s vernacular semantic intervention dislodges Latin as the ideological norm of literate practice and substitutes French as the natural, proper name. Reason’s vernacular corrects and supplements Latin discourse. Reason (Ratio) is prior to and more comprehensive than any language, including Latin, and philosophical grammarians often appealed to ratio as the cognitive ground for grammaticality. Reason argues that Latin grammar cannot totally represent grammaticality, so Latin as a cultural literate practice cannot encompass all that is representable and that people want to represent. Latin needs vernacular supplements to fully enunciate what it means to say. Multilingual discourse reaches beyond translation and reproduction to multilingual intention and production. In female Reason’s vernacular voice, the Roman retexts, revoices in another language the originary Latin discourse which Abelard’s narrative of castration and absence tries to control by deletion. The Roman replaces the temporal logic of Latin-vernacular intertextuality with a spatial logic based on manuscript textuality and citationality. The vernacular, the originary and natural linguistic moment within the Roman’s textual inscription, shoves the paraphrastic Latin utterance into the discursive margin. Whereas the Roman disrupted Latin’s ideological authority with vernacular literacy and ‘straight’ naming, some English popular writing did so with multilingual subjectivities or mixed textualities.

Kempe’s Grammar and the Gender of Latin Usage Margery Kempe’s fifteenth-century narrative of devotional literacy and female spirituality gives us an unusual insider account of the changing status and uses of Latin among the laity, framed within conflicts between power and marker literacies. Kempe’s narrative represents pious affective literacy as a collaboration between a secular female and clerical readers and scribes who risk their own status to work with a lay woman. In this section, I discuss some of Kempe’s Latin usage and retextings in terms of contesting literacy ideologies. Karma Lochrie, almost alone among Kempe’s modern readers, gives special attention not only to Kempe’s vernacular literacy but her Latin literacy as represented and performed in her narrative.22 I generally agree with Lochrie’s argument, but I want to take 22 

Lochrie, Margery Kempe, pp. 114–23. See Jenkins, ‘Reading and The Book of Margery

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the question of Kempe’s Latin literacy in a multilingual context in a different direction, toward dissemination and grammaticality and toward what David Benson refers to as ‘publicizing elite thought’.23 But whereas Benson and others regard such public popularizing as primarily a vernacular enterprise, I argue in Kempe’s case it was multilingual. At one point, Kempe dictated to her scribe a vision in which Jesus comforts the despondent Kempe by presenting himself as a better cleric and teacher than any other she might meet: ‘Ther is no clerk in al this world that can, dowtyr, leryn the bettyr than I can do, and, yyf thu wilt be buxom to my wyl, I schal be buxom to thy wil.’ In the vision, Jesus constructs with Kempe a pedagogy of reciprocal identification. She is his student and lover. He is her arche-clerk, ‘Goddys clerk’ who opposes the ‘develys clerk’.24 If Kempe is a good student and bends to his teaching (‘buxom to my wyl’), he will support her (‘buxom to thy wil’), although the syntactic parallelism and deixis suggest more a partnership of agents than self-abnegation. Jesus then assures her ‘ther is no seynt in hevyn but yyf thu wilt speke wyth hym he is redy to the to comfortyn the and spekyn to the in my name’. Then Jesus invites her to pray to him in Latin: ‘Dowtyr, thu mayst boldly seyn to me “Jhesus est amor me[u]s”, that is to seyn, “Jhesu is my lofe”’.25 When ‘Goddys clerk’ instructs Kempe how to pray in Latin, the prayer he recites just happens to be the one Kempe is wearing on her finger as she dictates her vision. It is inscribed on a ring which Jesus earlier had told Kempe to have made for herself.26 In the fifteenth-century ‘wearable writing’ or ‘talking garments’ were popular as religious, heraldic, and romantic objects, in particular inscribed rings and clothing embroidered with mottos and quotations.27 In this vision, Jesus the arche-clerk teaches Kempe to recite/read aloud a Latin text she already carries with her. The brief Latin sentence vibrates in Kempe’s narrative as speech, writing, love token, and sacred object. These brief visionary exchanges (Book i, chaps 31 and 65) enact complex lit­eracy events and foreground important aspects of late medieval multi­ lingualism, textuality, and grammaticality. I ’ll outline them in five questions. First, when Jesus invites Kempe to speak ‘boldly’ to him in Latin, the English Kempe’, pp. 116–19; with some reservations, Furrow, ‘Unscholarly Latinity’. 23  Benson, Public Piers Plowman, pp. 113–19. 24  Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 64 (pp. 153, 154). 25  Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 65 (p. 156). 26  Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 31 (p. 84). 27  See Crane, The Performance of Self, pp. 10–38; Rust, Imaginary Worlds, pp. 172–76.

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adverb highlights the Latin sentence’s transgressive pragmatics. But what exactly is the ‘bold’ speech act? That Kempe directly addresses Jesus as her lover? That she prays in Latin? That a woman or layperson prays in Latin? Any one of these could be provocation enough in the fifteenth century. Second, why, when Jesus attaches an English translation to the Latin prayer, should his id est gloss validate all those male clerics who translate, explain, and discuss scripture with Kempe and other lay people? Third, how miraculous is Kempe’s understanding of Latin syntax given that Jesus’s remarks suggest that Kempe’s Latin competence depends more on clerical-lay linguistic immersion and vernacular teaching which disseminated sacred discourse among the laity? Fourth, the masculine possessive pronoun (‘me[u]s’) in the Latin prayer satisfies grammatical gender concord but fractures the narrative diegesis. Is this Kempe’s report of Jesus’s speech or the male scribe’s interpolation? Does me[u]s maintain grammatical concord of the Latin phrase with masculine amor, and if so, does it import male-oriented Latin grammar into Kempe’s gendered narrative? That is, when a woman speaks the Latin phrase correctly according to grammatica, does she participate in a system of Latin grammatical gender which nonetheless maintains masculine privilege and erases the gendered identity of the female speaker with respect to the deixis of the possessive? The English equivalent (my lofe) demarks the speaker’s gender identity. Fifth, who ‘speaks’ the vernacular translation in the vision: Jesus, Kempe, or the narrating/inscribing scribe? Just who is using Latin and English here? Spoken and written Latin are central to the construction of religious subjectivity in Kempe’s narrative. Jesus offers as a prayer a Latin sentence he had dictated earlier to Kempe without translation, but mostly Jesus speaks in English according to the transcripts of the visions in Kempe’s Book. The Latin sentence appears twice in the text and supposedly comes from Jesus. It forms part of Kempe’s devotion, but it does not have a stable context or ‘source’. Other Latin phrases appear throughout Kempe’s text. The ‘Goddys clerk’ vision is one of several in which Jesus addresses Kempe with Latin. Elsewhere, she utters stock penitential phrases (for example, Benedicte), the sort of phrases Chaucer uses to satirize pretentious speech such as the Friar’s in the Canterbury Tales, General Prologue and the friar in the Summoner’s Tale.28 The meaning and social connotations of the phrases depend on who’s speaking where. Latin also figures in more than one linguistic miracle. While on pilgrimage on the Continent, Kempe, her close friend Richard the broken back man, and other English pilgrims meet a ‘Duche [German] preste, a worthy clerke’, who speaks no 28 

For example, Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 32 (p. 86).

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English. Kempe tells the group a Bible story in English, ‘in party to comfort hym [the priest] and in party er ellys meche mor to prevyn the werk of God’. When the group asks the priest if he understood Kempe’s story, he anon in Latyn telde hem the same wordys that sche seyd beforn in Englisch, for he cowde neythyr speke Englysch ne undirstondyn Englisch save only aftyr hir tunge. And than thei had gret mervayle, for thei wist wel that he undirstod what sche seyde and sche undirstod what he seyd, and he cowde undirstonde non other Englyschman.29

The priest’s miraculous comprehension of Kempe’s English is matched by Kempe’s miraculous comprehension of the priest’s Latin. Here and elsewhere in the Book of Margery Kempe, Latin is represented as not just clerical language but universal discourse, transcending English, Dutch, or German. In this episode, Kempe’s English, like Latin, exists outside ordinary languages in that the priest only understands her vernacular speech. Moreover, the priest’s Latin retelling of Kempe’s English retelling of the Latin Gospel, which she likely would have heard retold in English, reproduces Latin usage to officially record vernacular court testimony or codify sermons which were then preached in local vernaculars. Kempe’s vernacular narrative is miraculously understood by the priest, but his reverse Latin translation confers divine and clerical authority on Kempe’s vernacular words while also returning her scripture citations to their original Latin form. This Latin-vernacular-Latin repetition does not reproduce the same text, but a Latin retext. The episode ends not with Kempe’s words but the words of another which incorporate her English into Latin. Moreover, this complex linguistic transaction enfolds a lay female Latin listener into the exchange: ‘and sche undirstod what he seyd’. Elsewhere in the text, Kempe uses Latin phrases and cites scripture in both English and Latin forms (for example, ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine domini’ to greet angels in her visions), and she seems to have no trouble glossing a Biblical text in Latin when asked to do so by clerics at the court of the Archbishop of York.30 But sometimes she strategically claims not to understand Latin. When the Bishop of Leicester’s steward questions her in Latin, she replies that she cannot understand his Latin.31 Kempe selectively participates in Latin religious discourse in order to protect herself from ecclesiastical scrutiny and possible heresy charges. This is different from what some readers have described as Kempe’s use of the label 29 

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 40 (pp. 101–02). Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chaps 35, 51 (pp. 93, 121–22). 31  Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 47 (pp. 114–15). 30 

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‘unlettered’ to protect herself from accusations of heresy. Latin is clearly part of textual discourse in Kempe’s book, the language of scriptural citations, devotions, pious ornaments, visions, linguistic miracles, and official public discourse. The question throughout the Book of Margery Kempe is, Who is responsible for each Latin phrase: Jesus, Kempe, or one of her scribes? The contrast between Kempe’s vision with its Latin prayer and her earlier claim not to understand Latin in an episcopal court suggests that Kempe is deploying a strategic multilingual pragmatics. To reveal that she can understand Latin at the bishop’s court would imply that Kempe, a laywoman, was able to read the scriptures in Latin, that she had poached on clerical scripture and might even be able to advance her challenging beliefs and practices in the language of clerical authority. Never mind that in the fifteenth century some Latin reading know­ ledge, or mixed language literacy, was indispensible for members of the artisan, merchant, and knight classes in legal, business, and political affairs and devotions. When scrutinized, Kempe conveniently refused to allow herself to be linguistically identified as disruptive and as participating in authoritative clerical discourse. Similarly, she countered the charge at the Archbishop of York’s court that she preached by reminding her accusers that she did not speak from a pulpit.32 The complex status of Latin prayers or devotional speech in Kempe’s text also clarifies the nature of Kempe’s literacy. The statement ‘Jhesus est amor me[u]s’ first appears diegetically as a written text Kempe wears on her body. Then it appears at the narratological level as Jesus’s reported speech in her visionary discourse as represented in the text, while the English translation could also be part of visionary discourse or could be scribal insertion. Kempe’s self-descriptions that she cannot decode written language (that she is ‘unlettered’) and is a monolingual (English) speaker are at odds with her many prayers and confession which use Latin phrases and tags derived from the rituals of the primer or sacraments and her mixed language (English, German) conversation with a ‘Dewcheman’ priest in Rome.33 Jesus’s Latin sentence in Chapter Sixty-Five invites Kempe to perform a simple sentence of devotion, a bit of not very difficult Latin a lay person could learn orally or from a primer or from devotional reading, the kind of prayer or affective utterance actively pious and motivated women such as Margery Kempe, Alice Colyns, and Mary of Burgundy did in fact learn.34 Moreover, in the vision, Jesus specifically translates the Latin into English, and both versions maintain 32 

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 52 (p. 126). Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chap. 33 (p. 88). 34  Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp.  201–02. See Jenkins, ‘Reading and The Book of Margery Kempe’, pp. 113–28; Krug, Reading Families. 33 

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SVO word order. The sentence does not necessarily depend on Kempe’s ability

to decode written language (bottom-up cognition), even though she wears the sentence inscribed on a ring on her finger. In Kempe’s vision, Jesus’s use of the vernacular glossing formula (‘that is to seyn’) signifies he is speaking in a mixed language context where English is used to scaffold meaning and clarify or translate the Latin text for a non-Latin reading audience. Jesus’s vernacular gloss supplements the Latin text. Conversely, in the episode with the German priest, the priest’s Latin ‘translation’ of Kempe’s Biblical story, itself a ‘translation’, functions as a performative sign signifying his comprehension of her English. In Kempe’s Book, Latin often supplements the vernacular. One way Kempe might also have acquired the competence to construct the devotional Latin sentence ‘Jhesus est amor me[u]s’ was through her collaborative reading with a priest of Incendium amoris by Richard Rolle (d. 1349). Kempe’s Book informs us that Rolle’s text was one of a small number of devotional and meditational books she read with her priest.35 Most likely, Kempe and her priest read the text in Latin and the priest paraphrased, translated, and explained the Latin to her in English. The phrase amor meus occurs three times in Rolle’s Incen­ dium (short text): ‘o Deus meus, o amor meus illabare mihi’; ‘o amor meus! o mel meus ! o cithara mea!’; ‘ut ille sit amor meus qui est Deus meus est Ihesus meus’.36 To complete the utterance, Kempe in her vision would just need to supply the proper noun as subject and the copula verb est. Noun + copula verb + attributive phrase is basic Latin syntax and easily adapted to the vocabulary of affective piety which Rolle and Kempe practised. Ideologically and in practice, Latin still signified educated, written authority in the late Middle Ages, but as we have seen, many lay people could and did acquire some ability to use written Latin pragmatically or functionally from oral contexts such as devotions, liturgy, or legal proceedings as well as from basic grammar education. Such literate knowledge could be constructed negatively or positively. A friar or priest might be criticized as unlearned for knowing Latin primarily as a set of rote formulae and tag phrases, whereas a lay woman who acquired Latin in a similar way might be considered threatening and criticized for poaching on elite knowledge. These judgments had more to do with users’ social positions and textual pragmatics than with their strict linguistic competence. 35  Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, i, chaps 16 (p.  51), 58 (p. 141), and 62 (p. 150). 36  Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 35, fols 25–28r, 32r–98v in Rolle, Incendium amoris, ed. by Deansley, pp. 152, 245, 268.

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Besides collaborative multilingual reading, lay people such as Kempe might have learned to construct a sentence such as ‘Jhesus est amor me[u]s’ through what were called in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English schooling vulgaria, ‘vulgars’, or latinitates. These were Latin-English or English-Latin translation exercises often attached to elementary grammars (accedence) intended to teach Latin. Many of the surviving fifteenth-century vulgaria were keyed to anglicized sentences from Terence or other authors, but colloquial sentences and English idioms were also included.37 Whereas spoken Latin was taught for liturgical or devotional pronunciation, written Latin was taught in English in grammar schools for verse and prose composition, including commercial records. After mastering the alphabet and Latin morphology, English-speaking students were set to translating the vernacular into Latin, beginning with phrases, then combining phrases into sentences, such as ‘I loue the as my lyfe. Afficio te amore eque atque animam’.38 Vulgaria pedagogy and English examples to teach Latin grammar had been central to the ‘Oxford’ grammar masters’ educational programme in the early fifteenth century. Although the first printed vulgaria text was Anwykyll (d. 1487)’s Vulgaria (1483), the lectures and texts of John of Cornwall (d. 1349?) and John Leylond (d. 1428) heavily influenced elementary and advanced grammar instruction in Oxford and then more widely throughout the century. These works, together with exercises and lessons of lesser known grammar masters in Bristol, London, and elsewhere, disseminated grammatical descriptions, model Latin sentences, and example English sentences which students translated into Latin using English glosses. Fifteenth-century vulgaria exercises also influenced later English humanist Latin pedagogy; by the mid-sixteenth century, vulgaria by John Stanbridge (1490s) and Robert Whittington had become standard texts in English schools. John Brinsley’s Ludus literarius (1612) modified fifteenthcentury vulgaria exercises and syntactic theory by rearranging classical Latin texts into SVO syntax more familiar to his English pupils. He established steps, keyed to English students’ competence, for acquiring Latin syntax: ordo naturalis, English in SVO word order; ordo grammaticus, Latin with English word order

37 

For example, John Anwykyll’s Compendium and Vulgaria, both printed in Oxford. On vulgaria texts and pedagogy, see A Fifteenth Century School Book, ed. by Nelson; Orme, ‘Latin and English Sentences’; Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 134–47. 38  Stanbridge, Vulgaria (1519 text), in The ‘Vulgaria’ of John Stanbridge and the ‘Vulgaria’ of Robert Whittington, ed. by White, p. 16; see The ‘Vulgaria’ of John Stanbridge and the ‘Vulgaria’ of Robert Whittington, ed. by White, pp. xxxvii–lxi.

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(SVO); ordo ciceronianus, Latin with classical Latin word order.39 Brinsley’s ordo grammaticus reflects a mixed language context, similar to Mirk’s anglicizing of the baptismal formulae for midwives (see Chapter Two). Kempe’s Latin and English sentences, whether dictated by Kempe or rewritten by her scribe, switch smoothly between Latin and English Complement Noun Phrase structures (Latin [N+PossPro]; English [PossPro+N]), adjusted for the different languages’ word order and Latin grammatical concord. Kempe’s brief text inscribed on her ring or in her vision reproduces precisely the sort of crosslanguage grammatical information (morphology, phrase structure, preposing/ postposing word order) vulgaria exercises were designed to illustrate. Syntactically simpler than many vulgaria, but not unheard of, ‘Jhesus est amor me[u]s’ is the fifteenth-century equivalent of ‘America est patria mea’, the elementary, ‘made Latin’ sentences many of us in the United States learned in Latin I in the midtwentieth century. I recall similar questions and sniggering jokes about who was saying mea and what that meant, language games with natural and grammatical gender identities. ‘Jhesus est amor me[u]s’ is also similar to the playful school translation exercises whereby ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’ is recast as ‘Io Saturnalia’. Jesus’s one-sentence prayer resonates with the more provocative eroticism of late medieval piety, affectively textualized, as we have seen, in books of hours and vernacular romance and simplified for more popular use in psalters and primers.40 The brief prayer evokes piety and scandal, piety as scandal, in the semantic play of amor and the tension between grammatical and natural gender in the Latin and English possessive pronouns. ‘Amor me[u]s’ follows Latin grammatical concord, but the English translation, ‘my lofe’, with English’s natural gender and unmarked gender morphology, degenders the deictic possessive pronoun and unmarks the speaker’s sex. When Kempe speaks the Latin sentence, she in effect reads aloud the written sentence, the text, on her finger. When she prays, does she speak Latin concord and think English meaning? Her embodied Latin performance with English as a hypotext problematizes Latin grammaticality. Under Jesus’s instruction, Kempe’s speaking female body calls into question the propriety of Latin grammatical gender as her voice occupies the grammatical and deictic space marked for clerical, male authority. 39  See John Brinsley, Ludus literarius, ed. by Compagnac, pp. 148–49, 153–54. Earlier in Ludus, Brinsley offers a slightly different typology for revising Latin syntax for English speakers; see Brinsley, Ludus literarius, ed. by Compagnac, pp. 100–01, 109–10. 40  See Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, esp. pp. 233–65.

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Kempe’s text highlights the increasingly complicated relation between grammatical and natural gender in late medieval grammar, textuality, and literacy. In De planctu naturae, Alain de Lisle argued that the confusion of gender is always a grammatical error (solecism), even in figures of speech. As deviance itself, ‘Venus in Venerem pugnans illos facit illas’ (Venus, warring with Venus, changes he-s into she-s).41 Grammar might be at odds with Venus, Alain argues, but it should be in accord with Nature (Prose Five). However, Alain’s text disrupts Latin language ideology in a surprising way. Paradoxically for a traditional grammarian, Alain valorizes natural gender in the name of heteronormativity and stigmatizes Latin grammatical gender and concord as morally and linguistically deviant. Kempe’s text positions natural gender in Latin and English differently. When Kempe prays in English, her speech naturalizes Jesus’s Latin and the inscription she wears on her finger by erasing grammatical gender difference through vernacularity. In Kempe’s utterance, grammar and nature are neither synchronized nor at war; they are two different systems. Kempe’s vision performatively challenges Universal Grammar and therefore Latin language ideology by denying any basis for grammaticality other than individual language usage. Kempe’s ‘Goddys clerk’ vision presents Jesus in a multilingual pedagogical context. He addresses the supposedly ‘unlettered’ English woman as if she were in a Christian Latin school and presents himself as the better teacher, ‘Goddys clerk’. The text of the vision and Kempe’s other uses of the Latin prayer in speech and writing critique Latin authority from the position of marginal Latins. While Kempe might not have been able to decode written Latin, Jesus’s prayer and her vision suggest that ‘unlettered’ did not mean she couldn’t use or comprehend Latin discourse. Moreover, her performance as a female speaker and reciter of Latin and vernacular devotions destabilizes the dominant ideology of Latin grammaticality. She supplements Latin syntax with English’s less gender-marked grammar. Kempe speaks across languages, so that English grammar opens a discursive space within Christian devotion for women to speak and write as women, without necessarily locating themselves in Latin’s gendered grammar.

Instrumentalized Latin London, British Library, MS Sloane 2584 (south England, c. 1450–75) is a collection of mostly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century medical texts and recipes, in French, German, Dutch, English, and Latin. Among the household recipes 41 

Alain de Lille, De planctu naturae, ed. by Häring, Metre 1, l. 5.

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are instructions for making ‘gold letters’ with saffron, treating women’s womb ailments, and making and using charms. Kempe’s Latin prayer inscribed on her ring served as a devotional object and possibly an aide memoire. Two short multilingual charms (among others) in MS Sloane 2584 (fols 25v–26r) illustrate how popular texts instrumentalized written Latin (and Hebrew and Greek) in other ways. The scribe(s) marked off individual recipes or charms on the page with hyperliterate rubricated letters and vernacular instructions for using them. Subsequent readers added additional marginal topical rubrics. The Sloane Latin charms are framed with Middle English parerga or paratexts and interlaced with graphic symbols (crosses) guiding readers in how to use the sacred, magical Latin texts. The sacred and somatic power of the charm depended on the user and how she/he used the Latin text. Many charms for relieving women’s pain during childbirth invoked St Margaret and specifically instructed the reader/user to paste the text, inscribed with the incantation and saint’s name, on the woman’s belly. In the Middle English Seinte Margarete, the power of Margaret’s body, the text of her life, the text read aloud, and the childbirth charm are pragmatically equivalent.42 In some cases, labouring women were wrapped in medical/charm texts, birth girdles to ease and speed delivery.43 Although controversial and possibly ‘pagan’ in the eyes of Church authorities, such charms and other medical texts were considered to be effective because of how they were used as much as because of the texts’ actual language or verbal meaning. One of the charms in MS Sloane 2584 (fol. 25 v) combines textual and medicinal orality. The charm is introduced on the page with the heading ‘for to charme þre obleys for þe feue[r]s’ and calls for eating written Latin as a cure: Tak . ȝ. obleys 7 wryte þys on þe on + El + Eles + Sabaoth + And on þe toþer + Adonay + Alpha + ω + messias 7 on the thrydde + Pastor + Agnus + f + fons + 7 geve þe syke to ete eche day on ryȝt as þey ben ywryte þe first day þe first obley þe seconde day þe seconde þe þryd day þe þrydde. At yche obley þt he etyþ lat hym saye þt is syke . ȝ. Pater nr and . ȝ. Ave maria as he ete hyt.44 42 

Seinte Margarete, ed. by Millet and Wogan-Browne, pp. 78, 83. See Buhler, ‘Prayers and Charms’; Olsan, ‘Latin Charms of Medieval England’; Olsan, ‘Charms in Medieval Memory’; Skemer, Binding Words; L’Estrange, ‘“Anna peperit Mariam”’. Olsan focuses on the charms’ performativity but not so much on their multilingualism. Peter Cunich (University of Hong Kong) has reminded me that late medieval written charms and saints’ lives often took the place of holy relics in devotional and medical practices. 44  MS Sloane 2584, fol. 25v. Compare the very similar charm text in London, British Library, MS Additional 12195, fol. 136v. The transcriptions here of these charms revise or correct earlier ones in Paden and Paden, ‘Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon’, Olsan and Amsler, ‘Creole Grammar’, pp. 24–25. 43 

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I have transcribed this text (and the following charm text) without expanding all abbreviations or correcting the scribe’s false starts so as to render more accurately the textual condition. Recalling Biblical text eaters (Ezekiel, St John of Patmos), the Middle English instructions on fol. 25v for writing and using Latin literalize reading, ruminatio, as performance and consumption. The interlaced crosses indicate where the charm reciter or sick person should bless him/herself. The Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Greek, and Latin inscribed on the three obleys are to be ingested rather than expressed. The vernacular instructions describe how to ‘charm’ sacred wafers by somehow inscribing the three lingua sacra on them. Obleys, thin wafflelike pastries cooked between irons, were sold on the streets of fifteenth-century Paris and London for use at home. Charming the wafers by writing Latin on them fetishizes written Latin and reverses the flow of devout expression from the mouth; ingestion becomes a kind of silent reading. The sick said to be healed by literally incorporating written Latin. Medicinally, the order of writing the prayers replicates the order they are to be administered to the sick person (‘… þe first day þe first obley …’). Writing not only prescribes the dosage. It is the dosage. The act of writing and ingesting the text are both part of the medicine. The second charm (fols 25v–26r) deploys phrases from scriptural narrative, representing the birthing Virgin and other holy women, and Lazarus, magical acronyms and palindromes, and again, a Middle English paratext instructs users how to prepare/charm the mostly Latin text and use it as a material object to safeguard women in childbirth: For a woman þt trauayleth of chelde, bynd þis wrytte to hir ryȝt teet. In noīe pās 7 filii 7 spȓ stī Amen. + per uirtutem dei sint medicinia mei + pia cruce 7 passio Christi + Quinque vulnibs dei sint medicina mei + Sancta Maria peperit christum. + sancta anna peperit mariam. + Elizabeth peperit Johannem. + Sancta Cecilia peperit Remigium. Sator + Arepo + Tenet + opera + rotas + Christus uincit. Christus regnat. Christus Imperat. Christus te uocat. + mundus te gaudent. Lex te desiderat. + 7 christus dixit Lazars veni foras. Deus ultionū Domine. Deus ultionū libera famulam tuam N. + Dextra Domini fecit virtutem + A + G + L + A + T + N + [illegible] + alpha + 7 ω +. anna peperit mariam + Elizabeth pre[cursorem] + maria dominum nostrum Iesum christum sine dolorem + et + tristitia +. O infans sive vivus sive mortuus exi foras super (?). Christus te uocat ad lucem. + Agyos . Agyos + Agyos + Sanctis + Sanctis + Sanctis + Dominus Deus. Christus qui est 7 qui eras et qui venturus es Amen. + bhuron + bhurinum + bhitaonu+ bhitano +. Iesus nazarenus + rex Judeorum + filii dei + miserere mei + Amen. In nomine patris 7 filii 7 spiritus sancti. AMEN.45 45 

MS Sloane 2584, fols 25v–26r. Compare similar charms elsewhere in MS Sloane 2584 and London, British Library, MS Sloane 122 (for example, MS Sloane 122, fols 49, 57). Recently,

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This bilingual Latin charm is a marvellous multilingual literate mashup of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. It deploys the liturgical authority and power of sacred Latin by compiling a call-out of saints, the magical/sacred palindrome known as the Sator Square, ‘Sator + Arepo + Tenet + Opera + Rotas’ (my translations: ‘The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort’ or ‘The sower Arepo leads the plow with his hands’), and an explicit call to the fetus, dead or alive, to come out of the womb, on the model of Jesus calling Lazarus from the tomb. The Sator Square sentence, sometimes decoded as an anagram for Pater Noster + Alpha + Omega, appeared in pagan and early Christian graffiti throughout the Roman Empire, although its origins are opaque.46 When written on a five-character by five-character grid, the words can be read top to bottom or bottom to top in boustrophedon fashion. The Kabbala Hebrew acronym AGLA was used by rabbis to exorcize evil spirits and comprises the initial letters of the Hebrew words, Athah gabor leolam, Adonai [‘Thou art powerful and eternal, Lord’]. Some late medieval Christian books of magic also included the acronym. The Sloane charm also reproduces as magical/medicinal writing the Mozarabic addition to the Sanctus liturgical response, Agyos Agyos Agyos (Kyrie. O theos).47 As Mary Douglas notes, both liturgy and magic are ‘concerned with the correct manipulation of efficacious signs’, and these multilingual charms stage a pragmatic semiosis.48 In the second Sloane charm text, the appended Latin and other languages drift in and out of grammaticality (what is the meaning or the language of bhuron + bhurinum + bhitaonu + bhitano?), while the brief English parergon William Paden and Frances Freeman Paden have presented the text of this charm as part of their argument for the tenth-century origins of the Romance lyric; Paden and Paden, ‘Swollen Woman, Shifting Canon’. The Sloane manuscript text is difficult in some places to decipher, and my transcription might be inaccurate in some places, but unfortunately, Paden and Paden appear to have used not the MS Sloane 2584 version but the unreliable transcription found in Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, rev. by Ellis, ii, 3. Brand’s transcription is unreliable in key places, but not because the manuscript is illegible. The resolutely Protestant Brand changed the manuscript teet to ‘Thye’, dropped the important noun Sator from the palindrome (prompting Paden and Paden to declare the sentence ‘is not a perfect palindrome’ (p. 314)), when in fact the manuscript presents the complete palindrome, and transposed some clauses or omitted words altogether. Brand and Ellis’s transcription does retain the interesting Lex in the manuscript, which Paden and Paden silently change to Lux. Paden and Paden might be correct to do so, but we really have no way to tell, and besides, the charm version ‘Lex te desiderat’ makes as much sense pragmatically in context as ‘Lux te desiderat’. 46  See other examples in Jewish, Christian, and pagan texts in McBryde, ‘The Sator-Acrostic’. 47  See Missale mixtum secundum regulam B. Isidori dictum Mozarabes, in PL 85, col. 549A. 48  Douglas, Natural Symbols, pp. 9–10.

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details how and where to attach the Latin, Hebrew, and Greek writing to the labouring woman’s body to ignite written Latin’s magical power. These medicinal charms present more examples of wearing or eating text in medieval multilingual literacies. Writing on paper or cloth or bread on skin. MS Sloane 2584, a medical miscellany, constitutes a microarchive of functional directions and charm texts from which individual inscriptions are reproduced on demand and used when needed, similar to the way archbishoprics kept Latin copies of catechisms which were translated and circulated among parish clergy as needed or royal archivists retained copies of legal decisions and property holdings for future action, cases, or challenges. The locus of the written charms’ spiritual power is their inscribed Latin (or Hebrew or Greek), but the textual pragmatics which activate Latin’s sacred power and authority are guided in the vernacular paratexts and instantiated in writers’ and readers’ actions. Do the multilingual Sloane charms promote Latin, vernacular, or multilingual literacy? Using liturgical and scriptural phrases and magical formulae found elsewhere, these multilingual charms reveal how Latin language ideology and language mixing informed medieval popular writing and literate textuality. Eamon Duffy has described these ‘popular’ religious literate practices as ‘a bizarre mixture of piety and magic’, but he also cautions against thinking these practices appealed only to simple people.49 Late medieval charms manifest the widespread belief in the power of naming and holy names, whether pronounced during the sacraments or in private devotions or written on a piece of paper or wafer and eaten. When the Sloane scribes enframe the mostly Latin charms with vernacular parerga, their instrumental discourse reproduces the Latin prayers as both material written objects and sacred commodities. In terms of textual functions, the vernacular prose situates the Latin charms in a secondary position. Latin is efficacious because it is written, seen, and manipulated as a physical object. The vernacular instructions, not the Latin charm, govern textual action. A writer/ adviser guides the reader or user who pragmatically depends on the vernacular portion of the texts. To use the prayers effectively as writing, a user must be able to access the Middle English instructions but not necessarily be able to decode or pronounce the Latin. The vernacular parergon governs the sacred written Latin presumed to help a woman during childbirth or cure a sick person. Such medicinal Latin textuality redescribes writing as another kind of pharmakon. In the Sloane charms, as in Reason’s vernacular naming of the testicles (Roman de la rose), vernacular discourse controls or supplements Latin usage, administering a multilingual antidote to Latin. 49 

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 275, 277–79; see Baswell, ‘Multilingualism on the Page’.

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The Sloane manuscript charms (and other similar multilingual charms) also nip and tuck the edges of normative manuscript textuality. First, the vernacular instructions displace sacred, authoritative Latin writing and devotion by instrumentalizing the charm, the nominal ‘primary’ text. Second, these multilingual texts do not fit well within Parkes’s categories of ‘pragmatic’, ‘meditative’, and ‘scholastic’ literacies nor within Carruthers’s models of memory in late medieval literacies. Instead, the multilingual charms depend on reading aloud or silently one part of the text, copying a Latin inscription onto a separate piece of writing material, then feeding that text to someone or applying it to a woman’s body as a remedy. The charms destabilize Latin’s privilege and English’s secondariness by mixing English paratext instructions with Latin sacred writing. English is the rubric which positions Latin text on the page. In pragmatic terms, regardless whether the reader or charm user comprehends Latin, he or she must use the vernacular rubric to handle the Latin text properly. Construing the Latin is not enough, nor even required. Conversely, regardless whether the reader or charm user can decode English, he or she needs the sacred Latin text as material commodity or magical object if the charm’s instructions are to be effective. The vernacular parergon in the manuscript displaces the Latin prayer as an oral practice and re-produces it as a sacred textual commodity. In the charms, Latin’s status as magical writing (high-status, a kind of H in Ferguson’s diglossia model) depends on its written-ness and formulaicism, not on the text’s grammaticality or comprehensibility nor on Latin’s ideological status as grammatica or ordo artificalis. Magical objects like charms and relics were bought, sold, and given as sacred commodities. But the status of the sacred commodity shifts when the charm is written and disseminated. Through textual pragmatics, the Latin text is made to supplement the vernacular instructions. Someone (owner, scribe) had to reproduce the specific charm from an exemplar, detach the sacred text embedded in the vernacular regulating text, and then manipulate it as a material object or vocalize it. The proper performance of the Latin charm text depends on the vernacular frame which regulates it. While Latin discourse is still in the centre of the page space, it no longer controls textual or discursive space.

Performative Textuality in London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593 London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593 is a well-known Middle English manu­ script (early fifteenth century) containing seventy-one English or English-Latin and three Latin lyrics. The manuscript, measuring about 6’ x 4.5’, was perhaps produced in Warwickshire as a minstrel songbook, but it does not include written

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music. While most of the lyrics are religious, Sloane 2593 also contains some wellknown rowdy English lyrics, including ‘I have a gentil cok’ and the Psalm-quoting multilingual drinking song ‘Omnes gentes plaudite’. Most of the poems’ Latin is drawn from familiar liturgical phrases. Macaronic and Latin-English lyrics were not unusual in late medieval English literate culture, especially in liturgical or devotional settings where English-Latin multilingualism was customary. Many religious and devotional lyrics combine English verses with Latin refrains, for example, ‘In a valey of this restles minde […] Quia amore langueo’ or the solemn ‘As I me walked in one morning […] Timor mortis conturbat me’.50 Some refrains use Latin sentences which lay and clerical readers and listeners alike could know from the devotional psalms, for example, ‘Though poets feign that Fortune by her chance […] Auxilium meum a Domino.’51 Many Christmas lyrics and carols, such as ‘As I went on Yol Day’, also combine vernacular devotional verses with liturgical Latin refrains.52 The steady repetition of liturgical or devotional sentences in these poems situates Latin discourse as the medium for setting the proper interpretive context, evaluation, abstract principles, maxims, and orthodox wisdom, a technique which preachers also exploited in fourteenthand fifteenth-century England.53 Popular poems with English verses and Latin refrains enlarged both the texts and the poetic strategies in the cultural archive from which other multilingual writing drew, such as Piers Plowman and the courtly lyrics ‘De amico ad amicam’ and ‘Responcio’.54 The lyric ‘As I went on Yol Day’ (MS Sloane 2593, fol. 34v) mixes English and Latin in a performative heterotope of polylogic gender, language mixing, and poetic identification. Some modern editors classify ‘As I went on Yol Day’ and other MS Sloane 2593 lyrics as ‘trivial’, ‘bawdy’, or ‘miscellaneous’, suggesting how those readers find non-straight or cross-genre writing troubling and unruly.55 I shall argue that the poem’s community realism and mixed-language structure are part of a psycholinguistically subtle lyric performativity. The lyric presupposes readers and listeners are familiar with liturgical Latin and clerical performance. 50 

Early English Lyrics, ed. by Chambers and Sidgwick, pp. 150–51. Early English Lyrics, ed. by Chambers and Sidgwick, p. 159. 52  MS Sloane 2593, fol. 34v; for other Christmas lyrics, see Early English Lyrics, ed. by Chambers and Sidgwick, pp. 235–36. 53  See Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons, pp. 13–30, 105–29. 54  Early English Lyrics, ed. by Chambers and Sidgwick, pp. 15–17. 55  See Early English Lyrics, ed. by Chambers and Sidgwick, p. 201; Middle English Lyrics, ed. by Luria and Hoffman, p. 77; Medieval English Lyrics, ed. by Duncan, p. 175. 51 

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The poem also pluralizes narrative point of view (what Genette calls ‘variable internal focalization’) by mixing liturgical Latin narrative and formulae with firstperson and reported Latin speech so that Latin-vernacular language boundaries become blurred in the female speaker’s interior experience as are the distinctions between group participation in the liturgy and individual affective response.56 The poetic language mixing in ‘Yol Day’ is framed within the celebration of the incarnation of the W/word on Christmas Day, another moment of boundary crossing with linguistic implications. The manuscript of ‘Yol Day’ instantiates this performativity on the page as text, as literate multilingualism. The crux of language mixing in the poem is the bilingual refrain which divides the liturgical response: ‘Kyrie, so kyrie, Jankin singeth merie, with aleyson.’ In most MS Sloane 2593 lyrics, stanzas are marked with brackets in the left-hand margin, while refrains, marked in the same way, are copied only at the beginning of each poem. In ‘Yol Day’, the first repetition of the refrain is indicated by ‘kyrieleyson’ in the right-hand margin (fol. 34v) next to stanza two and thereafter by ‘Kel’ or ‘K’ to the right of stanzas five, six, and seven. The full refrain written at the top of fol. 34v does two things. On the page, the refrain literally and visually frames the narrative portion of the lyric. Performatively, the refrain homophonically ties together two different languages, usages, and perspectives with the word ‘Aleyson’, spelled to visually mark the bilingual pun and syntactically refocalized in an English prepositional phrase. The spelling ‘aleyson’ is a provocative instance of multilingual literacy. In late medieval manuscripts, the liturgical word is always spelled eleison or eleyson. In Middle English texts, the female name is usually spelled Aliso(u)n or Alysoun.57 After each step (stanza) in the dual narrative of the lyric (the order of the Mass and the female speaker’s story of her affair with the priest), the manuscript text guides the reader or oral performer to insert the refrain, thus reiterating the poem’s sacred-secular parody and disrupting the linearity of either narrative sequence. The refrain functions as a manuscript rubric as well as a multilingual (k)not. Contextually, the full refrain interrupts the syntax of the liturgical response, Kyrie aleyson (‘Lord, have mercy’) and hints at but does not yet reveal the lyric speaker to be a woman impregnated by the priest. Also, when reading the text privately or hearing it read aloud, informed audiences might hear the pronunciation of the 56 

Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. by Lewin, pp. 189–91. For example, Chaucer, ‘Miller’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, i, ll. 3366, 3401, 3698 (pp. 70, 71, 75); ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson, iii, l. 804 (p. 115). See also ‘Alysoun’, in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, fol. 63v, in The Harley Lyrics, ed. by Brook, p. 33. 57 

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woman’s name within the liturgical prayer (‘Lord, have mercy’) and intertextually conjure the generic names ‘Jankin’ and ‘Alisoun’ from popular love lyrics or Chaucerian texts. The bilingual refrain interrupts the liturgical discourse by inserting into the formula the female speaker’s private response to the Christmas liturgy performed in the priest’s voice. At the diegetic level, when the speaker hears Jankin entone the sentence during Mass and the procession of the Host, she imagines her lover is repeating her name, Aleyson, and calling to her, ‘Aleyson, have mercy’. At the level of poetic utterance, the female speaker also impersonates the celebrant as she reports his speech, but she transforms the speech genre from liturgy to secular love song. More transgressively, the multilingual female speaker imaginatively inserts herself into the Mass as the celebrant speaking the Latin liturgy and as the object of worship and addressee of the liturgy. Is her name latinized Greek or anglicized French? The bilingual pun on Aleyson operates at the intrasyllable rather than intrasentential or intersentential level. At the grammatical level, the lyric inscription transforms the inflected Greek verb into an English prepositional phrase (‘with Aleyson’). The unusual spelling of the woman’s name is first embedded in the refrain as part of a decontextualized liturgical utterance at the top of the page. Initially, that utterance should belong to the priest, but because the refrain attributes the response to the priest (‘Jankin singeth merie’), the poetic utterance turns out to belong to the woman speaking. In the lyric interior, Aleyson’s private response to the language of the Mass, perhaps performed in the voice of an impersonating (male) performer, seizes liturgical discourse and reterritorializes the ritual syllables within vernacular grammar as romantic lament rather than piety. Lyric space makes possible cross-gender and multilingual performances. The poem’s narrative then unfolds the pun which the full refrain has triggered on the page, appended as it were to the bilingual pun in. The lyric’s fiction represents Aleyson’s mental language as multilingual cognition, cued to the homophonic spelling on the page. The visual and aural pun on the latinized Greek verb and anglicized French ­female name also foregrounds medieval anxieties about affective piety and devotional identification in the body, voice, and mind of a lyric woman. The female speaker hears her name repeated by the priest her (former?) lover within the public ritual language of the Mass: ‘Aleyson, have mercy’. The pun activates the sacred metaphors of courtly romance and displaces the holy petition to God with the lover’s petition to his beloved. Such passionate engagement could be enacted and represented positively in affective piety and devotional literacies, as in the Latin prayer Jesus teaches Kempe in her vision, ‘Jhesu est amor me[u]s’. We hear ourselves called, interpellated, in the speech we believe is addressed to us. The ‘Yol Day’ speaker

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hears herself called in the priest’s voice, and the manuscript inscribes the pun on the page by blurring the distinction between written Latin and written English. How might a minstrel or singer perform this lyric? We can imagine a skilled singer dramatizing the implicit dialogue in the poem by shifting between a meditative or affective style in the stanzas and a straight or mock liturgical style of singing or voicing in the refrain, each time emphasizing the homophonic pun ‘Aleyson’. The written text with its alternate spelling pressures the word ‘Aleyson’, such that silent readers or dramatizing singers linguistically deterritorialize the Greek/Latin and reterritorialize the inscribed ‘Aleyson’ as a vernacular word in the context of performative reading. My hypothetical performative reader occupies an ambiguous position, impersonating a female whose interior think­ ing and affective responses poach on liturgical Latin and sacred ritual and whose recreation of the Mass seizes and incorporates the male celebrant’s position. The manuscript version of the lyric deconstructs the clergy’s discursive authority by inscribing disruptive codemixing on the page and representing how a lay congregant might hear, construe, and redirect ritual Latin. The manuscript version guides a performer impersonating a laywoman who has a relationship with the priest and whose interior thoughts poetically impersonate a male cleric. The bilingual poem, as performance and representation, is an imaginary textual site juxtaposing personal and ritual discourses. In the stanzas, the female speaker uses Latin phrases to mark the progress of the liturgical narrative: Kyrie, Sanctus, Angnus (Agnus), Benedicamus Domino, Deo gracias. Her responses affectively emphasize Jankin’s voice and performance, and her figural language connects Jankin’s singing with his sexuality and her seduction: ‘Jankin singeth merie’, ‘Jankin red the pistil’, ‘Jankin […] craked a merie note’. As the Mass reaches its climax and the priest displays the Eucharist to the congregation, he gives her a wink and steps on her foot as he walks past. At the end of the Mass and the poem, the speaker reveals that on this Christmas Day she, like Mary, is pregnant, we assume by the priest: ‘Crist fro schame me schilde. | […] alas, I go with childe.’ From Joseph to God to Jankin, the lyric play is poignant. Aleyson’s revelation retroactively activates another pun in stanzas four and five: the phrase ‘craked a merie note’. In late Middle Ages, cracking a nut, singing polyphonically over a syllable, and dicing vegetables (stanza five) were also associated with intercourse of one kind or another. ‘Yol Day’ is one of several fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English lyrics which narrate a woman’s affair with a clerk and the woman ends up pregnant.58 58 

See for example, ‘The last time I the well woke’, ‘This enther day I mete a clerk’, in The

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Accordingly, some modern editors and readers describe ‘Yol Day’ as a ‘seduction poem’, but the poetic play exceeds that thematic.59 The multilingual lyric explicitly parodies both Advent-Christmas theology and courtly romance narrative and mixes languages and people in ways which subvert by enlarging the scope of linguistic and performative understanding. Moreover, the lay female speaker overtly con-fuses affective responses during Mass with sexual desire, challenging orthodox ideas about lay devotion and affective piety and realizing some clergy’s anxieties about how affective piety might be uncontrollable. The lyric’s parodic codemixing and scandalizing textuality ironically aligns the lyric woman and the birth of the poetic word with Mary and the birth of the divine Word (for example, fourteenth-century readings and prayers for the Christmas Day liturgy, such as Matthew 1, Hebrews 1. 1–6 [‘This Son is the reflection of the Father’s glory, the exact representation of the Father’s being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word’.], and John 1. 1–18 [‘Word became flesh’]). In late medieval devotional writing and affective theology, the soul was imagined as being impregnated with the Holy Word. As we have seen (Chapter Three), Annunciation images often explicitly related reading and impregnating penetration. In ‘Yol Day’, the speaker responds to her actual, not figural, pregnancy. On Christmas Day, she is in fact more like Mary than other worshippers are. Moreover, the lyric’s social critique voiced by a laywoman undermines the devotional metaphor of the Word by foregrounding women’s social and physical vulnerability rather than Mary’s role as sacred vessel. The poem reveals the word as loss and shame rather than joy and renewal. Aleyson’s response to the priest’s voice is ambiguous. Although she thinks her pregnancy is unfortunate, the speaker still seems infatuated with Jankin. While the Mass narrates the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the female voice in ‘Yol Day’ scandalizes Latin and clerical orthodoxy by replacing Mary with the pregnant Aleyson, the priest’s liturgical voice with the female speaker’s appropriation of that voice, and the ingestion of the eucharist with symbolic sex, as Jankin carries the pax brede (‘pax board’, a eucharistic surrogate which allowed the priest and parishioners to share a kiss of peace virtually rather than directly; recall kissing the missal in Flamenca, Chapter Three above) and touches her foot during the Mass. Bayless interprets Aleyson’s seduction and impregnation as taking place, figuratively, during the time of the Mass, but the poem can also be read as a ‘realist’ narrative in which Aleyson is already pregnant by Jankin and Early English Carols, ed. by Green, pp. 277–78. 59  For example, Cartlidge, ‘“Alas I Go with Chylde’”; Bayless, ‘The Text and the Body’, p. 167.

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she fantasizes while attending Mass to be near him, although she feels ashamed. The poetic multilingual play sustains either a time-twisting or a realist narrative and links liturgy and sex with the incarnation of the word/Word.60 The Latinvernacular polysemy of ‘aleyson’ occurs diegetically in the female speaker’s head as she listens to Jankin celebrate Mass, but it occurs textually in manuscript space and inscription. Mental language overlaps material textual space. The language of the Mass produced in Jankin’s voice interpellates her, but her response appropriates that speech in a sexual and language-bending way. Aleyson’s personal response to public liturgical Latin disrupts the male clergy’s linguistic power and religious authority as she quotes, retexts, and incorporates the speech for herself. Thus, the manuscript version of the lyric suggests two different modes of performative reading. Hypothetically, a dramatizing or orally performative reader could differentiate the lyric’s female and male voices by using different styles or registers. Alternatively, the manuscript version of the lyric associates a silent reader with the scriptural and devotional image of Mary, either at the Annunciation or pregnant with the Son of God and keeping everything silent in her heart. Some late medieval writers deployed Mary’s relative silence in the Gospels as a feminine ideal of the quiet, pious woman. By instantiating the pun on ‘Aleyson’ visually, the manuscript text creates for the silent reader a series of impersonations in textual space which interweave the secular woman’s personal vernacular narrative and affective responses (‘it dos me good’, ‘full fair and full well’, ‘alas, I go with childe’) with liturgical Latin speech. The female lyric voice reproduces the celebrant’s and the congregation’s Latin-pronouncing voices within a vernacular narrative of her illicit affair with the priest. The manuscript text of ‘Yol Day’ represents Aleyson’s multilingual interior voice remaking her expressed devotional voice; she replaces Latin with the sound of her own vernacular name and seizes Jankin’s voice celebrating Mass and arousing her romantic interest. Within lyric interiority as literate performance, Aleyson’s mondegreen fulfills her desire and defines her as a multilingual, roaming subject. The punning, multilingual text of ‘Yol Day’ juxtaposes an astonishing array of discourses — sacred, secular, Latin, English, public, interior — on a single manuscript page to represent the polylogic inner speech of a transgressive pregnant woman. Like her English name, Aleyson the poetic character/speaker and laywoman embodies a bilingual pun, a scandalous lyric codemixing which destabilizes the sanctity of the Mass, Latin discourse, and the congregation’s prayer for mercy. The lyric imagines how some readers’ experiences with Latin 60 

See Bayless, ‘The Text and the Body’, pp. 167–68.

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during liturgy and devotions might cross languages and norms with multilingual punning and textual slippage. Beginning with a homophonic vernacular-Latin pun, a parergon knot, the lyric resists Latin’s ideological work with cross-language poetic play. The lyric might be performed by a male or female dramatizing voice, by a silent individual reader or aloud in a group setting. The ‘Yol Day’ speaker retexts liturgical Latin and clerical speech as the textual voice of an impersonating, appropriating lay woman whose imagined and inner speech and poetic reported speech create a personal dialogue with medieval ideals of motherhood and courtly romance. Layers of performative textuality and deterritorializing literacy unfold before us. The poem literally reaccents the language of the Mass in a lay woman’s head as she filters Latin through English. But the lyric’s circumstance clashes with multilingual interiority, and a paternal social ideology captures the lyric’s language-mixing transgression. Aleyson is the one who feels marked and aggrieved. With one word, an affective interjection, in the final line, ‘Alas!’, the female speaker clouds both the sanctity and parody of the Word/word occasion and suggests her likely future. Aleyson’s interjection of sorrow expresses a woman’s pain beyond syntax and an understanding of longing and loss which exceeds in any language the promise of the Latin Mass on Christmas.

Mankynde’s Grammar Late medieval drama was another provocative site of multilingualism, linguistic conflicts, and social retexts. To examine the relations between literacy and dramatic performance, I will discuss aspects of multilingual dialogue in the popular morality play Mankynde (c. 1465–70). Mankynde appears in the Macro Manuscript along with Wisdom and The Castle of Perseverance.61 Many critics have focused on the play’s relation to vernacular and popular drama, the ‘morality’ play’s dramatization of vice and penance, and its sacrilegious and performatively unruly bodies, but almost no one discusses the play in relation to performative literacies.62 Here, I want to argue that Mankynde uses Latin and English 61 

The Macro Plays, ed. by Bevington. For example, Potter, The English Morality Play, pp. 30–31, 38–39, 40–43, 49–50; Kelley, Flamboyant Drama, pp. 64–93; Beene, ‘Language Patterns’; Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life, pp. 15–45; Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, pp. 84–89. Orme, ‘Children and Literature’, p. 238, suggests the play might have been performed as part of a school festival, satirizing Latin grammar schooling. See Lerer, Children’s Literature, pp. 67–68. I think Mankynde’s linguistic and dramatic play is more barbed than Lerer seems to believe. 62 

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codemixing and creolizing linguistic performances which dramatically critique Latin-based philosophical grammar, grammaticality, and language ideology and, rather than rejecting elite literacy altogether, offer a different register of mixed Latin-vernacular discourse and writing. All the characters — Mankynde, Mercy, Mischief, and the Worldlings (New Guise, Nowadays, Nought) — use Latin and English to one degree or another, whether they teach doctrine, counsel penance, bring to trial, deceive, complain, play, sing, or parody official Latin. The play’s multiple functions of mixed speech are connected to what some conservative and dissenting mid-fifteenth-century clergy called interpretation, argument, and conversational interaction in the ‘more modern’ [in the modern fashion]. For instance, from 1389–91 Bishop John Trefnant of Hereford (d. 1404), who later famously presided over the interrogation of Walter Brut (1391–93), headed the examination of William Swinderby, hermita, on his beliefs and practices as a suspected Lollard. The register account of the inquiry includes Bishop Trefnant’s criticism of dissenters and presumed heretics for interpreting scripture in mistaken ways and for speaking in indirect, vague, or misleading ways, that is, for exponendo […] sacram scripturam populo ad litteram more moderno aliter quam spiritus sanctus flagitat, ubi vocabula a propriis significacionibus peregrinantur et novas divinari videntur, ubi non sunt iudicanda verba ex sensu quem faciunt sed ex sensu ex quo fiunt, ubi construccio non subjacet legibus Donati, ubi fides remota a racionis argumento sed suis principiis, doctrinis, et dogmatibus publicis et occultis virus scismatum inter clerum et populum ebullire (interpreting scripture to the people according to the letter in the modern fashion rather than as the Holy Spirit demands, where the words are shifted from their proper/correct significations/meanings and seem to bring in new meanings, where the words are not to be judged by the sense they make but by the sense from which they are made, where (grammatical) construction is not bound by the laws of Donatus, where faith is distant from reasoned argument but from their principles, doctrines, and teachings in public and in secret a schismatic poison between clergy and the people boils over).63

Bishop Trefnant, the Bishop of Lincoln, and other heresy interrogators and refuters complained regularly about the Church’s loss of control over the circu­ la­tion of meanings in public discourse and private (occultis) literacy, spoken and written, especially in relation to matters of faith and doctrine. Trefnant 63 

Registrum Johannis Trefnant, ed. by Capes, p.  232. See Hudson, ‘Laicus litteratus’, pp. 229–30; Ghosh, The Wyclif Heresy, pp. 209–10.

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appeals to a monolithic grammatica under the sign of Latina (‘subjacet legibus Donati’) to justify orthodoxy and conformity. Furthermore, he privileges, citing obliquely Hugh of St Victor, interpretation which produces a grammatically and semantically coherent orthodox text rather than interpretation which claims to speak for the originary intention of the writer or the speaker or which uses passages out of context. However, discontinuous reading or positing apostolic motives was not just what heretics did. One of scholasticism’s major strategies for reading and fraternal preaching was to read texts discontinuously and intertextually, to break them apart and recombine them according to other thematic, logical, or interpretive rubrics. Mankynde actually stages multilingual dissemination by multiplying grammaticalities, literacies, and degrees of dissent with language mixing and discontinuous reading. The play depicts the frustration, idleness, and despair of an ordinary labourer, Mankynde, who, despite his hard work and piety, has little tangible reward for his effort. Entering the stage, Mankynde presents himself as already in spiritual conflict: ‘My name ys Mankynde. I have my composycyon | Of a body and of a soull, of condycyon contrarye.’64 Mischief, the Worldlings, and the bighead devil Titivillus (or Tutivillus) tempt and deceive the disgruntled Mankynde to the point of spiritual sloth and despair. Mankynde cavorts in the tavern with prostitutes, gambles, drinks, and commits violent crime before being brought to mock trial by Mischief. But in the nick of time, Mankynde rejects Mischief and the Worldlings, Mercy regains his pastoral authority, and Mankynde returns to his labour, vowing to be more vigilant and spiritually wise against the snares of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.65 Mankynde may have been written by a cleric or a university graduate, given some of the complex Latin puns, but the play presupposes an audience receptive to both popular vernacular drama and Latin parody.66 Besides dramatizing medieval preaching and law, the play also draws on popular performance conventions: delaying Titivillus’s appearance so as to collect money from the audience, foregrounding the Worldlings’s irreverent farce and bawdy jokes, and including audience-participation bits in the performance space. In this hybrid linguistic and theatrical context, Mankynde creates a performance space for interrogating, deterritorializing, and retexting Latin’s power, referentiality, and 64 

Mankynde, ll. 194–95, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 113. See also the edition of the play in The Macro Plays, ed. by Eccles, which unnecessarily adds scene division apparatus. 65  Mankynde, ll. 871–90, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 134. 66  See Clopper, ‘Mankind and its Audience’.

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grammaticality, both as a second ‘universal’ language and as a means of regulating vernacular speech. The play stages language struggle as a figure of broader social conflicts and spiritual challenges. Latin is used in Manykynde in both the paratext and the dramatic fiction. Throughout the Macro manuscript, official Latin discourse is distributed on the page in both the margins and the dramatic text itself. Stage directions are written in Latin, English, or English+Latin. (Compare the Tours manuscript text of Mystère d’A dam [twelfth century], which uses Latin for all stage directions and scene settings and Anglo-Norman for the dialogue.67) In Wisdom, for example, the margins of the page and spaces between sections contain brief stage directions in Latin (Et cantent, Exient, Hic recedunt demones); more complicated stage directions are in English. In Mankynde we find mixed English+Latin stage directions such as ‘Nought scribit’ (l. 672). These marginal notes indicate that directors, managers, and perhaps some performers were expected to understand simple Latin syntax in highly conventional contexts. In the Macro plays, scripture is quoted primarily in Latin but often followed by English paraphrases. At one point in Wisdom, in the left margin in a different hand, the VA-CAT (‘omit’) annotation functions as a metatextual parergon (similar to OR-DO syntax glosses) to indicate that performers might omit the final part of a scene, the dance of the three retainers.68 In Mankynde, Mercy, dressed as a cleric or friar, functions as an embodied version of manuscript apparatus, a walking set of incipits, explicits, prefaces, and interpretive glosses. Addressing the play’s imagined diverse audience of ‘soverens that sytt and ye brothern that stonde ryght uppe’ and ‘Wyrschepyll sofereyns’, Mercy provides religious instruction and interpretation, first in an exaggerated Latinate English, then later in a restrained Latinate English which stands alone on stage at play’s end.69 As markers of official Latin culture, Mercy’s Latinate English and the manu­ script’s marginal Latin frame, but cannot contain the play’s performative and linguistic transgressions. When Mercy and his ‘Englysch Laten’ enter the performance space of play and page, the actor’s body and his language are immed­ iately contested by Mischief and the Worldlings, with their physical trickery and transgressing multilingual speech.70 Mankynde parodically juxtaposes various 67 

Le Mystère d’Adam, ed. by Aebischer. Wisdom, ll. 685, 784, in The Macro Plays, ed. by Eccles, pp. 136; The Macro Plays, ed. by Bevington, pp. 213, 221. 69  Mankynde, ll. 29, 903, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, pp. 109, 135. 70  Mankynde, l. 124, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 111. 68 

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forms of Latin and vernacular speech, and the institutions which sustain them. Grammatical understanding depends in part on recognizing different linguistic units (phonemes, syllables, morphemes, clauses) and being able to combine them to generate text. By circulating dislocated linguistic bits, disruptive morphemes and lexemes, something like Derridean ‘morceaux’, in text and performance, Mankynde unsettles the grammaticality and authority of Latin literacy through the creation of multilingual and hyperliterate utterances and the ‘enlarging’ voices and bodies of both reverent and irreverent language users. While Mischief is after Mankynde’s soul, Mischief and the Worldlings target Mercy’s ‘Englysch Laten’ and Latin’s ideological and social power. Language is a metonym and discursive space for clerical and official power as well as a space for resistance. The vice figures use Latin more pointedly than do Mercy or Mankynde, and they often torment and insult Mercy in terms of his Latin usage. Mischief undermines Mercy’s control of moral discourse and the play’s performance space by transgressively deploying Latin and English word formation.71 While Mercy speaks almost exclusively in English vernacular filled with numerous Latin borrowings and tag phrases, Mischief and the Worldlings use English, Latin, and French and create new, creolized Latins. In addition to using Latin and English, many fifteenth-century cycle and morality plays deployed different forms of English and poetic registers to distinguish characters from one another according to status or behavioural type. Also, according to Janette Dillon, by the mid-sixteenth century English plays were deploying a wider variety of foreign vernacular usages in addition to Latin to interrogate or stereotype alien-ness.72 What I argue here is that some fifteenth-century drama also deployed a more varied set of Latin and mixed language usages to construct characters and subjectivities.73 Latin speech, usually quotations from scripture or authoritative texts, was often included in vernacular dramatic performances as a sign of religious, ecclesiastical, or legal power. But different vernacular usages and registers on the stage and in scripts also marked social positions. For example, in some English cycle plays, alliterative vernacular stanzas are used for the speeches of tyrants, devils, and God, while farcical 71  See Dillon, Language and Stage, pp. 54–69; and Forest-Hill, Transgressive Language. Both read the play’s linguistic transgressions somewhat differently than I do here, but Dillon and I share a dialogic, Bakhtinian frame for multilingualism. Dillon also uses Mankynde as a bench­mark for reading other English drama in terms of linguistic play and social critique. 72  See Dillon, Language and Stage, pp. 164–87. 73  On language mixing and identity construction, see also Myers-Scotton, Contact Ling­ uistics, esp. pp. 233–94.

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characters often speak in popular tail rhyme stanzas. Rustic or humble characters (for example, shepherds receiving news of the Incarnation) use everyday vocabulary drawn from rural experience or else speak in the political-charged register of disgruntled peasants, struggling beneath the legal and not so legal oppression of kings, aristocratic landholders, absentee landlords, and rent and tax collectors (for example, York ‘Fall of the Angels’, Wakefield ‘Second Shepherd’s Play’). The point is, late medieval drama actively portrayed character, theme, and social contest through many kinds of language and mixed language usage. The plays presupposed some audience metalinguistic awareness, while performatively, they helped shape people’s understandings of linguistic form, authority, and transgression.74 Late medieval drama also explored new literacies and mixed language usages by opening up more spaces, often keyed to multilingual discourse or carnival parody, with potential for resisting or inverting orthodox meanings or established power. Within this nexus of speech forms and textualities, we can read Mankynde’s multi­lingualism as more than a contrast between English and Latin. Perfor­ matively, Mankynde destabilizes Latin language ideology by staging conflicts between different Englishes and different Latins, transgressive as well as authoritative. These different Englishes, Latins, and English-Latins construct different, often contesting subject positions. Mischief enters stage space by critiquing Mercy’s use of the traditional husk-kernel trope for literal-spiritual interpretations and judgments. His critique is couched in hybrid Latin-English utterances which repeat but reaccent Mercy’s register: mercy The corn shall be savyde, the chaffe shale be brente. I beseche yow hertyly, have this premedytacyon. mischief I beseche yow hertyly, leve yowr calcacyon, Leve yowr chaffe, leve yowr corn, leve yowr dalyacyon.75

Discursively, Mischief is a materialist, a literalist, and a tail-rhymer. He challenges Mercy’s traditional metaphor of agricultural labour with a very literal Latin construction: And he provyth nay, as yt scheweth be this verse: ‘Corn servit bredibus, chaffe horsibus, straw fyrybusque.’76

74 

See Diller, ‘Code-Switching’. Mankynde, ll. 43–46 in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 109. 76  Mankynde, ll. 56–57 in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 109. 75 

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Mischief ’s codemixing creole combines English nouns with Latin verbs and English roots with Latin grammatical morphemes and syntactic constraints, even attaching -que in the postposition to the third clause in the sentence. Similar lexical and morphosyntactic mixing, without irony or parody, can be found in commercial texts such as the York Memorandum Book recording administrative and commercial activities in York between 1376 and 1493, where English lexemes are ‘dressed up’ as Latin vocabulary in Latin texts.77 In the play context, Mischief reaccents creole Latin as transgressive and grammatically extended speech, English in Latin drag. These grammatically well-formed phrases in the York Memorandum Book and Mischief ’s Latin+English sentence in Mankynde, line 57 destabilize the distinctions between Latin and vernacular utterances which some philosophical gram­marians arranged as ars vs usus, theory vs. usage, explicit vs. implicit linguistic knowledge, or even grammarians vs ordinary speakers.78 We have seen (Chapter Two) how Peter Helias theoretically distinguished vicium and figura as two kinds of improper Latin syntax.79 In Mankynde, Mischief the vice figure, a performatively and grammatically discordant vicium+figura, embodies an improper grammaticality which, and this is the important point, makes sense across language boundaries and in theatrical context. Mischief ’s creole sentence is grammatical Latin (Helias’s Latina), with proper subject-verb agreement, dative forms, and equi-verb deletion in parallel clauses. But his hybrid Latin goes further. Servit, with the Latin singular verb ending, reactivates the underlying Latin lexeme which had mutated into French (servir de) and then was borrowed into English (serve). According to the OED, English serve (v.) from the early thirteenth century had meant ‘to labour, work, or be of service’. But the earliest MED record of serve (v.) meaning ‘to be useful to’ or ‘to function as (a part of the body)’ is John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (1398) and the earliest records of serve (v.) meaning ‘to be equal to the task of ’ are William of Palerne (1375) and Cursor Mundi (1400). In the mid-fifteenth century, then, Mischief ’s servit is transgressive creole usage which breaks down word boundaries and blurs linguistic origins. Contextually, 77 

See Rothwell, ‘Aspects of Lexical and Morphosyntactical Mixing’. For example, Breve sit, in London, British Library, MS Harley 2515, fols 8vb–9ra, in Fredborg, ‘Universal Grammar’, pp. 78–81; see Kilwardby, De ortu scientiarum, ed. by Judy, chap. 47. 79  These medieval examples expand on the degrees of grammaticality within Universal Grammar, as Chomsky argued early on in the transformational grammar era; see Chomsky, ‘Some Methodological Remarks’. 78 

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we can’t pin down whether Mischief is using the English serve or the Latin servas a root with a Latin verb inflection. Michief ’s parodic Latin operates with the same rules as other borrowed words which have been assimilated into the target or borrowing language. For most English speakers, syllabus is an English word and no longer recognized as a Latin loan, so why continue to mark the plural with syllabūs (fourth declension plural) or even the common but ill-formed syllabi or syllabae? What’s wrong with syllabuses? But is this an English root+English plural morpheme or a Latin root+English plural morpheme? ‘Englysch Laten’, Latin English. Mischief ’s and the Worldlings’ dramatic Latin usage revises fifteenthcentury vulgaria exercises as simultaneous translation. Moreover, Mischief ’s usage repeats and then reverses Mercy’s and later Mankynde’s extravagantly Latinate English. In this respect, both Mischief and Mercy use forms of mixed language, and both maintain the privilege of Latin as a prestige language. But while Mercy uses Latin to dress up his English, Mischief poaches on Latin and inserts English into Latin matrix sentences as a disruption. Structurally, what distinguishes Mercy and Mischief as speakers is the social order of privileged speech and authoritative users. Performatively, what distinguishes them is how they mix Latin and English for codeswitching and deterritorializing speech. Mischief ’s mixed or hybrid discourse, mimicking and retexting Mercy’s aureate (Latinate) English as anglicized Latin, marks the return of the linguistic repressed. Mischief ’s initial Latin sentence is formally (grammatically) proper but performatively (rhetorically) improper, unruly, marginal.80 Through his creole speech, Mischief intervenes in Mercy’s (and the clergy’s) sociolinguistic domain. Mischief ’s creole Latin and multilingual pun on preaching rhetoric’s ‘dalyacyon’ (ME dalliation: 1. idle talk, 2. dilation, from Latin dilatio, dilatatio) enlarge and redirect the domain of metaphoric speech across languages.81 Moreover, Mischief ’s creole Latin sentence resists Mercy’s moral judgment and authority by reattaching the words to their literal referents and to labourers’ everyday needs. As transgression and poaching, Mischief ’s marginal Latin discourse foregrounds the politics of realist semantics and popular voice, thus mobilizing the myth of primary need as a symbolic counterstrategy. Mischief is a multilingual hired man, a vernacular and Latin-speaking character, a grammatical vice figure who uses Latin to resist Mercy’s religious and moral authority from a materio-political viewpoint. Countering Mercy’s spiritual judgment, Mischief ’s hybrid LatinEnglish articulates in a new, creative Latin utterance basic needs of everyday living, food, and warmth. 80  81 

Diller, ‘Code-Switching’, offers a somewhat different reading of Mischief ’s hybrid Latin. See Dillon, Language and Stage, p. 231, n. 7.

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In the next scene (the Macro manuscript is missing a leaf after line 72), the Worldlings again parody Latin’s ideological authority by roughing up Mercy’s body and language. Hearing Mercy address him in extravagant Latinate English, New Gyse explodes, ‘Ey, ey! Yowr body ys full of Englysch Laten. | I am aferde yt wyll brest.’82 The unruly New Gyse, Nowadays, and Nought use transgressive semantics and translation dilemmas to disrupt the division between ‘proper Latin’ and ‘improper English vernacular’. All the play’s characters use many forms of Latin, but the Worldlings use or quote, mostly in transgressive, parodic, or deceptive ways, not only biblical and devotional texts, legal formulas, and tag phrases but also the ‘neck verse’ (Psalm 50. 1), everyday discourse (‘noli me tangere’, ‘Estis vos pecuniatus?’), curses (‘“Pravo te,” quod the bocher onto me’), and insults (‘Osculare fundamentum!’).83 Like Mischief, the Worldlings pressure the linguistic and cultural boundaries between Latin and English by challenging Latin’s semantic relation to ‘body talk’. As Mercy warns Mankynde later, ‘Beware of New Gyse, Nowadays, and Nought. | Nyse in ther aray, in language thei be large; | To perverte yowr condycyons all the menys shall be sowte’ (ll. 294–96). Mercy uses ‘large’ here in the sense of unrestrained and improper, speech which is harmful to the soul and social order. But, in fact, Mischief and the Worldlings also enlarge the semantic range of both English and Latin with their body talk, language mixing, and transgressive meanings. Both Mercy and the vice figures are copious (‘large’) in their usage. Copiousness was soon to become a key linguistic concept in humanist discourse, but in Mankynde copiousness is a plural and contested discursive space. When Nowadays invokes vulgaria pedagogy and challenges Mercy to translate his scandalous English verse into Latin, he challenges Mercy to acknowledge that Latin can constitute something other than official moral or interpretive discourse. Nowadays’s vernacular couplet (‘“I have etun a dyschfull of curdys. | And I have scheten yowr mowth full of turdys”’) dares Mercy and Latin to say what official clerical culture will not allow Latin to say: ‘“Now opyn yowr sachell wyth Laten wordys | Ande sey me this in clerycall manere!”’.84 Nowadays poaches on EnglishLatin vulgaria pedagogy to enlarge Latin expression as ‘dirty’ speech, reflecting a deep wordplay on the meaning of vulgus, vulgar or vernacular. Nowadays 82 

Mankynde, ll. 124–25, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 111. Mankynde, ll. 512, 471, 726, 142 (in order of quotation), in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, pp. 122, 121, 111, 112. 84  Mankynde, ll. 131–32, 133–34 (in order of quotation), in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, pp. 111–12. See Orme, ‘Latin and English Sentences’ and ‘A School Note-Book from Barlinch Priory’, in Orme, Education and Society, pp. 76–77, 116. 83 

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challenges Mercy to produce Latin as a vernacular, where the idea of a ‘vernacular’ floats free of a specific language. Nowadays’s discourse also supplements what Latin grammar can say but which Mercy will not say (recall Reason in the Roman de la rose). Latin language ideology relates scandalous vernacular to Latin in the same way as the Church related Jews to Christians with respect to usury. But before Mercy can even reply to his challenge, Nowadays extends his irreverent, bawdy discourse by sparring with Nought, mocking penance in carnivalesque but grammatical Latin: ‘Osculare fundamentum!’ (Kiss my ass). He then offers a mock pardon, available for a price between ‘Pope Pokett’s’ wife’s legs.85 In performance space, Mercy can barely engage with, let alone control, Mischief, the Worldlings, or their transgressive Latin and vernacular speech. He can only condemn the Worldlings and their language games: ‘Thys ydyll language ye shall repent. | Out of this place I wolde ye went.’86 Despite his Latinate English and learned straddling of Latin and vernacular cultures, Mercy is restricted within his linguistic position, unable to speak ‘largely’; he can’t play or engage with the vice figures. Mischief, on the other hand, creates a creole Latin which enables him to speak across languages, and the Worldlings use physical and linguistic riot to destabilize the semantic and discursive limits of Latin clerical discourse. Mischief and the Worldlings use Latin in multilingual ways, and their scatological speech blurs the borders between Latin moral discourse and what is represented as improper vernacular speech. They create a creole, deterritorialized Latin which grafts onto and subverts official Latin even as it seizes and obeys Latin grammaticality. English vocabulary and word stems create a new Latin speech, a vernacularized, deterritorialized Latin which threatens Latin’s dominant ideological position. The Worldlings perform Latin grammar in an irreverent, multilingual, bodily register. Latin spoken and reaccented in different mouths retexts Latin’s status as grammaticality. Also, both normative and transgressive usages are written in the play script. According to medieval linguistic theories, what is grammatica or Latina is what can be written and what can be understood as meaningful. The paradox is that to describe the ungrammatical, grammarians often found themselves writing and naming the unwritable or at least pointing to it in writing. In Mankynde’s text and performativity, the grammatical includes not only the speech of Mercy and Mankynde but also that of the vice figures. Later medieval philosophy, science, and theology were keenly involved with new developments in optics, acoustics, mathematics, geometry, and semiotics. 85  Mankynde, ll. 135–46, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 112. See Scribner, Popular Culture, pp. 74–75, 77–78. 86  Mankynde, ll. 147–48, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 112.

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These new fields of inquiry inflected theories of language and grammar, and language theorists explored the distinctions among noise, sound, and speech. But most medieval philosophical grammarians excluded phonetics and dialect variation from the domain of grammatica. In universal grammar, sound and articulation were regarded as epiphenomena of usage. According to an anonymous thirteenth-century commentator on Boethius’s commentary on Aristotle’s De interpretatione, ‘Nec est gramatica pure a voce hominis; sed regulatur impositor a proprietatibus rerum, ut non possit significare rem ipsam sub modis significandi qui repugnant proprietatibus ipsius rei’ (Nor does Grammar come simply (pure) from the human voice; but the impositor is regulated (constrained) by the properties of things, such that it is not possible to signify a certain thing with modi significandi which are at odds (repugnant) with the thing itself ).87 In this view, Grammar is constrained by a semantic realism although necessarily realized in speech and writing. Philosophical grammarians’ intermittent interest in voice and sound created a significant gap in late medieval language theory, despite the fact that traditionally the letter (littera) included a vocal component (sonus) along with the letter’s shape (figura) and name (nomen) and despite the fact that Dante, Chaucer, and other writers called attention to speech and dialect differ­ences within Romance and Germanic languages. In the later Middle Ages, the variability of spoken language connoted vernacularity and constituted a noticeable gap in language theory. In Mankynde, the Worldlings and Mischief use their voices to resist Mercy’s authority and the Latin ideology it depends on. The Worldlings exploit vernacular puns, phonetic overlaps, English derivational morphology, and dialect differences (voces, ydiomata) in order to decouple grammatica and dicibile. They join homophonic speech with sacred and profane meanings in a single utterance, thus exploiting counterhegemonic possibilities in multilingual mondegreens. When Mercy leaves Mankynde alone and the Worldlings return to the stage, the linguistic rogues exploit English derivational morphology and dialect differences to subvert the sanctity of Mankind’s labour and ‘Crystemes songe’.88 Addressing the audience as ‘yemandry’, the Worldlings organize a scatological call-andresponse Christmas song ending in a communal vernacular pun, with possible audience participation: ‘Holyke, holyke, holyke! Holyke, holyke, holyke!’89 87 

De modis significandi, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, MS 1334, in Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins, p. 127. 88  Mankynde, ll. 327–32, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 112. 89  Mankynde, l. 343, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 118. Coldewey’s edition

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In the mid-fifteenth century, the English derivational morpheme -ly/-lic was pronounced two ways, northern [holɪk] and southern [holi]. Northern English pronunciation was stigmatized or treated as comic by southern English speakers, as in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale. The Worldlings release the stigmatized vernacular pronunciation into sacred speech as a scandalizing pun. Their phonological disruption of grammatica inserts the lower body into the sacred order of gram­ maticality. Sound (phone) consignifies the flesh and body of usage, which can affirm, redirect, or resist proper syntax and meaning. Vocal utterance is unruly, large, mixed. The Worldlings’ parodic Christmas song in the first half of the play is matched by their delinguistification of Latin in the second half. The Worldlings are premodern Dadaists. When Mercy comes to find Mankynde, Mischief and the Worldlings mock his Latin request (with echoes of the Easter pageants): ‘Wyll ye here? He cryeth ever “Mankynde, vbi es?”’ To which New Gyse replies, ‘Hic, hic, hic, hic, hic, hic, hic, hic! | That is to say, here, here, here! ny dede in the cryke. | Yf ye wyll have hym, goo and syke, syke, syke!’90 New Gyse’s mixed language deictic wordplay challenges Mercy’s speech with vernacular puns on his spoken Latin (sic, seek). New Gyse pushes this game further when he semantically bleaches the Latin adverb hic as just eruptions of air, hiccups. The Worldlings use the phonological overlaps in English and Latin to undermine (deflate) Mercy’s public authority and linguistic integrity. They seize Mercy’s Latin and English speech and remake it as multilingual speech, profane play, or flatus vocis. The Macro script of the play presents several ambiguous literate features of these scenes with Mischief and the Worldlings. Early in the play manuscript, the writer or scribe uses typical written abbreviations: ‘Chaff horsybus’ et reliqua […]| And so forth, et cetera’.91 Do et reliqua, And so forth, et cetera refer to dialogue which the actor playing Mischief should fill in as he utters his Latin sentences and translates them into English or Latin? Or is Mischief supposed to perform orally a textual formula for abbreviating citations? If Mischief performs the dialogue as written in the manuscript, he would seem to be incorporating specifically written discourse into his clerical parody. But if these citational abbreviations belong not to the scripted dialogue but to the textual apparatus (paratext) and improvizational performance space, then at these moments (or places) in the manuscript, writing overlaps the space of performance language on the page, and misnumbers lines 339–40 (p. 117). 90  Mankynde, ll. 771, 774–77, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 130, 131. 91  Mankynde, ll. 60, 63, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 109, 110.

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marginal text or hypertext slides into performance text. Very early in Mankynde, creole Latin releases other marginal practices, such as how manuscript page ordo can destabilize the relation between and script and performance paratext. Whereas the scripted performance of creole Latin and multilingual carnival speech are emphasized in the first half of the play, the theme of writing and carnival Latin occupies much of the second half. Before the Worldlings begin their desacralizing Christmas song, Mankynde carefully ignores them, wearing a Latin inscription he has written down on ‘papyr’. Mankynde then addresses the audience: Worschypfull soverence, I have wretyn here The gloryuse remembrance of my nobyll condycyon. To have remo[r]s and memory of mysylff thus wretyn yt ys, To defende me from all superstycyus charmys: ‘Memento, homo, quod cinis es et in cinerem reuerteri.’ Lo, I ber on my bryst the bagge of myn armys.92

Some readers interpret Mankynde here to be referring to the Bible and gesturing to a crucifix around his neck or on his chest. But the play text is quite literal and specific about Mankynde’s Latin literacy. Mankynde calls attention to a written Latin text ( Job 34. 15) which he wears as a ‘bagge’ (badge) and defense against ‘charmys’. How Mankynde’s speech is performed on stage has a lot to do with how writing and textuality are performed in the play and how the script is interpreted. Mankynde could read the scriptural text aloud to suggest he decodes the page, or he could recite the passage aloud as if from memory. Different performances will suggest different kinds of lay Latin literacy. Either way, Mankynde inscribes Latin on paper and wears the text as a shield and penitential sign (‘To have remo[r]s and memory of myselff, | […] bagge of myn armys’), the arma Christi.93 This scene of Mankynde’s Latin writing is quickly matched by the Worldlings who quote and retext scripture before launching into their scatological LatinEnglish Christmas song. New Gyse quotes lines from Psalms, then reframes the passages as an antifraternal cliché by adding in English ‘quod the Devll to the frerys’.94 This concatenation of literacy scenes initiates a thematic turn in the second half of the play to secular literacy, specifically writing in the law. 92 

Mankynde, ll. 327, 315, 317–22 (in order of quotation), in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 117. 93  Mankynde, ll. 319, 322, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 117. 94  Mankynde, l. 325, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 117.

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While Mankynde sleeps after his crop failure, Titivillus, making his last stage appearance, whispers in Mankynde’s ear that Mercy has stolen a horse and been hanged or died in France. Mankynde, says Titivillus, should ask mercy from the Worldlings for having injured them with his shovel and then go to the tavern and take a lover.95 What follows is an extended parody of another form of institutional power, legal literacy and secular Latin, under the stage sponsorship of Titivillus, the recording demon.96 Mankynde’s parody of Latin and legal literacy depends on characters wielding formulaic language and textuality. When Mankynde returns from the tavern and approaches the Worldlings, Mischief immediately calls for a court using a Latin legal formula: ‘Nowadays, mak proclamacyon, | And do yt sub forma jurys, dasdarde!’97 The vice figures then stage a sessions court of misrule (dasdarde = fool), a Court of Mischief, with Nowadays the bailiff, Nought the recorder, and Mischief the judge. The OED indicates that ‘mischief ’ in fifteenth-century English meant evil-doing as well as misfortune, distress, or calamity. But in English law French, mischief was also the word for a crime, especially related to property. Crime uses Latin and judges from the bench in Mankynde’s upside down dramatic world. Whereas the Worldlings’ Latin and vernacular parodies of sacred discourse mixed grammatical propriety with scatological and unruly meanings, their parodic performance of legal literacies is more nonsensical and pragmatically threatening. Mankynde’s trial puts on the stage another multilingual space, Law, where English and Latin intersect and contest for power and meaning. While Latin was the official language of record, trials and inquisitions were conducted orally in the vernacular, at least with regard to the questioning of witnesses, the accused, and defendants. The Mankynde scene juxtaposes English, the language of court speech, with Latin, the language of court record. During the trial, the Worldlings’ legal writing becomes unreadable, while Latin and English speech are more comprehensible but farcical. As court scribe, Nought writes in the trial record, ‘… blottybus in blottis. | Blottorum blottibus istis’, to which Mischief responds, ‘I beschrew yowr erys, a fayer hande!’98 Hand here refers primarily to the court hand (‘Chancery hand’) associated with standard written English which emerged in Chancery documents in the latter half of the fifteenth century. 95 

Mankynde, ll. 594–604, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 125. My discussion of literacy and Titivillus in the play is indebted to Jennings, ‘Tutivillus’. 97  Mankynde, ll. 665–66, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 127. 98  Mankynde, ll. 680–82, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 128. 96 

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In grammatical contexts, ME hand denoted a range of referents: handwriting, spelling, word choice, and sometimes morphology (for example, -s instead of -(e)th for 3rd person singular present verbs). Mischief, the grammatical Latin user, seems to praise Nought’s nonsense Latin text. Like Mischief, Nought (a ‘devil’s clerk’) combines English roots (blot-) with Latin nominal inflections to create hybrid surface forms. But while Nought’s mixed language writing looks and sounds Latin-ish, it is in fact semantically empty (blot) and turns text-based legal discourse, text read aloud, into nonsense. The passage’s syntax is unstable: grammatical at the phrase level, ungrammatical at the clause level, semantically empty. This is English in Latin drag gone wrong. In terms of Peter Helias’s theory of grammaticality, Mischief and the audience or reader can only comprehend the utterance as sounding like Latin, that is, consignifying Latinity, but not meaning something in Latin, hence not Latina. Unlike Mischief ’s mixed English-Latin earlier in the play, Nought’s Latinized English disfigures legal discourse, and his blotting/writing stains the page, blah blah blah. Even as they convene the court, Mischief and the Worldlings suggest that legal discourse is nonsense. Later in the trial scene, however, Mischief and the Worldlings use Latin legal discourse more appropriate and pragmatically effective ways. They employ regular Latin legal tags and formulae, and Mischief avoids hanging by reciting the ‘neck verse’ (Psalm 50. 1) as proof he can read Latin.99 Mischief and the Worldlings seize official legal discourse for their own counterhegemonic or transgressive purposes. They parody secular and ecclesiastical legal proceedings in order to convict Mankynde and invert social order. They sentence Mankynde to visit all the wives when their husbands are away and, more dangerously, ‘robbe, stell, and kyll, as fast as ye may gon’.100 Mischief ’s mock court deploys written Latin as an unreadable sign of ‘official authority’ and uses spoken Latin, written in the written, to authorize corrupt behaviours. Behind Mankynde’s parodies of official Latin and English discourses in morality and law stands Titivillus, the recording demon. Judging by the way his star turn is stage-managed by the Worldlings, Titivillus must have been one of the highlights of the play for medieval audiences.101 He certainly is for modern audiences. Titivillus’s first words on stage appropriate Latin language ideology for devil discourse. As part of the play’s Latin and multilingual performativity, Titivillus’s utterance is grammatically simple (Raised Subject-Copula-Predicate 99 

Mankynde, ll. 687, 689–90, 693, 780–81, 619 (in order of quotation), in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, pp. 128, 131, 126. 100  Mankynde, ll. 703, 708, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 128. 101  Mankynde, ll. 453–74, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 121.

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NP) Latin: ‘Ego sum dominancium dominus.’102 Titivillus, the bighead devil with big ears, is first defined on stage by his dramatic appearance and his Latin. In the late Middle Ages, Titivillus was the name given to one of two devils said to lurk inside churches (some threads combined the two). In one thread, Titivillus (or Tutivillus) grabs the words, syllables, and scraps of language (verba, syllabae, morceaux) inattentive priests misspeak, syncopate, abbreviate, or skip as they recite the liturgy, prayers, and scripture. According to John of Wales’s wellknown thirteenth-century verse, ‘Fragmina verborum titivillus colligit horum | Quibus die mille vicibus se sarcinat ille’ (Titivillus gathers the fragments of words with which he fills his bag a thousand times a day).103 In another thread, Titivillus scours the church for lazy speech, chatter, and gossip among the laity, especially women, whose idle words distract them from their proper spiritual focus and violate the cooperative principle of devotional discourse (see for example the church wallpainting in Melbourne, Derbyshire [probably late fourteenth century]).104 In both threads, Titivillus stuffs idle or mispronounced words and syllables, bits of language, into his sack or writes them down on parchment or both. Titivillus maintains a written archive of the clergy and the laity’s spiritual inattention and linguistic sloth, their speech and oral reading crimes. Titivillus is an inverted figure of official literacy. But in Mankynde the recording demon doesn’t actually write nor does he act anything like the farcical character in the sermon exempla of Jacques de Vitry and John of Wales. So why does Titivillus appear in the play? Titivillus’s presence in Mankynde might be explained thematically by the general connection between inattentive speech and sloth (acedia).105 Or we might read Titivillus as a generic devil, the archdeceiver with stage charisma, who misleads Mankynde and delegates Mischief and the Worldlings to taunt the frustrated farmer. Nonetheless, Titivillus’s role in the play is also specifically multilingualism and mixed language literacy. He is, after all, recognized as the ‘recording demon’. Moreover, Titivillus’s initial appearance coincides with the shift in the play from speech to writing, from Mischief and the Worldlings’ parodies of clerical Latin discourse to their increasingly incoherent parody of written legal discourse. In exempla texts, Titivillus bags bits of idle or missing speech and archives them in writing. He tempts and taunts the disgruntled Mankynde, but he is also God’s archivist of idle speech and bad reading, language crimes against God and grammar. 102 

Mankynde, l. 475, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 121. Tractatus de penitentia, in Jennings, ‘Tutivillus’, p. 16. 104  See [accessed 10 February 2010]. 105  See Jennings, ‘Tutivillus’; Ashley, ‘Titivillus’; Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth. 103 

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When Titivillus the writing demon transcribes bits of speech, misspoken or skipped syllables, morphemes, he creates an hypertextual archive of decontextualized morceaux, fragmina, full of language errors, immoral speech, and speech crimes. These linguistic fragments and transgressions against grammaticality can be gossip or idle speech not in keeping with the intention of devotional discourse, sounds or morphemes which speakers and readers fail to articulate or articulate properly or, conversely, sounds they speak with excessively prideful emotion or disregard for their souls. They might also include, if Titivillus could gain access to it, Aleyson’s understanding and interior articulation of Jankin’s liturgical Latin (‘Yol Day’). Titivillus’s writing objectifies improper or slothful speech by producing a permanent record of what would otherwise be evanescent utterance, particularly in religious and devotional contexts. The devil’s writing reinscribes these improper morsels into a new book of virtues and vices by which everyone will be judged at the end of time.106 Titivillus is an archdeceiver, but when he transcribes bad or slothful speech, his writing is situated within a divinely sanctioned literacy underlining Latin grammatica. Titivillus’s writing thus recombines, retexts, various spoken English and Latin syllables, morphemes, and phrases into a new mixed language text with a different purpose. In a sense, this is precisely the same sort of language mixing which Mischief did earlier in the play with his Latin-English speech. Now, later in the play, Titivillus recombines bits of language to produce a new written record. He is a maker of official lists, a kind of Ur-writer. List textuality turns decontextualized Latin and English morphemes into official record framed by a linguistic morality. The writing demon reproduces in English and Latin the sort of deterritorializing multilingual play which Mischief and the Worldlings exploit throughout Mankynde. In this respect, Titivillus underwrites their parodic, destabilizing multilingualism and at the same time represents moral law as the inscription of deviant speech. As a play, Mankynde confidently uses multilingual play to interrogate the power and registers of speech and writing, but it is ambivalent about locating grammaticality, morphological riot, and lexical multilingualism in the mouths and bodies of Mischief, the Worldlings, and Titivillus, however dramatically charismatic they might be. Leaping from parody to parody within mixed language popular culture, the play eventually loses its nerve and reasserts the social order. This is comic theater in the dominant mode, and if Mercy can’t control the play’s powerful subversions, the playwright can — sort of. When Mercy returns 106 

See Titivillus in the Wakefield/Townley Iudicium play in The Wakefield Mystery Plays, ed. by Rose, pp. 521–42 (esp. pp. 525–34).

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to the stage, he again uses Latinate English to counsel Mankynde, but after line 815 his speech is chastened, less Latinate than when he first appeared on stage. (The staging at this point is unclear. Mercy returns at line 721, but it’s not clear whether he leaves at line 771 looking for Mankynde and returns or remains on stage and speaks again at line 811). Mercy, counseling Mankynde to repent, repeats a number of scriptural passages in Latin and at one point juxtaposes Latin and English in a complex, gender-bending dialogue: The good Lord seyd to the lecherus woman of Chanane, The holy gospell ys the awtorite, as we rede in scrypture, ‘Vade et jam amplius noli peccare.’ Cryst preservyd this synfull woman takeyn in awowtry; He seyde to here theis wordys, ‘Go and syn no more.’ So to yow, go and syn no more. Be ware of veyn confidens of mercy; Offend not a prince on trust of hys favour, as I seyd before.107

(This passage illustrates one of the ways lay people could have access to scripture, through mixed language translation and paraphrase. Another was the use of Latin words and phrases on church wall paintings.) Mercy, speaking Jesus’s Latin, admonishes and absolves Mankynde, cast as the adulterous woman. Mercy performs Latin scripture, then like a preacher provides an English translation, and finally absolves Mankynde in the vernacular by using rather than mentioning Jesus’s words. Whereas Mercy first entered the stage speaking in extravagant aureate, Latinate vernacular, now he loosely links Latin and vernacular speech, text and translation, as part of his pastoral speech acts. Mercy has reterritorialized Latin in a more domesticated vernacular priestly discourse. At the end of the play, Latin discourse and scripture have been reinserted into the socio-grammatical domain and comic performance space. So what, if anything, has performance changed? Have the vice figures and their unruly grammatical impropriety been expunged? Well, not exactly. For one thing, both Mercy and Mankynde temper their implicit language mixing by using a more low-key variety of Latinized English with Latinate borrowings and derivational forms, in contrast to Mercy’s earlier extravagant Latinate English (‘Englysch Laten’) and Mankynde’s more nativist English. Mischief and the Worldlings, on the other hand, have deterritorialized Latin and mixed it with English in grammatical and ungrammatical but ultimately destabilizing ways which do not square with the ideal of copious or aureate Latin English. Their dramatic 107 

Mankynde, ll. 848–54, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 133.

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challenges to Latin language ideology interrupt Mercy’s use of Latin and English to counsel piety, work, and spiritual diligence. But Mercy’s later, more chastened English constitutes a dramatic intervention in mid-fifteenth-century language and translation politics and a middle ground between religious conservatives and some Lollard reformers with regard to literacy and language practices. To that extent, the rogues’ linguistic carnival has produced a broader social effect, though not one they are allowed to control. Performatively, their cross-language transgressions temporarily topple Mercy and Mankynde as moral agents, but finally Mischief and his crew are not allowed to hold the stage space. As Latinusing vice figures, Mischief and the Worldlings are decidedly lay characters, irreverently talking back, enlarging grammatica, and dirtying Mercy. They also create the sort of unruly lay Latin and multilingual speech which excited social anxieties about lay people mixing more closely with clergy and with Latin. In the medieval popular imagination, the linguistic power of Latin was marked not only by the clergy’s traditional control of official religious and legal documents and discourse but also by the incantation and repetition of inflectional morphology (-ibus, -orum, -ae, -i, etc.), liturgical and legal vocabulary, and scriptural verses. Because Latin was increasingly understood and used within multilingual discourse communities and within various mixed language contexts, Latin’s ideological status was complicated by linguistic pluralism and broken up by new possibilities for combining it in vernacular discourses and texts. Mankynde exploits this new linguistic heterogeneity and parodies Latin language ideology through hybrid grammatical forms, scandalous translation, and embodied Latin riot. Latin will of course be part of Mercy’s aureate clerical discourse, but Titivillus also quotes Latin scripture and liturgical phrases and records Latin and English speech, while Mischief and the Worldlings disturb the privilege of clerical Latin with their creolizing discourse. The first Latin utterance in the play’s textual space is Mischief ’s grammatical parody of official Latin. In other words, Latin enters the stage world in Mankynde as linguistic transgression and social critique. Mankynde’s grammar plot constitutes a multilingual, performative critique of the clergy’s sociolinguistic authority. The play embodies deterritorialized Latin speech and creole language in irreverent carnival characters. But Latin language ideology and orthodoxy are also reproduced or textualized in the play: in the grammaticality of Mercy’s, the devil’s, and the rogues’ speech, the controlling marginal Latin stage directions, the expulsion of the subversive devil and rogues from the stage, and Mercy’s renewed religious and linguistic authority when confession and repentance are reaffirmed. Mankind is shriven, and Mercy gets the last word.108 The power of 108 

Mankynde, ll. 903–14, in Early English Drama, ed. by Coldewey, p. 135.

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official Latin speech is resituated in the voice and body of the clergy, but not without difference. Mercy’s utterance proclaims not only the return of clerical authority but also Mankynde’s renewed spiritual activism and a more restrained use of Latin and English in multilingual contexts. Mankynde engages with the broader universal grammar project by enacting linguistic transgressions and multilingual speech and then containing the moral and social consequences of multiple grammars. Unruly language mixing and grammatical control exists side by side in the play. For philosophical grammarians, religious writers, social critics, and poets, the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical Latin was replaced by the contrast between grammatical (Latin) and a/ungrammatical (vernacular) language and then by more complex gradations of grammaticality marked by speech contexts, language mixing, and pragmatic uses. Mankynde uses creole Latin and multilingual punning to ignite linguistic parody in the play’s textual and dramatic space. Linguistic subversion performs a wider social and institutional transgression. In the play’s morphological reduction and reassertion of linguistic orthodoxy, we can read a new approach to the multilingual social order and possibilities of performative play. The vice characters’ phonological, morphological, and semantic exchanges between English and Latin highlight the unruly possibilities in the contact zone, a discursive space which also includes Mercy’s aureate Latinate English and Latin language ideology. At the play’s end, Mercy’s mixed Latin and vernacular speech are closely imbricated with the vice figures’ creolizing, parodic, scatalogical, and morally threatening Latins. Latin’s authority and Latinized English cannot shed their shadow, marginal Latin and unruly language mixing. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europe, Latin grammatical and literate traditions included not only scholastic ideals of grammaticality and ordo and humanist ideals of learned, written language, but also marginal Latin discourses. The real or imagined literacies of Kempe, Mankynde, Mischief, Aleyson, and the charm users were motivated not only by lay people’s wider access to Latin and vernacular schooling but also by their desires to participate in or adapt for themselves traditional clerical culture and Latin writing as part of popular culture. Participating in the textual and linguistic domains of Latin and the vernacular and the contact zone where these domains and discourses overlapped, the new literate subjects and practices represented in these manuscripts challenged Latin language ideology and traditional textual power by literally making people up in new sociolinguistic ways. Kempe, Mischief, and Aleyson deterritorialize Latin and destabilize Latin language ideology as the representation of grammatica and Language. These fifteenth-century English multilingual texts produce multiple differences, spatial and temporal, which unsettle the dominant textual domain and reimagine literate identities.

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In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, multilingual interactions in English, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and various hybrid languages were the norm rather than the exception, for merchants trading goods, for diplomats carrying information, for preachers, for workers and overseers on the manor, for agents and allies of Richard II and Henry IV, for poets at court and writers of texts in household miscellanies of medical recipes. Often, people were speaking, listening, writing, and reading across languages, for both communication and parody, expression and resistance. English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin were all living languages at the time. They were often combined at the sentence and lexical levels, but distributed differently and valued differently, unevenly, across the speech community. Only more writing, more play, more countercommentary can resist the work of authoritative language ideology. In performance space and on the manuscript page, creolized Latin reveals linguistic authority to be anything but natural. Rather, there are contested textualities and new heterotopes fortified by creole language, deterritorialized utterances, hybrid literate subjects, and multilingual imaginings.

Chapter 7

‘Clean and Chaste Latin’: Literacy, Humanism, and the Boy Jesus A whole history remains to be written of spaces — which would at the same time be the history of powers.

(Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’)

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ometime during 1510–12, John Colet, then Dean of St Paul’s, with strong support from Desiderius Erasmus, refounded St Paul’s grammar school ‘in the Church yarde of paulis at the Estende’ as a model humanist school.1 Erasmus had been in England for six years, and his contributions to Colet’s new school were crucial for the school’s success. Focusing on schooling as a moral literacy programme, Colet and Erasmus deployed the story and image of the Boy Jesus teaching in the Temple (Luke 2. 41–52) to anchor humanist ideals of the literate child in the curriculum. Colet keyed the size of the school — one hundred and fifty-three boys ages seven to fifteen — to the New Testament story of the miraculous catch of fish ( John 21. 11).2 As a Latin grammar school, St Paul’s was to assume an important place in humanist literate activity. Establishing or refounding a school is a complex project, and Colet planned for the school over a number of years as he arranged to build a new school building, hire teachers, write textbooks, establish financial support, enroll students, and so forth. The school building featured a new design, with open classrooms and individual desks for the students and living quarters for the master, surmaster, and chaplain. Colet and Erasmus wrote or commissioned new Latin grammar textbooks for the school, and Erasmus’s De ratione studii and De copia provided 1 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 272. The building itself was probably not completed until 1512, when William Lily was appointed head master. Orme dates the school’s refounding more expansively to 1508–12; Orme, Medieval Schools, p. 67. See Gleason, John Colet, pp. 220–21; McDonnell, A History of St Paul’s School, pp. 58–59. 2  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 277.

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theoretical grounding for the curriculum. Erasmus wrote a sermon for the controversial Boy Bishop festival which Colet stipulated was to be celebrated at the school. Erasmus’s Latin poems were mounted along with icons of the Boy Jesus on the walls. These curriculum texts, activities, and physical space were organized into what Foucault calls the ‘ritualisation of the word’, the interrelation of literate behaviours, objects, and attitudes to form a cultural practice, an embodied practice and limited governmentality, linking the organization of spaces with power. 3 Foucault’s notion of governmentality and discursive spaces augments Gee’s theory of Secondary and Borderland Discourses which organize behaviours of belonging and rites of recognition. St Paul’s pedagogy reproduced and strategically placed representations and performances of the ideal child within the school as part of a broad curriculum for shaping the bodies and minds of schoolboys as literate humanist subjects. Schooling deploys material practices and pedagogical structures to produce and order literate subjects. Literacies constitute relations of power and relations to power. Power, as Foucault reminds us, is not just negative, censoring, or masking. Power is constitutive of individuals and structures. Power subjectifies. To understand schooling as practice we need to be attentive not only to how schooling and literacy education drive conformity and assimilation but also to how they present traditional and unimagined possibilities for resistance, change, and differentiation within educational ideals and dominant practices. Literate discourse is heteroglossic, and St Paul’s school discourse encodes several, sometimes competing literate subjectivities. Schooling is designed to produce literate subjects, but just how teachers and students as literate subjects are ‘made up’ doesn’t necessarily correlate with a school’s stated goals. School practices can be deployed or appropriated by teachers or students for different purposes than the founders or the state intended. Schooling is an unacknowledged open text, especially when the literacy curriculum is anchored in Latin grammar and texts for an almost entirely secular audience of vernacular speakers. Likewise, in the sixteenth century, the humanist ideal child was an open text, educable but unruly, a target and a goal of pedagogical action. At the tail end of the Middle Ages, within the temporal fold that links medieval and humanist cultures, late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century schools such as St Paul’s challenged the Church’s domination of Latin literacy and textuality by deploying new Latinities and behaviours to construct multilingual literacies and literate childhood. 3 

Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. by Gordon, p.  149; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. by Smith, p. 227.

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Sixteenth-century Europe witnessed rapid, tumultuous change, in global commerce, government, the arts, and especially education. Many historians have labelled the 1540s as the take off point in early modern European education and literacy training, due to the founding of many new grammar schools and many more men and women acquiring basic reading and writing skills, in the vernacular and increasingly in Latin. According to Joan Simon, ‘the development of a system of grammar schools catering for lay needs emerges clearly as the new factor in the situation’.4 Moran attributes the sharp increase in the number of new grammar schools in York between 1500 and 1550 to several factors: increased population and demand for elementary and grammar education in the north of England, growing lay involvement in schooling and printing, and people’s greater access to primary schools, those ABC or ‘pettie’ schools which prepared students, usually younger than eight, for Latin-based grammar schools by teaching letter-sound recognition and basic vernacular literacy.5 More children in more schools meant wider uses of vernacular and even Latin literacy among urban and semi-urban groups. However, more schools are not the same as new curriculums. The quantitative approach of Moran, Stone, and other historians foregrounds the power of the growing bourgeois population in the mid sixteenth century as the basis for the growth in vernacular literacy. But model schools foreground ways of schooling and educational ideals; they occupy ideational as well as material social space. Model schools were an unstable part of sixteenth-century social change and reform mentality, among humanists as well as other social, political, and culturally powerful groups. Decades before the take-off point posited by Moran and Stone, Colet and Erasmus refounded St Paul’s as a model humanist school promoting behavioural, economic, national, and literate values. They established their school in the capital city, within sight of the Inns of Court (law), St Paul’s Cathedral (Church), and Guildhall (commerce). Sponsored by Colet and London’s most prestigious guild, the Mercers, the school linked grammar education, Latin eloquence, religious models of literacy, and national cultural politics. Since its refounding, St Paul’s has been widely, if not universally, praised as an innovative humanist school. Erasmus (letter to Justus Jonas, 13 June 1521) claimed that ‘hoc opus nemo non probavit’ (this work [refounding St Paul’s grammar school] won universal approval).6 Erasmus was exaggerating, but the 4 

Simon, Education and Society, p. 297. See Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine; Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution’; Moran, The Growth of English Schooling. 5  Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, pp. 221–26. 6  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, v, 518; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 237.

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school did feature numerous architectural and curricular innovations, many of which were later adopted by other English grammar schools. Many modern historians have followed suit. Joan Simon is typical in calling St Paul’s a model humanist school, with ‘a radically new curriculum’ and a ‘new model’ of education’ which showed a ‘clear severing of school teaching from ecclesiastical ritual and the attempt to permeate education with Christian principle’.7 Michael Seabourne describes St Paul’s as the ‘prototype of the schools of the New Learning’.8 But others have dissented. Richard Fitzjames, Bishop of London, campaigned against the school in 1512, calling it a hotbed of heresy and pagan literature. The conservative bishop tried to have Colet charged with heresy because of his literal exegesis of scripture, which was still associated with Lollardy, and perhaps because Colet preached in English. According to Colet (letter to Erasmus, March 1512), Bishop Fitzjames criticized the school as ‘a useless institution (rem inutilem), or rather an evil one, or even, to use his very words, “a home of idolatry” (domum idolatriae). This he said, I believe, because the poets are taught there.’9 Fitzjames’s charges came to nothing when Colet received the young Henry VIII ’s clear support, an early indication of the king’s commitment to humanist education and a tacit recognition of middle-class educational, social, and economic power. In the twentieth century, A. F. Leach, ever the contrarian trailblazer in the history of education, was always sceptical of St Paul’s reputation: ‘in everything he did in regard to the school, Colet followed, and did not set, a fashion’. Leach questioned the school’s foundational ideology and concluded that the Tudor-era curriculum at St Paul’s was ‘not progress but reaction; it was not promoting humanism, but reverting to theological prepossessions’.10 According to Leach, Edward VI ’s dissolution of the chantries, not Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries, gutted England’s system of primary school and grammar education. Thus, Leach argued, Colet’s new school was a throwback rather than an innovation. Although Leach’s Protestant prejudice blinded him to St Paul’s possible counter-hegemonic work, his critique of St Paul’s as a model humanist school suggests how complex, even contradictory, the school’s discourse was. 7 

Simon, Education and Society, pp. 73, 80. Seabourne, The English School, p.  12. See Woodward, Studies in Education, p.  109; Baldwin, William Shakespere’s Small Latine, i, 118–33; Thompson, Schools in Tudor England, p. 11; Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution’; Clark, John Milton, pp. 100–02; Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, pp. 350–53. 9  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 508; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, ii, 224. 10  Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, pp. 277–78. 8 

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Nowhere was that more the case than in St Paul’s image of the ideal child and the Boy Jesus. As lived experience and discursive event, the refounded St Paul’s grammar school constituted a nexus of literate subjectivities and economies, a plateau, which Deleuze and Guattari describe as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’, that is, an open heterogeneous event. Schooling as ideological and disciplinary practice marks time passages, achievement, and status, whereas schooling as social and institutional plateau constitutes a multidimensional event, something less linear and without a clear telos, more dialogic than ideological practice. The different elements of school semiosis — architecture, staffing, pupils, textbooks, curriculum, organization of space, rituals, national reputation, funding — make up not a singular, unified historical concrete, but multiplicities ‘connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome’.11 The Deleuzean plateau is a convergence or constellation of discourses, themes, and practices girding or structuring historical space and time. A plateau can be a site of hysteria, war machinery, prod­uctive anxiety, or, as I shall argue, model schooling within late medieval multilingual literacies. As historical discursive space, the plateau reflects temporal transformation even if it is not located within a teleological narrative trajectory. The plateau’s vibrating energy comes from confluent and conflicting forces, where multiple discursivities compete for dominance and create new discursive spaces within cultural imaginations. The plateau is the site of both continuity (tradition, culture) and change (resistance, conflict, heterogeneity). The refounding of St Paul’s grammar school was a heterogeneous literacy event, a plateau, interweaving different ‘self-vibrating’ literate discourses and institutional subjectivities in its languages, texts, rituals, and architecture. The school’s curriculum and rituals were organized around a not altogether coherent set of images of the literate child, as student, learner, ventriloquist, wise knower, Jesus-follower, and unlearned monster. Despite its prominent position within London society, St Paul’s disseminated a Latin grammar curriculum which made possible different, even oppositional modes of Latin and vernacular literacy. On the one hand, the urban school was buttressed by middle-class elite values and goals. St Paul’s symbolically and in practice replaced clerical and court-centred literacies with a Latin-based humanism harnessed for administrative, political, or commercial ends. On the other hand, St Paul’s images of childhood and the Boy 11 

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Massumi, p. 22.

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Jesus figuratively represent a monster at the centre of Christian piety, grammar, and Latin language ideology. Institutions do not entirely control their discursive futures, and as we shall see, the school’s performative discourse exceeded its foundational rhetoric. Teachers and students, negotiating St Paul’s ideals, ideo­logy, and linguistic deterritorializations, embodied and reaccented Latin language ideo­logy within a different multilingual literacy.

Refounding When Colet began to conceive and rebuild the neglected grammar school at St Paul’s cathedral, Henry VIII ’s confiscation of the monasteries and Church property to, among other things, refashion a national educational program was still decades away (1538–41). It is unclear whether Colet refounded a non-functioning cathedral school or revamped an existing school on cathedral grounds. Either way, Colet took a neglected urban school and remade it in a new educational image. By 1512 the refoundation was complete, and Colet’s new building was constructed in the east end of the churchyard, behind the nave. (This ‘original’ building was destroyed, along with ‘Old St Paul’s’, in the Great Fire of 1666.) In 1505, on the death of his father Sir Henry Colet, Colet had inherited a substantial sum from the family fortune. He used nearly all his inheritance to endow the school, thus ensuring St Paul’s long-term financial stability. Male pupils attended the school for free. St Paul’s first master, William Lily, received an annual salary of £34, ‘a marke a weke’ plus perks (housing, clothing allowance).12 Lily’s salary was almost double that of any schoolmaster in England at the time, more than three times the average annual salary in England (£10), and eightyfive per cent of what Regius Professors received from the king’s endowments at Oxford and Cambridge Universities (£40, at the inflated 1536 rate).13 St Paul’s school began as a high profile institution. Although the medieval grammar school at St Paul’s had been sponsored by the cathedral, the new charter and Statutes for the refounded school named the Mercers’ Company of London as the new trustees. The Mercers’ Company continues to administer and fund St Paul’s school to the present day. Both Henry and John Colet were members of the politically and economically influential guild, which still refers to itself as the ‘premier Livery Company of the City of London’ (www.mercers.co.uk). Sir Henry was twice elected mayor of London, 12  13 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 273. Orme, ‘Schoolmasters’, p. 224; Dickens, The English Reformation, p. 150.

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like many Mercers before and after him.14 Prior to 1600, in other English cities and towns, the prosperous Mercers, importers and exporters of luxury textiles, apparel, and other goods, always reserved for themselves the grand finale in the cycle plays, the Last Judgment, and they often led the Corpus Christi processions. When Colet linked his new school with the Mercers’ Company, he ensured that the governing body, finances, hiring, and curriculum of St Paul’s would be overseen by prominent members of the London laity, not unheard of but not typical before 1500.15 The guild took its supervision responsibilities seriously; for example, in 1559 they removed the High Master (Thomas Freeman), citing his lack of learning but also probably because they found his religious views unacceptable.16 St Paul’s school functioned as a metonym for the guild’s social position. St Paul’s Statutes stipulated the high master and surmaster should be laymen, even married laymen. According to Erasmus, Colet believed that ‘nihil quidem esse certi in rebus humanis, sed tamen in his se minimum invenire corruptelae’ [nothing was certain in human affairs, but that in these [married male citizens] was found the least corruption’ (letter to Justus Jonas, 13 June 1521).17 In other words, Colet entrusted his new school to men from the same social and commercial, if not conjugal, class as himself and to which he imputed utmost virtue. Thrupp’s claim that the merchant class showed ‘no great zeal for the extension of education’ doesn’t fit the connection between St Paul’s and the Mercers. 18 And Thrupp herself argues elsewhere that London merchants’ bequests to schools show their sons attended those institutions,19 while Louis Wright notes numerous bourgeois endowments of schools in England prior to St Paul’s.20 These educational gifts reflect the new power of the prosperous commercial classes and the ideology of ambition, self-improvement, and social purification which motivated fifteenthand sixteenth-century urban bourgeois literacies. Humanism had a conflicted relation with both the Church and the emerging urban commercial and literate 14 

Berger, The Most Necessary Luxuries, esp. pp. 91–118. Gleason, John Colet, p. 219. 16  McDonnell, A History of St Paul’s School, p. 106. 17  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 272; Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 518 (no. 1211, dated 13 June 1521); Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 237. 18  Thrupp, The Merchant Class, p. 163. 19  Thrupp, The Merchant Class, p. 160. 20  Wright, ‘Bills, Accounts, Inventories’, pp. 43–80. 15 

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culture. Colet’s staff, trustee, and curriculum decisions for St Paul’s usurped the clergy’s control of Latin grammar instruction, but St Paul’s institutional practices positioned the school ambiguously as a model of Latin literacy education for the laity, especially for aspiring commercial and professional families in largely vernacular settings. New textbooks and school rituals and humanist education philosophy were important parts of St Paul’s refounding. Colet wrote an English catechism, Latin primer (Aeditio) in English, and prayers to the Virgin Mary and Boy Jesus for the students. The school itself was officially dedicated to the Virgin and the Boy Jesus, continuing the medieval link between literacy and the Madonna/ Child motif we noted earlier (Chapter Three). Colet enlisted some of the most important humanist intellectuals of the time to help develop the curriculum. He commissioned his Oxford teacher, Thomas Linacre, and later William Lily to write Latin grammars for the pupils. He incorporated several texts by Erasmus into the curriculum and school practices: De ratione studii was a model for the school’s pedagogy; Erasmus revised Lily’s grammar to make it more appropriate for young Latin learners (which greatly irritated Lily); De copia and De civilitate served as curriculum guides; Erasmus’s five Latin poems on the Boy Jesus (Carmina scholaria) were mounted on the walls for the boys to read aloud or ponder; the students recited his prayer to the Boy Jesus; and he composed a sermon (Concio de Puero Iesu), to be delivered by a boy during the founding ceremony before the school’s teachers and pupils and then annually, probably as part of the Boy Bishop festival on 28 December. St Paul’s reputation as a progressive grammar school has derived in part from the fact that the school was financially well endowed, free to most students, governed by powerful lay businessmen, and promoted by Erasmus. In other words, St Paul’s succeeded not just because it was good pedagogy but because it was well connected. At the 1529 Convocation at Canterbury, Henry VIII used St Paul’s as a model for his national school curriculum, adopting some of the textbooks, classroom practices, and lessons for royal-sponsored schools. Later, of course, in 1548, Edward VI proclaimed ‘Lily’s Gramma’ to be the mandatory textbook for English schools. But while Colet and Henry VIII seized the grammar school to establish a new educational practice, they did so for different purposes. Colet associated Latin literacy with spiritual purity and urban commercial culture, while Henry used the school curriculum as a vehicle for royal and national leadership in education and learning. The school’s continued prominence up to 1700 was sustained by its prestigious teachers and graduates, including William Lily, Thomas Lupset, Richard Mulcaster, Alexander Gill, Thomas Gresham (Founder of the Royal Exchange), Samuel Pepys, John Milton, and John Churchill (Duke of Marlborough).

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The semiosis of evanescent classroom practices depends on several factors: materials (built environment, furniture, textbooks), finances (endowment, salaries, scholarships), expectations and training (admission requirements, student abilities, family motivations, teacher preparation), explicit curriculum, and ‘school talk’ (classroom strategies, assignments, metaphors, tropes, rituals). Histories of education and literacy often rely on curriculums (as sets of texts), statutes, and textbooks — the literate artifacts of schooling — as well as on the literate practices, reputations, and memories of graduates. But schooling is fundamentally performative, and performativity is located beyond official policy statements and advertised curriculums. Schooling constructs the child as a learner, uses rituals and symbols to enforce or encourage student compliance, and opens possibilities, not always purposefully, for resistant or alternative practices. Literate education is embedded in the ritualized forms of school culture, in the cognitive and affective traces in institutional narratives, ceremonies, and rhetorics. Performative rituals and practices enact a curriculum to form or reform literate children.21 Officially, St Paul’s rejected monastic Latin literacy education, but in practice the school’s overt and hidden curriculums linked secular and christocentric schooling around the figure of the pious literate child. Colet was rector of the prestigious Guild of the Holy Name of Jesus in London, whose headquarters were in St Paul’s Cathedral, and the cult of Jesus and the Holy Name did not fit easily into the available religious categories.22 In effect, the St Paul’s founders coopted the ambivalent figure of the holy child to retext literacy and language ideology. Schooling is a contested site of different practices where curriculum, rituals, and gaps within school discourse make possible other discourses and other sites, or, as I have been arguing in this book, alternative literacies and multilingual practices. It is difficult to know for certain what the boys were thinking or feeling when they recited their Latin conjugations in prepubescent voices or when they prayed in the morning and afternoon to the Boy Jesus, nor do we find much reflection on how the schoolboys and their teachers perceived or sympathized with the images they saw and worshipped. Schooling as event, not just as a stated curriculum or set of lesson goals, is an open, performative text, even if it’s not officially acknowledged as such. With their performative spaces, public discourses, and emphasis on textual skills, schools are vibrating plateaus of forces, ideological construction, resistance, authority, reaccents, writing, reading, and counter literacy. ‘What did you learn in school today, dear little boy of mine?’ If we read closely in the texts and in the gaps of St Paul’s school, we might find out. 21  22 

See McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance. See Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, pp. 147–49.

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We know the refounding of St Paul’s school generated a great deal of interest and controversy, not only among prestigious intellectuals like Erasmus, Lily, and the Bishop of London, but also among university professors who considered grammar school teaching a lowly activity, not worth calling a ‘profession’. As such, St Paul’s school stood at the centre of humanist debates about knowledge, authority, language, literacy, and the power of schooling.

Building Forms Classroom space is an important part of how schooling represents subject matter, constructs student/teacher relationships, and deploys language ideology. According to a 1591 sketch, Colet wanted to reestablish the grammar school next to St Paul’s cathedral in a new building which reordered traditional pedagogical space. The new building contained not only classrooms but also apartments for the high master and his family, the surmaster, and the school usher. This architectural layout differed from the traditional organization of English grammar schools (for example, Winchester and Eton), where staff were housed apart from the school building. Schoolmasters’ accommodations were never lavish, but compared with those for other English grammar masters, housing for St Paul’s master was elaborate.23 Physically and visually linking staff apartments with classrooms fashioned the school as a self-contained (even monastic) community, although St Paul’s was never a boarding school in the sixteenth century. With the high master and surmaster’s apartments in separate wings, classroom and examination spaces were linked to the teachers’ private rooms.24 Colet’s innovative architecture blurred the boundaries between public and private space and suggested the school was part of the master’s domestic space, or vice versa. In fact, rooms on the second floor of the master’s apartment were sometimes used for examinations, although whether this practice began during Colet’s administration or sometime later (1567?) is difficult to determine.25 St Paul’s architecture became the model for other English school buildings during the mid-sixteenth-century boom; for example, at the grammar school at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire (1541), founded by John Incent, Dean of St Paul’s cathedral after Colet (1540–45). Foucault, adapting Althusser’s framework on ideological state apparatuses, theorized architecture’s role in surveillance discursive practices: 23 

Seabourne, The English School, p. 14. Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 273. 25  Seabourne, The English School, p. 14. 24 

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an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen (as with the ostentation of palaces), but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control — to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals.26

Centuries before Bentham’s Panopticon, St Paul’s new architecture imagined schooling not only as social achievement but as a sorting and transforming physical practice. Many of St Paul’s architectural and physical pedagogy innovations would be captured in Foucault’s panopticism.27 The classroom was subdivided into three sections: catechumen area, lower school, and upper school, taught by the chaplain, surmaster, and high master, respectively. The areas were partly separated by curtains.28 Whereas the school building and teachers’ quarters blurred the distinction between school and home, the divided classroom sorted the one hundred and fifty-three boys (‘Children of all nacions and countres indifferently’) into sixteen-pupil forms (the numbers don’t work out exactly) with individual desks (another educational innovation) according to their development, abilities, and performance.29 Each form had a high-achieving student as ‘president’. The divided classroom marked teachers and students in other ways. It hier­ archized the teaching duties of master, surmaster, and chaplain and permitted teachers to keep all the students in view. The classroom organization also allowed students to see one another in their classroom ‘positions’. In a letter to Justus Jonas, Erasmus pointedly noted the wide-open classrooms: ‘Tota schola nullos habet angulos aut secessus, adeo ut nec solarium sit ullam aut cubiculum. Pueris singulis suus est locus in gradibus paulatim ascendentibus distinctis spaciis’ (The whole school has no nooks or hiding places, so much so that there is neither sitting-room nor study. Each boy has his own place on steps rising gradually, with distinct spaces marked out).30 Students were interpolated into the surveillance 26 

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Sheridan, p.  172; Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 127–86. Althusser theorizes subjectivity in terms of institutional appropriation and ideology: ‘I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called inter­ pellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!”’ (p. 174). 27  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. by Sheridan, pp. 195–228. 28  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 236. 29  Seabourne, The English School, pp. 13–14. 30  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by

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and assessment practices of the school and also sorted into subgroups and observed as a whole. St Paul’s Latin and vernacular literacy education took place in a public institutional space which ordered and categorized students and teachers in a hierarchy of achievement and surveillance. The all-school rituals of reading and reciting Erasmus’s Latin prayers (written especially for the school) at the start and end of each school day reinforced the sense of a single student body speaking with one voice, despite the sorting by age and ability. St Paul’s literacy rituals groupified students and teachers around spoken and written Latin discourse. Even as St Paul’s arrangement of classroom space quieted the clamor which medieval and early modern teachers complained about and focused instruction on more homogeneous groups of students, the three teachers still oversaw the school. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the increasing emphasis on teaching silent reading, textual study, and moral discipline required classrooms to be more tightly controlled. By the early seventeenth century, St Paul’s divided classroom had become the model layout across Europe. According to the Puritan educator John Brinsley (d. 1624), English schools were typically organized into upper and lower classrooms and divided into several forms, with auxiliary and special function rooms adjoining the main classrooms, as at Charterhouse (post1600) and Peter Blundell’s grammar school at Tiverton (1604).31

Endowment, Administration, Teachers Colet’s endowment and resources were critical to the functioning of the school’s practices and language ideology. Located near the Inns of Court, up the hill from St Paul’s, the new school building quickly became a London landmark, visually as well as symbolically. By sixteenth-century standards, St Paul’s was a very large school with substantial financial backing. Late fifteenth-century and sixteenthcentury school and college classrooms were often very crowded, especially in England, even though many schools enrolled small numbers of students at a time. The increased demand in England for schooling at all levels, but especially for primary literacy education in Latin and the vernacular, exceeded capacity. Demand created new opportunities. A literate religious or secular woman in London could easily open a ‘pettie’ or ABC school to provide instruction Mynors and Thomson, viii, 236. I have modified the translation in Erasmus, Collected Works. 31  Brinsley, Ludus literarius, ed. by Compagnac, p. 48; see Seabourne, The English School, pp. 46–50.

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and help support herself. Given increased demand for lay education, St Paul’s admission standards, to accept a large number of students already able to decode letters to sound and minimally construe some written Latin as well as English, suggest the school drew on a network of lower schools and private tutors, both men and women, in and around London which prepared young boys and girls in English and Latin literacies.32 Such elementary schools were well established, if controversial, in London by the late fourteenth century, as the scene in Piers Plowman (B. vii.136–39) dramatizes when the priest angrily confronts Piers for learning his ABC from ‘Abstynence þe Abesse’. Citing a 1391 Parliament act, Barron notes how prestigious grammar schools at St Paul’s, St Mary Arches, and St Martin’s ‘had found it necessary to pursue “strange and unqualified masters of grammar” who were holding “general schools of grammar” in London to the “deceit and illusion” of children’.33 By the late sixteenth century, according to John Brinsley, opening an ABC school in England was one way an otherwise ‘poore man or woman’ could ‘make an honest living of it’. Brinsley’s remark suggests not only how widespread and disseminated basic literacy skills had become among religious and lay people but also how basic literacy teaching was a new option for people to support themselves.34 St Paul’s was an urban landmark in other ways too. The master’s hefty salary and perks were urban commercial symbols of St Paul’s prestige among London’s middle-class and gentry society. St Paul’s signified well-funded primary education for London’s mercantile community in Latin, and Latin literacy was a means for attaining wider literate access to social and political power. The school’s association with the powerful lay Mercers’ Company and its high salaries for the lay master and surmaster also marked its status and power in urban society.35 By supporting humanist or commercial literacy education with such mercantile status markers, the urban bourgeoisie exercised and deployed their growing power. They associated themselves with social reform, national leadership, and Latin grammatical literacy through civic-minded gifts, oversight of professional organizations, and political control of some institutions. Pragmatic literacy was first popularized in Italian humanist schools, where wider literacy in Latin and 32 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 277; Cathechyzon with Articles of Admission, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p.  285; Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517 (although Erasmus does not indicate which languages the new entrants should be able to read and write). See Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education’, pp. 222, 224–26. 33  Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education’, p. 226. 34  Brinsley, Ludus literarius, ed. by Compagnac, p. 20. 35  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 272.

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the vernacular was believed to produce better citizens and higher social status. In the Tudor period, commercial fraternities and companies often sponsored schools to promote pious literacy or education which better served the social goals and values of the mercantile laity. But by sponsoring new schools and literature-based Latin curriculums, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century lay elites again deterritorialized traditional Latin and to some extent vernacular literacies by using Latin grammar to promote humanist literacy as a requirement for civic participation, lay piety, and social authority. According to St Paul’s Statutes and other records, the surveyors appointed by the Mercers’ Company were supposed to visit the school four times a year to pay the teachers’ salaries and take care of administrative business. Such visits were considered significant events in the school year and affirmations of the school’s close association with London’s mercantile community. By 1450, elementary vernacular literacy was often required for teenagers wanting to be apprentices, especially in northern Europe, a fact which offered literate opportunities to many in the aspiring lower orders. But St Paul’s surveyors, despite their secular commercial profile, did not embrace the ideal of mass or universal literacy. Rather, the emergence of different kinds of schools for specific social groups or occupations (accountants and bookkeepers, navigators, scriveners) suggests that post-1400 European schooling was divided between pragmatic literacy goals and the bourgeois and commercial classes’ desire to gain access to social and political power through prestigious Latin literacy. Educational opportunities and school literacy were carefully regulated by those who wished to advance their power or status.36 Nonetheless, through different ‘niche’ literacies and new grammar schools, the kinds of literacies and numbers of literate lay people expanded dramatically in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. St Paul’s was refounded at a time of growing conflicts in English society regarding knowledge, written authority, lay literacy, and the power of schooling. I ’ve already mentioned the controversy the school excited among Colet’s London contemporaries, especially the Bishop of London who attacked the school as a hotbed of heresy. The Bishop singled out the school’s emphasis on Latin textual knowledge and the teaching of pagan Latin poets; he also objected that Colet read his sermons aloud in a stiff, reserved manner from a prepared text. Apparently, the Bishop regarded teaching secular literature and Colet’s overly text-controlled performances as heterodox. (Fitzjames’s distinction between speaking ‘authentically’ and reading from a prepared sermon is not unlike that of 36 

See Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education’, pp.  222–25; Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 23–24, 168.

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many modern linguists who privilege ‘authentic’ face-to-face conversation over other forms of verbal exchange or linguistic behaviours in mass media. Fitzjames, however, was after bigger fish, as he thought Colet’s school was corrupting the morals of young Christian boys.) St Paul’s also figured in debates over the status of grammar and grammar teachers. Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422) in his Chronicon Anglicae (an abridgement of Chronica maiora) reported a detail not found in other contemporary accounts of the Peasants’ Rising (1381), that the rebels ‘forced the teachers of grammar to swear that they would never again teach that art’.37 The rebels marching on London seem to have interpreted Latin grammar teachers as living symbols of a broad Latin language ideology which enforced a form of literate oppression. Margery Starre, residing in Cambridge at the time, reportedly scattered the ashes of burned documents, saying, ‘Away with the learning of the clerks, away with it.’38 Most of the documents were probably in Latin and included official tax rolls. The peasants did not disagree with writing or documents. They objected to the control of documentary culture and power by those who read and wrote Latin. Despite the rebel attacks, many others still ranked grammar masters as low status on the education hierarchy. Throughout the fifteenth century, grammar teachers were regularly described as necessary drudges in the long slog toward Latin literacy. Many prestigious intellectuals, especially university professors, regarded teaching grammar as a lowly occupation, not worthy to be called a ‘profession’. However, humanist educational reforms focused new attention on the child, primary grammar teachers, and the structure and content of elementary schooling. Humanists took their cue from Quintilian’s argument that the best teachers should be teaching the most elementary subjects and students. The new professional and social status of the grammar teacher was a recurrent topic in the letters of Erasmus and Colet, especially around the time St Paul’s was being refounded. Just as the master’s salary was a sign of the importance of grammar teaching, Lily’s appointment as the first master was a response to intellectual elites who regarded elementary grammar teaching as not rigorous enough or worthy for serious scholars or academics. Colet’s new school positioned grammar teachers at the forefront of his humanist Latin curriculum for the laity. During the fall of 1511, Erasmus was residing in Cambridge. On 13 September 1511, Erasmus wrote Colet about his efforts to locate a surmaster for the school. Colet replied (late September 1511), after reading his friend’s De ratione studii: 37  38 

Walsingham, Chronicon Angliae, ed. by Thompson, p. 208. Quoted in Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 72.

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‘O Erasme, quam tunc optavi te praeceptorem in schola nostra. Sed habeo spem te allaturum nobis aliquid adiumenti vel in instituendis praeceptoribus nostris, quando discesseris ab istis Cantabrigiensibus’ (O Erasmus, how I longed to have you, Erasmus, as a teacher in my school! But I am hopeful that you may lend me some assistance, if only in training my teachers when you have taken leave of your Cambridge men).39 On 29 October 1511, Erasmus wrote to Colet about an argu­ ment he had with some Cambridge University dons over elementary grammar education. One professor had ridiculed the teaching of children as a demeaning, intellectually vacuous activity. Erasmus defended the grammar teacher as an important profession in the English Christian community: Respondi modestius, hoc munus mihi videri vel in primis honestum, bonis moribus ac literis instituere iuventutem. neque Christum eam aetatem contempsisse, et in nullam rectius collocari beneficium, et nusquam expectari fructum uberiorum, ut pote cum illa sit seges ac sylva reipublicae. Addidi, signi sint homines vere pii, eos in hac esse sententia ut putent sese nullo officio magis demereri Deum quam si pueros trahant ad Christum. (I replied with a good deal of modesty that this function of bringing up youth in good character and good literature seemed to me one of the most honourable; that Christ did not despise the very young, and that no age of man was a better invest­ ment for generous help and nowhere could a richer harvest be anticipated, since the young are the growing crop and material of the commonwealth. I added that all who are truly religious hold the view that no service is more likely to gain merit in God’s eyes than the leading of children to Christ.)40

Erasmus’s advocacy of children entails a host of other assumptions. Like other humanists, Erasmus associates good character with literate Latin eloquence and civic responsibility. His metaphor for teaching and learning — harvesting a crop for the good of the nation — reveals new links between literacy, especially Latin literacy, and nationalism. Erasmus also characterizes elementary humanist grammar teaching as a pious activity and a secular alternative to the Church’s traditional authority for cultivating virtue and piety. In this important letter, Erasmus elaborated his connection between national and Christian virtue through literacy:

39  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 470; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, ii, 174. 40  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 479; Erasmus, The Correspondence, ed. by Allen, ii, 86–87.

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atque is corrugato naso subsannans. ‘Si quis,’ inquit, ‘velit omnino servire Christo, ingrediatur monasterium ac religionem.’ Respondi Paulum in charitatis officiis ponere veram religionem; charitatem autem in hoc esse ut proximis quam maxime prosimus. Reiecit hoc tanquam imperite dictum. ‘Ecce,’ inquit, ‘nos reliquimus om­ nia; in hoc est perfectio.’ ‘Non reliquit,’ inquam, ‘omnia qui, cum possit plurimis prodesse labore suo, detrectat officium quod humilius habeatur.’ Atque ita, ne lis oriretur, hominem dimisi. Vides sapientiam Scotisticam et habes dialogum. (He [the Cambridge don] grimaced and sneered: ‘If anyone wished to serve Christ properly,’ he said, ‘he should enter a monastery and live as a religious.’ I replied that St Paul defines true religion in terms of works of love; and love consists in helping our neighbours as best we may. He spurned this as a foolish remark. ‘Lo’, said he, ‘we have left all; there lies perfection’. ‘That man has not left at all,’ said I, ‘who, when he could help very many by his labours, refuses to undertake a duty because it is regarded as humble.’ And with this I took my leave of the fellow, to avoid starting a quarrel. Here you see a sample of the Scotists’ wisdom and the way in which they talk.)41

Erasmus’s debate with the Cambridge professor suggests how a school’s founding and organization establish what is important to teach and know and the social status of the teacher and the school within a larger educational network, or plateau. Colet and Erasmus operationalized key aspects of Quintilian’s theory of pedagogy and teacher authority in their own school organization, textbooks, and practices, but they also, or at least Erasmus, grafted onto Quintilian’s rhetoricoethical discourse a Christian nationalist educational program. Latin literacy, moral education, and Tudor nationalism were intertwined in the humanist return to classical authorities.

Schooling, Family, Nation Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria was an important hypotext in the rhetoric of early modern schooling and literate education. Besides wanting the best teachers in the earliest stages of education, Quintilian also argued that the grammarian or rhetorician should think of himself as acting in loco parentis with his pupils: ‘First of all, then, let him (the teacher) adopt a parental attitude (parentis erga) toward his pupils and regard himself as taking the place of those whose children are en­

41 

Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 479; Erasmus, The Correspondence, ed. by Allen, ii, 187.

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trus­ted to him.’42 Roman imperial schools were notorious for teachers’ exces­ sive use of corporal punishment and for being noisy, disorderly, and sometimes even physically dangerous. In this passage, Quintilian describes what he regards as the more productive classroom environment and moral standards which the teacher as parent should create and promote. Elsewhere, he condemns corporal punishment in the schools because it is retaliation, not education, an insult to free-born pupils, and a poor substitute for close supervision of a pupil’s studies.43 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, humanists could read the newly recovered texts of Quintilian as prescriptions for more controls over children’s perceived wildness and corruption or alternatively, as a plea for nurturing schooling which directs rather than constrains students. In a different vein, by the middle of the sixteenth century, Quintilian had become the symbol of Ciceronian Latin grammar education and the lightening rod for Ramus’s critique of modern education and its classical antecedents. These opposed readings of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria on elementary edu­ ca­tion are reproduced in two sermons associated with the Boy Bishop festival in English grammar schools. As we shall see, the Boy Bishop festival was a controversial part of St Paul’s curriculum. On the occasion of the ‘Sermon on the Child Bishop, Pronownsyd by John Stubs, Querester’ at Gloucester cathedral on Childermas Day, 1558, the young chorister read aloud a Latin text he almost certainly did not compose. The sermon attributes the vices and moral corruption of school children to parents and teachers who are too liberal and tolerant. He urges teachers to regard pupils as ‘your childer, and your selfes as their fathers’, and to be as strict and careful with virtues and manners as they are with standard Latin grammatical forms. But in another Boy Bishop sermon from St Paul’s, dated between 1490 and 1495 (at least fifteen years before Colet refounded the school), the boy preacher proclaimed that while young pupils need stern moral discipline, teachers should remember that Christ’s New Law is founded on mercy: ‘And as longe as we bene in the scole of mercyfull benygnytee and gentylnesse, though we doo fawtes, purposynge to amende, soo longe he abydeth us pacyently, holdynge hymself content.’44 Boy Bishop sermons were commonly composed in Latin to be read aloud by young choristers at services on or about 28 December. They were extremely 42 

Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 2. 2. 4–5. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. by Russell, 1. 3. 14. 44  See ‘Two Sermons’, ed. by Nichols, p. 9. One of the sermons Nichols edited was actually from the reign of Henry VII, as the younger Henry Tudor did not become king until 1509. 43 

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popular and often translated into the vernaculars. (The two sermons edited by Nichols are preserved and one printed by Caxton in English, but there may have been Latin originals.) The young choristers at Gloucester, St Paul’s, and elsewhere in prepubescent voices schooled in Latin pronunciation, read aloud Latin or perhaps vernacular sermons and spoke about themselves in discourses which originated with literate adults. A good deal of school discourse consists of adults speaking on behalf of or in the voices of children. The Boy Bishop sermons problematize that speech situation. Both sermons edited by Nichols connect schooling and family and advise teachers of their disciplinary or nurturing roles. In John Stubs’s 1558 sermon, the textualized child’s voice instructs lenient teachers and other adults in their proper disciplinary roles. In the 1490–95 St Paul’s sermon, the child’s voice pleads with adults to temper discipline with patience and mercy. There is little of the teasing, play, and riot associated with children’s speech and behaviour during the Boy Bishop festival. Whereas the Gloucester sermon depicts school as a straightening Latin puberty rite, the St Paul’s sermon advises teachers to consider the boys’ youth and vulnerability and to teach with mercy and empathy.45 These early sermons suggest how Colet’s new curriculum and Erasmus’s grammatical pedagogy might have found an audience already receptive to a child-centred curriculum and performative Latin literacy. Juxtaposed, the two sermons foreground the underlying ambiguity and institutional power of Quintilian’s metaphor of schooling as a family. In these sermons intended for the often riotous Boy Bishop festival, when traditional adult-child, teacher-student roles were reversed or suspended, the figure of the father-teacher is poised between control/correction/discipline and patience/ nurturing. The choristers’ text-based performances ambiguate the notion of a child or adult’s ‘authentic’ voice and con-fuse the embodied roles and voices of teachers and students. The trope of the nuclear family underwrote Colet and Erasmus’s ideal hum­ anist child and St Paul’s repositioning of the elementary grammar teacher within the nation. In a letter (29 April 1512), Erasmus praised Colet for bringing the Christian message to England and for founding a school so that the youth of England, under carefully chosen and highly reputed teachers, might there absorb (imbiberet) Christian principles together with an excellent literary education (litteras) from their earliest years. For you are profoundly aware both that the hope of the country (spem reipublicae) lies in its youth — the crop in 45 

Study’.

See the famous formulation of masculinist Latin pedagogy, in Ong, ‘Latin Language

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the blade, as it were (velut haerba) — and also how important it is for one’s whole life that one should be initiated into excellence from the very cradle onwards.46

(This letter was reprinted as the preface to the 1512 edition of Erasmus’s De copia.) Praising Colet for his efforts to refound St Paul’s, Erasmus constructs an imaginary national family: Colet as another father to the children of English citizens, in fact all English citizens. For his part, Erasmus feels ‘indebted both to the English nation at large and also you (Colet) personally’.47 Erasmus links literacy and nationalism in the body of the child. When Erasmus reimagines schooling as family, the unmarried Colet becomes Erasmus’s and the boys’ surrogate father, and implicitly England is ‘mother England’. St Paul’s grammar school and Latin literacy education become the new origin for the school(ed) child and the English national family. Humanist learning and piety are something all proper sons (but fewer daughters) of the nation have or can have in common. That such a literacy program begins with Latin and extends to the national language, English, complicates any notion of the nation-state as a homogeneous speech community. In many late medieval and early modern representations, schoolchildren are imagined as lazy or undeveloped persons or as miniature adults ready for mental and physical discipline. Some late medieval philosophies of education asserted that children past the age of seven need to be strictly disciplined, especially at school, to wean them from the pampering they supposedly received at home from female caregivers.48 Deploying the trope of the family to describe the school and the nation, Erasmus and Colet imagine the schoolchild somewhat differently. St Paul’s was conceived as a nurturing school, an alternate family, with male teachers devoted to ‘bringing upp chyldren’ (the Statutes do not say ‘boys’), not miniature adults, by modelling good behaviour and speech.49 Energized by Quintilian’s pedagogical optimism, humanist educators presumed that children are educable. In doing so, they created a new discursive space within the cultural imaginary, childhood as a monstrous ideal. 46 

Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 511; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, ii, 226. See De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis declamatio (1509– 10), in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxvi, 300. 47  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, i, 511; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, ii, 227. 48  Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, pp.  33–49, 321–24; Shahar, Childhood, pp.  178–79. Ariès’s work is controversial but remains indispensable. 49  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 271.

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The belief that schooling can and should socially transform children gives rise to practices which have supported and continue to support various educational programs, from radical and liberal to vocational to socially conservative.50 St Paul’s divided central classroom, with children grouped into spatially marked forms according to age and ability, suggests a pedagogical concern for the differ­ ent needs of pupils as learners at different stages of literate development. But this child-centred curriculum and space were still heavily scripted by adult Latin literacy, while the flexibly partitioned classroom also enabled schoolmasters to more closely oversee, regulate, and evaluate students’ activities, as Erasmus suggested in his letter to Justus Jonas (no hiding spaces or secret corners). The architecture and curriculum — curriculum as architecture — articulated the new emphasis on silent reading with the traditional pedagogy of recitations, public oral composition, and memorization. By singling out a ‘president’ for each form, the school’s discursive practice correlated classroom space with academic success and power. The school’s official spatial arrangements measured and displayed students’ cognitive and moral achievements by calculating students’ bodies (and the ‘student body’) in forms and seats which encoded distinctions. St Paul’s archi­tecture, spatial semiosis (the meanings given to physical and built space and the ways space organizes bodies, individuals, and practices), and performativity deployed individual children’s bodies and minds to advance an ideology of children’s bodies and minds and of language. The school modelled the ideal child as part of school space, in the classroom and on the walls with images of the Boy Jesus teaching in the Temple. The school space in which St Paul’s boys moved and learned measured and labelled them as students and as future literate English subjects. By and large, humanist grammarians repeated the grammatical descriptions of the Roman Imperial grammarians, principally Donatus and Priscian, with some exceptions. They emphasized semantic and usage criteria over strictly formal criteria for describing word classes and constructions and promoted Ciceronian models of eloquence and spoken and written discourse. Deploying usage and construction criteria, for example, Colet continued post-1250 grammarians’ distinction between substantives (nouns) and adjectives, stating that the noun substantive is a word ‘that standeth by him selfe, and requireth not an other worde to be joyned with him’ whereas the noun adjective is a word ‘that requireth to be joyned with an other worde’.51 The St Paul’s grammars also made extensive 50  See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 175–81, on ‘belatedness’ and ‘natality’ as the productive tension in education. 51  Lily and Colet, A Short Introduction, p. 7.

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use of conjugation and declension charts and paradigms, with full page outlines similar to those advocated later by Peter Ramus. Nonetheless, St Paul’s textbooks also retexted received Latin grammatical description and paradigmatic systematization by constructing the ideology of nurturing pedagogy and the ideal educable child as a literate subject within the grammatical text itself. Erasmus’s De ratione studii (amplified Paris edition, 1512) theorized the curriculum in detail. Colet rejected Linacre’s English-language grammar of Latin, Progymnasmata grammatices vulgaria (c. 1512) (not his posthumous De emendata structura as is sometimes claimed), as being too long and dense for an elementary school textbook.52 At Colet’s request, Erasmus revised Lily’s Absolutissimus de octo orationis partium constructione libellus to make it more accessible and developmentally appropriate for young Latin learners, and he added a short section on Latin syntax. Lily felt Erasmus’s revision was so extensive that he refused to allow his name to be assigned to the text. Emphasizing the nurturing school, Colet and Erasmus restricted the use of the cane (following Quintilian), promoted the educational value of play for young learners (but prohibited bear baiting and other popular ‘sports’), stipulated that English should be the language of instruction, and exhorted parents to take better care of educating their children.53 Using the vernacular to teach Latin had been common in preConquest England, less common in twelfth- and thirteenth-century grammar schools, and then more widely practised from the late fourteenth century on. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists argued that the vernacular not only should enable lay people to live more devout and faithful lives but that it should serve the development of Latin grammar and literacy as a framework for reason and copia. Latin literacy, then, was situated in a multilingual speech community but deployed to teach and control vernacular usage. In his brief grammar text (Aeditio), Colet extends the family trope to child­ hood in general. St Paul’s textbooks are framed by the fetish of the tender boy, not unlike the fetish of the litel clergeon in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.54 But whereas Chaucer’s clergeon remains within maternal protection and recites a Latin text he can’t decode from the page, St Paul’s virginal boy is already minimally literate in English and becoming literate in Latin. Colet says he kept the Aeditio brief, ‘consyderyng the tendernes and small capacyte of lytel myndes’ and ‘Iudgyng 52 

See Padley, Grammatical Theory, pp. 22–23. See De pueris, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxvi, 325–34, 339; Colet, Aeditio, Proem; Lily and Colet, A Short Introduction, pp. A.iir–A.iiiv. 54  Chaucer, ‘Prioress’ Tale’, The Canterbury Tales, vii, ll. 502–24, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Benson. 53 

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that no thynghe may be to softe | nor to famylyer | for lytel chyldren specyally lernynge a tongue unto them all straunge’. He refers to pupils as ‘soft’ ‘lytel babys’ with tender wyttes’, as opposed to ‘hard’ Latin and the ‘hard’ cane.55 Henry VIII continued this trope of students as ‘tender babes’ in his royal proclamation attached to the grammar (the earliest extant edition which includes the proclamation is 1542). The young boys’ voices reciting Latin prayers, catechism, and conjugations reinforced this image of soft babes in the classroom. Colet’s Aeditio description of soft young boys follows Erasmus’s theory of education and runs counter to other, harsher early modern school practices as well as to Ong’s description of Latin grammar pedagogy as a puberty rite. For Colet, the pupil is the centre of schooling, and the boy student at the centre of school ideology is diminutive, unsoiled, almost angelic. The adjective lytel permeates the Aeditio Proem: lytel myndes, lytel boke, lytel white handes. At the end of the Proem, Colet asks his young readers to ‘lyfte up your lytel whyte handes for me | whiche prayeth for you to god.to whome be al honour and imperyal maieste and glory’. Colet’s rhetoric of purity rewrites the trope of the nuclear family and imagines the school almost as a sacred temple, with the young boys as vestal virgins and Colet as father and priest. In St Paul’s curriculum, Latin literacy is the new liturgical text, classical Latin literature the new scripture, and the Latin grammar pupil the ideal reader.

Dirt, Chastity, Eloquence Humanist education depended/s on a belief in change and progress: children are educable, one’s low rank and social position can be changed, language can be improved through reason and copia, vernacular usage can be improved by ‘good’ Latin grammar, and ‘chaste’ Latin and vernacular literacy are means to access cultural power. But St Paul’s ideology of model schooling was internally contradictory, double-voiced. The school combined innovative educational architecture with urban commercial backing, secular ideals of rational, privileged language use with traditional Roman and Christian Latin texts, Christian ideals of piety and biblical humility with conservative and progressive pedagogical practices and spaces. By metaphorizing male pupils and lay teachers with the figure of the Boy Jesus, St Paul’s rhetoric masks schooling’s interventionist authority and the enabling contradictions of the educable child and chaste Latin. 55 

See Colet, Aeditio, Proem.

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The classroom organization, curriculum, and textbooks legitimated the school as nurturing rather than physically and emotionally coercive, accommodating rather than violent. The roles of pupil and teacher were confused precisely in their metaphoricity. The figure of the Boy Jesus in the Temple disturbed the traditional hierarchy of parent and child, teacher and pupil, adult male and younger male in the school family. The image of the Boy Jesus as teacher is a transgressive, poten­ tially emancipatory image at odds with that of schooling as interventionist and transformative. St Paul’s discourse represented childhood as pious yet not incorruptible, learned yet not adult, educable yet not mature or ‘fully’ literate. Childhood and pious literacy were constructed as kinds of chastity or purity which schooling claims to inculcate or preserve rather than violate. The school’s rhetoric linked chastity with authority, deploying what Stephanie Jed calls humanists’ ‘chaste thinking’.56 According to Jed, the compound term castigation charged the atmosphere in which philological work was performed with an emotional and moral intensity. The correcting of the an­ cient texts became somewhat of a moral and political crusade to remove the signs of their depravity, violation, corruption, contamination, etc. and to transmit a faithful, chaste, untouched textual tradition to posterity.57

Bourdieu and Passeron link this situation to Pedagogic Authority: Insofar as it is an arbitrary power to impose which, by the mere fact of being mis­ recognized as such, is objectively recognized as a legitimate authority, PAu (Peda­ gogic Authority), a power to exert symbolic violence which manifests itself in the form of a right to impose legitimately, reinforces the arbitrary power which estab­ lishes it and which it conceals.58

Pedagogic Authority was legitimated at St Paul’s by the familial description of pupils as ‘virgin babes’ and by their political description as future literate male English citizens. Paradoxically, the model humanist school claimed to preserve children’s inherent virtue and innocence while shaping them into educated, literate adults. Literate subjectification is made possible by institutional for­getting. The semiotic tension between hard and soft practices, between chastity and educability, in Colet’s pedagogical discourse resonates with Bourdieu and 56 

Jed, Chaste Thinking. Jed, Chaste Thinking, p. 32. 58  Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction, trans. by Nice, p. 13. 57 

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Passeron’s analysis of schooling as symbolic violence. They argue that doing away with hard pedagogy or masculine rituals (corporal punishment, rigorous core requirements, high stakes national standard tests) and installing child-centred or age-appropriate pedagogy does not mean that social violence and arbitrary imposition are not in play: ‘[t]he “soft approach” may be the only effective way of exercising the power of symbolic violence in a determinate state of the power relations, and of variably tolerant dispositions towards the explicit, crude manifestation of arbitrariness.’59 In other words, conventional schooling is necessarily enacted in situations of violence. St Paul’s ideal child and pedagogical practice are strategies of institutional power, not just educational means and goals. Institutional misrecognition and the imposition of Pedagogic Authority it enables are embedded in St Paul’s foundational discourse. As we have seen, Colet and Erasmus represent themselves and the 153 boys as part of an institutional family, a new originary formation. Colet is the pedagogical father of English schoolboys; England is Erasmus’s foster-mother; schoolboys ages seven to fifteen are ‘virgins’, ‘lytel babys’ with ‘lytel whyte handes’, and ‘tender wyttes’ in need of a nurturing master. This descriptive system aligns St Paul’s ideal schooling with a maternal, humanist ideal of education and explicitly rejects the masculine, impure world of clerical education and ‘dirty’ forms of Latin and vernacular literacies not founded on Ciceronian latinitas. On the one hand, Colet and Erasmus asserted that school is the necessary conduit (maternally, a birth canal) through which male children pass on their way to becoming literate, privileged adult citizens. But St Paul’s founding discourse and practices also masked schooling’s interventionist and disciplining pedagogy by representing childhood, embodied in the entering child and the schooled child, as a space of purity and spiritual innocence which schooling itself is said to preserve rather than violate. In this double-voiced discourse, Latin literacy, the enactment of arbitrary Pedagogic Authority, is the basis for all learning and the purveyor of both original purity and new cultural status: chaste grammar as eloquence.60 Like the rhetoric of ‘tender babes’, the rhetoric of chastity grounds the ideal of the literate child in St Paul’s foundational discourse. Erasmus’s school poems, displayed on the classroom walls and recited by the schoolboys, set the tone. The Boy Jesus inspires ‘puris | Moribus’ (pure habits) and abolishes ‘Spurcis moribus’ (base habits). The schoolboys are described as a ‘virgineae gregi’ (flock of ­virgins) 59 

Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction, trans. by Nice, p. 17. See Barthes, ‘The Old Rhetoric’, in Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge, trans. by Howard, pp. 11–47. 60 

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or ‘angeli’.61 Puritas is the principal virtue in behaviour, study, and grammar. As school parents, Colet and Erasmus distinguished true learning from false or ­pseudo-learning through a series of figurative oppositions: cleanliness/dirt, chastity/sexual activity or violation, good manners/slovenliness. These ideological figures were supported by specific school practices. ‘Chast laten’, a model literacy, stood in for social, cultural, spiritual, and linguistic order. St Paul’s curriculum was designed to instruct boys ‘in litterature both laten and greke, and goode auctors suych as have the veray Romayne eliquence joyned withe wisdome specially Cristyn auctours that wrote theyr wysdome withe clene and chast laten other in verse or in prose’.62 ‘[A]ll laten adulterate’ was supposed to be banished from the curriculum and schooled out of the boys. Both Colet and the surveyors from the Mercers’ Company were concerned that St Paul’s boys learn good, clean Latin grammar and good, clean manners — elite literacy and polite behaviour. St Paul’s pedagogy assembled middle-class values of frugality and grooming, aristocratic codes of courtly politeness and eloquence, and the literate code of elegance and correctness to produce a new standard for future English bourgeois leaders, citizens, writers, and readers. Most likely, the rhetoric of chastity at St Paul’s came from Colet. In his sketch of Colet’s life, Erasmus remarked that Colet ‘Impatiens erat omnium sor­ dium, adeo ut nec sermonem ferret soloecum ac barbarie spurcum. Quicquid erat domesticate supellectilis, quicquid apparatus in cibis, quicquid in vestibus, quicquid in libris, nitidum esse volebat’ (was impatient of everything slovenly, and thus could not stand language that was ungrammatical and defiled by barbarisms. All his household gear, the service of his table, his clothes, his books — all must be neat).63 Colet brought forward the long association between grammar and chastity in western schooling and poetics. Ancient and medieval grammarians associated chastity and cleanliness with linguistic purity or elegance. In De planctu naturae (twelfth century), Alain de Lille metonymically linked proper Latin grammar with moral purity and chastity and improper grammar (solecisms, barbarisms) with dirt, homosexuality, and other transgressions. Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus conceived of their textual criticism and commentary as purifying the written word, erasing scribal blemishes and readers’ smudges from classical and Biblical texts, and restoring classical authenticity and originality. 61 

Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 86, ll. 1–2, Carmen 87, l. 4, Carmen 88, ll. 6, 9. My translations of Erasmus’s poems try to maintain the sense but not the metre. 62  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 279. 63  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 236.

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In the humanist theory of learning and virtue, eloquence no longer signified wisdom. Eloquence was (is) coextensive with wisdom and virtue.64 In De copia Erasmus used analogies between clothing/body, style/thought, and table setting/ banquet to describe standards of propriety and cleanliness. In his satiric Dialogus Ciceronianus (1528), Erasmus maintained a Ciceronian standard of Latin, but he also advised updating cultivated Roman speech to make Latin more flexible and appropriate for contemporary usage rather than remaining stuck as a slavish, conservative imitation producing only inelegant and outmoded usage. For Erasmus and St Paul’s ideal curriculum, standard Latin was a contemporary construction. The school taught Latin literacy to prepare students to handle official, administrative, and everyday literate discourse in Latin and English. Such competence was keyed initially to students acquiring a core knowledge of ancient, medieval, and contemporary Latin texts. Erasmus promoted the use of a learned, witty Latin style which still retained the lexical, morphological, and syntactic core of Classical Latin. Unlike others in the humanist debate over Ciceronianism, Erasmus urged a ‘pragmatic chastity’ of linguistic style, a standard Latin governed by the structure and norms of earlier classical written usage but not completely cut off from contemporary readers’ expectations, discursive goals, and historical contexts. The humanist project wedded Christian and ancient wisdom with rhetorical eloquence, sapientia with eloquentia. In doing so, humanists constructed a com­ plex relation between the social body and the sociolinguistic self. The humanist ideal of language hierarchized and indexicalized the relations between learning, language, and conduct. Cleanliness, chastity, grammatico-rhetorical eloquence, and correct spelling and pronunciation were material signifiers referring to internal signifieds of heart and mind, true learning and Christian piety. But this ideological linkage of wisdom and elegance problematizes the structured hierarchy of ‘husk and kernel’ semantics (words [paper] wrapped around meaning [fruit, rock]) upon which much education theory and policy, as well as many theories of reference, have been based. More so than Erasmus, Colet was critical of contemporary or late medieval (‘scholastic’, ‘modistic’) Latin usage. In the Statutes, impious learning and values are ‘all barbary all corrupcion all laten adulterate which ignorant blynde folis brought into this worlde and with the same hath distayned and poysenyd the olde laten speech and the varay Romayne tong’. ‘Modern’, i.e. scholastic, Latin is corrupt and breeds bad souls. Despite their approval of using vernaculars to 64 

See Percival, ‘Grammatical Tradition’; Padley, Grammatical Theory; Tavoni, ‘The 15thCentury Controversy’; Gravelle, ‘The Latin-Vernacular Question’.

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teach grammar and deliver religious and moral education, Colet and Erasmus were linguistic purists. In a masterful, implicitly fascist, foundational strategy, Colet the school father sought to banish from his temple/house/school the ‘ffylthynesse and all such abusyon which the later (medieval) blynde worlde brought in which more ratheyr may be callid blotterature thenne litterature’.65 In St Paul’s discourse, what is most original is most pure, most worth knowing, and most worth being taught. St Paul’s literacy curriculum was divided between reclaiming an earlier standard Latin literacy and adjusting contemporary Latin usage to new circumstances and discursive needs. In the Statutes and elsewhere, Colet links the trope of chastity with language and literacy. The contrast between litterature and blotterature shapes his multilingual politics of humanist education and literate formation. The positive litterature borrows the Latin word into English, while the negative blotterature overwrites the first Latin element with the vernacular blot. (Recall Nought as court scribe in Mankynde.) The blot has long been associated with writing. Imperial Roman grammarians sometimes etymologized littera as ‘a lituris, ut quibusdam placet, quod plerumque in ceratis tabulis antiqui scribere solebant’ (from smearing, as some believe, because the ancients commonly used to write on wax tablets).66 The OED cites the first use of blot as an English noun in 1325 (‘a spot or stain of ink, mud, or other discolouring matter’) and then 1440 (‘Blotte upon a boke’). The OED cites the first use of blot as a transitive verb (‘to spot or stain with ink or other discolouring liquid or matter; to blur’) in 1440 (‘Blottyn bokys’). Blot was sometimes associated with devils’ writing (Chapter Six). Colet uses the figure of chastity to link Latin language ideology with the ideal of the literate child. The contrast between littera and blot is grounded on the literate description of proper and improper usage. It installs a vernacular + Latin hybrid word, blotterature, a stain or disfiguration, a macaronic, as the antithesis of chaste Latin and proper literacy. Mary Douglas has noted that ‘Dirt […] is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt, there is system’.67 Derrida would agree. Limits, demarcation, and standardization produce dirt, as well as orders of discourse and disciplines. What institutions, literate schooling, or social standards exclude or forget is as important as what they include or privilege. Western discourses of literacy are structured around the metaphorical distinction between letters and blots, in the purified classroom and on the unstained page. Medieval and early modern 65 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 280. For example, Priscian, Institutiones grammaticae, ed. by Keil, ii, 6. 67  Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 35.

66 

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grammarians, repeating some intimations in pre-Socratic philosophy, described litterae as elementa (atoms or corpuscles). Letters are linguistic units with nomen (name), figura (written shape), and potestas (phonetic value), which when properly combined (grammatica) form syllabae, dictio, and oratio. The blot, then, is a disruption, an inky disfiguration, a stain upon the page, a filthy blem­ ish, a violation of linguistic propriety. The blot signifies everything from poor handwriting and inelegant composition to nonstandard usage, limited reason, and ungrammaticality. As primary school teachers have said for centuries, ‘Neatness counts’. But this construction of education also produces a contradictory figure of literacy and the literate child. In Colet’s foundational rhetoric, writing and Latin eloquence (grammatica, copia) are alienated, internally divided. For Colet, dirty writing, blotterature (late medieval or scholastic Latin vocabulary, mor­ phology, and syntax or inelegant or impious Latin composition or sometimes ‘ungrammatical’ vernacular speech) is precisely what the humanist curriculum is supposed to erase from the child, leaving behind ‘clean, chaste’ writing. Blotterature thus functions as a necessary but other supplement within a complex literate ideology. Blotterature is necessary for schooling to function, and it must be excluded from proper schooling. The vernacular hybrid word blotterature names a necessary disfigure within institutional metalanguage. Colet’s hybrid word governs both Latin and vernacular usage and generated the necessary supplement to enable schooling to posit an ideal literate child and measure the schoolboys according to an imposed ‘universal’ standard. So cleanliness has a catch. As supplement, blotterature is pedagogically nec­ essary, not only as the shadow or deficit but as part of actual classroom per­ formance. The belief that children are educable, that they can learn and improve, implies that linguistic or moral purity (‘correctness’) is not innate but something which can be achieved through proper instruction and learning. In St Paul’s discourse, schoolboys are monstrous paradoxes, virgins in need of literate purification. They are and are not already chaste and lettered. Procedurally, the school’s entrance requirements admitted only boys who ‘canne the cathechyzon’ and ‘can rede and wryte competently’.68 Like other humanist schools, St Paul’s used a bilingual vulgaria pedagogy to train students in proper Latin literacy. 69 Grammaticality and eloquence were attainable in Latin grammar. But to become educated, the boys must first be using what the school declares to be improper or 68  69 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 277. See, for example, Colet, Aeditio, especially the section ‘To make latyn’ attributed to Lily.

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incomplete linguistic forms or a less prestigious language (vernacular). Other­ wise, there’s no reason for schooling, historically defined as a straightening, cor­ recting, improving institution, to exist. School practice locates the blot of writing, literacy’s dirt, within dominant discourse, not outside it. As described in the Statutes and textbooks, St Paul’s curriculum legitimated a particular form of linguistic propriety from selected Latin texts and a wordclass grammar, a canon and a linguistic theory, which metonymically signifies an imagined origin, pure form of language. The curriculum purifies students’ language usage. The metaphor of ‘clean and chaste’ Latin, which supposedly produces litterature instead of blotterature, frames style as moral meaning. Good style clothes the body of true learning with beautiful eloquence and installs a theory of coercive subjectivity as literate performance. And good written style in Latin and the vernacular is modelled on select classical writers (especially Cicero and Terence). Good style includes both linguistic form and cultural belief in a nonhierarchical approach to Christian piety. Apparently, Colet had accused Bishop Fitzjames and others of reciting by rote their ‘bosom sermons’ with slavish conformity to a script and without emotional affect. Thus, Colet invoked the criterion of performance style as a marker of literate authority, ‘correctness’, and orthodoxy. Humanist theories of language and education identify language itself as the performance of knowledge. Sixteenth-century humanists installed themselves as the custodians of proper usage and therefore right knowledge. In this respect, St Paul’s as a model school was linguistically and rhetorically homologous to the ideology of the merchant class who were its predominant supporters. The school presumed to endow students with educational and cultural capital, including ‘good style’, and new, more appropriate social origins, goals which increasingly enhanced the school’s social reputation within English society.70 Colet, Erasmus, and other early modern humanist educators thus complicated Alain de Lille’s equation of grammar with morality by arguing that good Latin, pure Latin, the Latin of cultivated Roman speech, and eloquent vernacular usage are simultaneously prior to schooling and dependent on proper schooling. Many humanists described late medieval Latin syntax and vocabulary as messy, sloppy, and dirty, while they idealized classical Latin syntax as crisp, correct, and pure. Erasmus’s view of late medieval Latinity was more mixed. According to Colet and other humanists, Roman Latin (not a redundancy) is Latin before the imposition of school rules. Roman Latin is the speech used by original natives, a functional redundancy operating in Latin language ideology to mark difference rather than repetition: 70 

See Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. by Nice, pp. 11–96.

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For in the begynnynge men spake not latyn bycause suche rules were made, but con­trariwyse, bycause men spake suche latyn upon that folowed ye rules were made. That is to saye, latyn speche was before the rules, not the rules before the latyn speche.71

Erasmus, Colet, and other humanists identified or edited back in such original, ‘pure’ usage in texts by Cicero, Terence, and other Roman writers. Humanists’ revisions (purifications) of the Latin textual archive became the foundation and standard for sixteenth-century Latin and vernacular usage. This complex language ideology allowed Erasmus and other humanists to valorize both ideal Latinity and colloquial usage. Colet and Erasmus further feminized humanist language ideology and the ideal of chaste Latin when they contrasted the hard discipline of learning Latin with the image of soft babes in the classroom, tender young boys with lytel white hands and tender minds praying to the Boy Jesus and conjugating verbs in prepubescent voices. We don’t have transcriptions or descriptions of a reading lesson at St Paul’s, but we can reconstruct something of pedagogical practice from accounts of other grammar schools as well as from key St Paul’s textbooks and curriculum materials: Colet’s Aeditio, Lily and Colet’s A Short Introduction of Grammar, and Erasmus’s De ratione studii. Latin language instruction, conducted in English and Latin, largely followed the model of the elementary ars grammatica codified in the Latin grammarians of late antiquity and repeated and modified, but not substantially changed, in late medieval schools. Young grammar school pupils were supposed to already have some competence with letter-sound correlations. They improved their skills by pronouncing the sounds as they copied down the written symbols. Students combined these sounds and letters into syllables and words, then learned to pronounce Latin syllables, words, and sentences, compose texts, decline and conjugate words, and read works selected for their moral instruction and as illustrations of ‘good’ Latin, appropriate for beginning or advanced readers. More advanced students translated English sentences into Latin and vice versa. However, not all late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Latin grammars produced in England were consistent with humanists’ emphasis on linguistic usage and convention. For example, Colet’s Aeditio, the progenitor of Lily’s Latin grammar, is organized according to the traditional partes orationes, with the grammatical forms displayed in table after table. Neither the Aeditio nor Lily/ Erasmus’s Latin grammar contains many examples of Latin discourse as speech, unlike Erasmus’s enormously popular Colloquiae. (The fact that the Colloquiae 71 

Colet, Aeditio, p. D7r.

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was quickly translated into almost every major European language moderated its role in Latin pedagogy.) Nonetheless, Colet and Erasmus, more than ancient and medieval Latin grammarians, stressed that students should learn the elements (partes) of Latin from reading texts as well as from independent instruction in grammar. When the teacher glossed the texts with grammatical information in English, students acquired grammatical metaknowledge which they were expected to use to develop their literate skills and reading comprehension in multiple languages. Other humanist Latin textbooks did adopt usage and the inductive approach, and some were probably used at St Paul’s early on. Anwykyll’s (c. 1483) and Stanbridge’s (1490s) Vulgaria textbooks used everyday phrases and dialogue from Terence’s plays to teach both Latin and English literacy. Lily’s texts incorporated features of Stanbridge’s Vulgaria into St Paul’s curriculum. Students used their native English to construe and imitate written Latin syntax and also acquire spoken Latin. Thus, learning to speak, read, and write Latin was also supposed to guide and improve their English reading and writing. The Vulgaria texts helped young readers correlate grammatical rules with literary, that is, textual, examples of proper, canonical Latin usage and conventions. Textual usage gov­erns grammaticality. Erasmus’s Colloquies, widely used as a Latin reader in sixteenth-­century schools, also emphasized Latin as a conversational medium for con­ducting intellectual discourse. Good (‘correct’) pronunciation of written as well as colloquial Latin was a hallmark of humanist literacy education. Erasmus’s De ratione studii (1511) also suggests how literacy pedagogy might have been enacted at St Paul’s. Colet regarded Erasmus’s text as a blueprint for the school’s curriculum: good teaching and good (‘chaste’) Greek and Latin writing. Erasmus takes Terence’s written language to be the exemplar of Latinity: among Latin writers, who is more valuable as a standard of language than Terence? He is pure, concise, and closest to everyday speech (purus, cotidiano sermoni proxi­ mus), and then, by the very nature of his subject matter, is also congenial to the young (adolescentiae).72

For Erasmus, standard Latin is based on written versions of everyday speech, which purify ‘scholastic Latin’ through the colloquial register. Students can acquire good spoken Latin, says Erasmus, by carefully observing the teacher’s own usage, using proper Latin in ordinary contexts, such as games, meals, and other occasions, reading texts appropriate for their age and skill level, and translating 72 

Erasmus, De ratione studii, ed. by Margolin, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (UAI 1969– edn), I/2, p. 148; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxiv, 669.

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vernacular letters into Latin or Greek (vulgaria), reproducing prose in verse and vice versa, and using Latin copiae to vary individual compositions.73 In De ratione studii, Erasmus outlines a method for reading an author in class which combines close reading with the teacher’s running commentary on the text’s grammar, references, allusions, style, and diction. The teacher concludes the lesson with a moral application of the text to the pupils’ lives. In general, this method of teaching reading in the grammar school does not differ much from the method implied in medieval Latin grammars, except that the language of instruction is the vernacular and Terence and Erasmus’s Colloquies replace selections from the Bible and Virgil. While humanists’ theories of language supported usage as the criterion for deter­mining the rules of speech and writing, they rarely recognized the contra­ diction which their language ideals involved them in. In fact, humanists’ ideological misrecognition was enormously productive. Even as they cultivated a more conversational, contemporary mode of Latin grammar and usage and the use of the vernacular, they promoted a Latin literacy which theoretically stigmatized ordinary usage in Latin and even more so in the vernaculars. As part of language ideology, humanists deployed Latin grammar prior to grammatica and literate rules as a ‘dividing practice’ to categorize, discipline, and improve contemporary Latin and vernacular usage (eloquence). This refashioned grammatica legitimated humanist schooling as a new literate (and national) origin. These contradictions in humanist education motivated a symbolic violence which discursively eliminated the difference between ‘pure Latin’ and school authority. Humanist education conflated style and textual content as part of humanism’s broader reordering of ideas about subjectivity and the relation between public manners and private selves in sixteenth-century Europe. As in earlier periods, sixteenth-century literacies were sites of social conflicts and power struggles, conflict and conflation without sublation. Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century courtesy writing increasingly argued that persuasion and civility enabled men to become privileged, powerful, and literate if they deployed appropriate, i.e., successful, discursive strategies. These rhetorical changes meant that in early sixteenth-century England the image of the ruling elite was less and less identified as clerical and more associated with the intellectual, social, and politically powerful laity. (By the end of the century, social and political power was again nearly captured by religious groups, but then Puritanism included lay people as well as clergy.) Humanist education promoted social ambition as moral and eloquent literacy. Those who seized the discursive initiative obtained patronage 73 

Erasmus, De ratione studii, ed. by Margolin, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (UAI 1969– edn), I/2, pp. 125–26, 130–32; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxiv, pp. 675–76, 678–79.

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and preferment in exchange for service. Such new learned elites, while not always having social prestige by birth or wealth, were nonetheless identified as possessing a high level of cultural literacy, elegance, and witty learning (copiae), in both Latin and the English vernacular. Facility with language, especially the ability to speak or write at length on any topic, became a public sign of social prestige, valued at court and civic gatherings, and increasingly important for the efficiency of the growing Tudor bureaucracy. Elite vernacular literacy was legitimated in Latin grammar education. Colet’s figuration of learning as cleanliness repeats and negates, retexts and inverts, Machiavelli’s discourse of powerful persuasion. (Il Principe was written in 1513 but not published until 1532; Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio was published 1513–17.) Courtesy and humanism are two sides of a pragmatics. In courtesy discourse, style is power. In humanist discourse, eloquentia is power and privileged. Rather than promoting individual wisdom and piety, humanism substitutes style, similitude, and material signifiers (language, clothing, gestures) for ‘truth’ in the private domain and mental world. The humanist emphasis on classical Latin grammar and rhetorical eloquence foregrounds a general Grammar which underwrites all speech and writing and which relates language to things and being through a series of semiotic operations, re-significations rather than resemblances, and principally in written discourse.74 When language is taken to be a natural conduit or transparent vehicle of expression or representation, it remains largely invisible. But to see language at all, to notice it, analyze it, manipulate it, we must have already set language apart from itself. In humanist cultural performances, language and eloquence were already other to themselves and constitute a counter-discourse. In humanist social and educational discourse, language is objectified as a material object which can be ‘cleaned up’ and acquired through nurture, instruction, and practice. Many early modern humanists deployed Latin language ideology to theorize all languages, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and vernaculars, as artificial and constructed, other to nature, and then went on to construct another original, pure language which they claimed preceded rules, formalized grammar, and school discourse but which humanist schooling could nonetheless recover. In humanist grammatical theory, language is a natural system 74 

I don’t think the rupture described by Foucault between the Scholastic regime of signs and the sixteenth-century Classical Episteme of similitudes and resemblances is as complete and absolute as he often implies; Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 25–44. Foucault’s statement that in the sixteenth century ‘Knowledge therefore consisted in relating one form of language to another form of language; in restoring the great, unspoken plain of words and things; in making everything speak’ (p. 44) could equally apply to many aspects of medieval thought and semiotics, 400–1500 ce.

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before being organized and disciplined as systematic and eloquent. But, like the child, language is correctable, educable, needing pedagogical intervention in order to realize its complete innate self. Around this split ideology, schooling is a performance among other sociocultural performances. Erasmus’s De civilitate morum puerilium (1530; English translation by Robert Whittington, A lytell booke of good manners for children, published by Wynkyn de Worde, 1534) suggests other connections between purity and the educable child in St Paul’s discourse. Originally addressed to Henry of Burgundy (brother of Maximilian and grandson of Erasmus’s early patron), De civilitate is an advice book or etiquette manual for young boys based on life at the great houses of the European aristocracy. Whittington’s English translation changes that to ‘children’. According to J. K. Sowards, the textbook became a popular drill book for primary school pupils, suggesting how aristocratic models informed sixteenthcentury bourgeois institutions.75 In De civilitate, Erasmus defines the education of children: Munus autem formandi pueritiam multis constat partibus, quarum sicuti prima, ita praecipua est, ut tenellus animus imbibat pietatis seminaria: proxima, ut liberales disciplinas et amet, et perdiscat: tertia est, ut ad vitae official instruatur: quarta est, ut a primis statim aevi rudimentis civilitati morum assuescat. (The task of fashioning the young is made up of many parts, the first and conse­ quently the most important of which consists of implanting the seeds of piety in the tender heart; the second is instilling a love for, and thorough knowledge of, the liberal arts; the third in giving instruction in the duties of life; the fourth in training in good manners right from the earliest years.)76

Good manners are natural and reasonable but also something young children need to be taught. Education, especially literacy, naturalizes young, otherwise wild (uncivil) children. Here, middle-class self-fashioning and literacy education are naturalized and universalized, even though their criteria are based on aristocratic scripts and elite Latin grammatical discourse. Erasmus argues that good manners (civilitas) are socially useful because they seduce others’ good will and advance one’s intellectual abilities in their eyes, in part because good manners enable the properly trained person to join the social circle of banquets, formal festivals, rituals, and public discourse. Ideally, writes Erasmus, the ‘externum illud corporis decorum ab animo bene composito 75 

See Erasmus, De civilitate, ed. by Sowards, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, pp. lvii–lviii. Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, cols 1033B–C; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 273. 76 

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proficiscitur’ (external decorum of the body proceeds from a well-ordered mind), just as well formed utterances proceed from an ordered, literate mind. But sometimes, ‘incuria praeceptorum nonunquam fieri videmus, ut hanc interim gratiam in probis et eruditis hominibus desideremus’ (we observe even upright and learned men lack social grace because they have not been taught properly).77 When combined, literacy and manners produce, or educe, the socially proper, schooled body. Humanist schooling appropriated these formerly aristocratic manners for children of the middle-class laity and gentry because they were regarded as civilizing or improving gestures, just as proper, learned Latin syntax was considered to be a stylistic signifier of excellence and propriety. Linguistic and performative civility manifests another contradiction within humanist pedagogy and St Paul’s ideal of the literate child. Civilitas is simultaneously natural and artificial (cosmesis). Good manners and gestures, writes Erasmus, ‘quod natura decorum est, reddunt decentius: quod vitiosum est, si non tollunt, certe tegunt minuuntque’ (render what is naturally decorous even more attractive: if they do not remove defects, at least they disguise and minimize them).78 Erasmus’s construction of the concept of civilitas corresponds closely to what C. S. Peirce calls an aggregate of effects: ‘Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive of the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.’79 In his pedagogical program, Erasmus focuses almost exclusively on male civility, but he complicates that norm by regendering young boys and deterriorializing some class markers. Barbara Correll argues that awareness of Erasmus’s discriminatory attitudes toward women becomes a site not of accusation but rather of investigations of early modern subject and gender formation […]. [W]omen function as an essential negative to be overcome by civilizing labours and education, a constructed threat — and the uncanny echo from the machinery of changing power relations — that motivates male students to inscribe themselves in cultural masculine structures of civility.80

But in their plan for St Paul’s Erasmus and Colet deterritorialize chastity from its con­ventional location in the female body and reconstruct schoolboys as both 77  Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, col. 1033C; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 273. 78  Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, col. 1034B; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 274. 79  Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. by Hartshorne and Weiss, v, par. 2. 80  Correll, The End of Conduct, pp. 63–64.

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masculine and feminine, a new kind of educated male. In De civilitate and else­ where, Erasmus locates this new pedagogical ideal within wider bourgeois prac­ tices for differentiating classes and maintaining social prestige. For example, in De civilitate Erasmus notes that facial expressions are con­ ventional, vary historically and from society to society, and encode social status. Looking at someone with one eye shut, for example, should be left to ‘thynnis ac fabris’ (tunnies and smiths); that is, it’s a lower-class gesture.81 ‘Naturally decorous’ (natura decorum) expressions and gestures are desirable, and influential manuals such as De civilitate helped fashion a culturally appropriate middle-class aesthetic of the re-naturalized, formerly aristocratic male body. Good, courteous manners, writes Erasmus, are signs of an elite status but can also be appropriate for ordinary, humble, even rustic people. Regulated by an aristocratic norm, non-aristocratic people, ‘those for whom destiny has decreed an ordinary, humble, or even rustic lot’, can ‘ut quod fors invidit, morum elegantia pensent’ (compensate for the malignity of fate with the elegance of good manners).82 With effort, ordinary or ignoble people can learn to be better. This ideal of humanist education as social self-improvement was embedded in St Paul’s practices as educational discipline. Improving onself through education produces a new origin which erases one’s biological/class origin and divides language against itself within the speaker. In humanist schooling, the ideal child becomes a native speaker of another, more prestigious form of language. Cultural literacy interpellates the self. The literate ideology underwriting the humanist revolution in education was embodied literally and figuratively in St Paul’s curriculum: an optimism about educability, social mobility, and linguistic and literate performance. Like cosmetics and other artificial adornments (Erasmus and others specifically used the term cosmesis), good manners and good grammar can be used by those ‘less fortunate’ to cover up or compensate for the fact they were not born into the privileged class or to help them, if possible, move up the social ladder. ‘Nemo’, Erasmus writes, ‘sibi parentes aut patriam eligere potest, at ingenium moresque sibi quisque potest fingere’ (No one can choose his own parents or nationality, but each can mould his own talents and character for himself ).83 This is the epi­tome of literate selffashioning. The child is presumed to be originally inno­­cent and pure, but at the 81 

Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, col. 1034B; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 274. 82  Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, col. 1043B; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 289. 83  Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703– 06 edn), i, cols 1043B–1044A; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 289.

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same time, the child is presumed to be morally, intellectually, and behaviourally educable, that is, deficient and open to change. In a similar fashion, a language is presumed to be malleable and correctable back to its original, chaste state, and vernacular grammar is presumed to exist only in so far as it can be described within the universal framework of Latin grammar. Individuals are assumed to be able to learn to control how they look, speak, and act in accord with the dominant (naturalized) ideology of elite taste. According to De civilitate, good manners, including conversation, are naturally decorous yet rhetorically individualized under the gaze of hegemonic elite usage. What counts as decorous speech turns out to be desexualized and referentially indirect. Polite speech is chaste and nontransparent, eloquent and strategic: ‘Si res exigat, ut aliquod membrum pudendum nominetur, circumitione verecunda rem notet’ (If the conversation requires one to mention some private part of the body, it should be referred to by the way of polite circumlocution).84 In De civilitate, Erasmus links manners and chaste speech in a rhetoric of performance and self-fashioning. Personal manners are a kind of linguistic performance, part of the discourse of literacy and culture, just as linguistic behaviour is part of one’s personal habits. In Erasmus’s text, the lower classes are said to be able to improve themselves and advance in the world or be able to move in more prestigious society if they put on the personal habits and gestures of aristocratic or prosperous mercantile, well-educated subjects. Of course, in practice such mobility was more limited than Erasmus’s theory of civilitas implied, as the thwarted careers of Gabriel Harvey and George Gascoigne suggest.85 Changing one’s station required not only putting on different gestures and language but also having a social place from which to access such gestures and a language and a discursive space within which display or perform them authoritatively. The expansion of prestigious Latin or vernacular literacy among more writers and readers provided just such discursive spaces or at least the opportunities to try to occupy them. Humanist theories of literacy and style are simultaneously elitist and egalitarian. According to aristocratic discourse, good manners and good grammar naturally belong to the privileged class. But as we saw earlier, wider lay uses of Latin in the late Middle Ages undermined this assumption by destabilizing the 84  Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, col. 1042B; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 287. 85  See Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, pp. 184–96 (esp. p. 196). See Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 191–99.

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distinctions between literatus/illiteratus and clericus/laicus. Humanist discourse went a step further. It universalized older aristocratic and clerical privileges and naturalized them as effective schooling, good upbringing, and the nature of language itself. For humanists, the elegant and eloquent display of good manners signified that one is in control, civil, artful, rhetorical, well composed, reasonable, and a member of the elite ‘new nobility of learning’: Decet autem ut homo totus sit compositus animo, corpore, gestibus, ac vestitu: sed in primis pueros decet omnis modestia, et in his praecipue nobiles. Pro nobilibus autem habendi sunt omnes, qui studiis liberalibus excolunt animum. Pingant alii in clypeis suis leones, aquilas, tauros, et leopardos, plus habent verae nobilitatis, qui pro insignibus suis tot possunt imagines depingere, quot perdidicerunt artes liberals. (It is seemly for the whole man to be well ordered in mind, body, gesture, and clothing. But above all, propriety becomes all boys, and in particular those of noble birth. Now everyone who cultivates the mind in liberal studies must be taken to be noble. Let others paint lions, eagles, bulls, and leopards on their escutcheons; those who can display devices (imagines) of the intellect commensurate with their grasp of the liberal arts have a truer nobility).86

Humanism objectified and deterritorialized manners and language from their traditional subject positions and transformed them into disseminated and teachable codes of behaviour and discourse. However, because humanist theories of linguistic purity controlled social and educational discourse, as at St Paul’s, humanists divided language from itself, separated elite from ordinary usage, and privileged Latin writing as the criterion for a linguistic standard. As we have seen, humanist language ideology depended on constructing an originary purity and innocence which education and textual revision recovered. The humanist conflation of nature and cosmesis provisionally arises and overcomes oppositions, sublates, but it simultaneously supersedes an older concept of eloquence and status while still holding onto it. Is this progressive or democratizing or emancipator as education? In humanist schooling, grammar education fostered both reproduction and change. Latin education became increasingly important to early modern commercial classes as a new origin, the machine of social birth. Wealthy, powerful urban groups such as the Mercers’ and Merchant Taylors’ Companies fashioned for themselves social positions in the schools they sponsored. Rather than embodying a separate or uniquely mer86 

Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, cols 1033C–D; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 273–74.

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cantile world, early modern schools such as St Paul’s often established a new literate elite ordered around privileged linguistic, social, and gestural behaviours. Humanist education constructed the canon worth knowing from Latin writers and their vernacular continuators. Performance and achievement in school, not birth, established one’s sociocultural family and advanced the nation or commonwealth’s identity. But the powerful social ideologies of birth, genealogy, and class were never entirely written out of this commercial utopia of progressive, expanded education and upward mobility. Counteracting or overcoming the social imaginaries of privileged rank and birthright requires something more than a curriculum or a degree. It requires a change in individual and collective consciousness. Can we imagine within any educational discourse a continuous critique of its own foundationalism, a critical discourse which refuses mastering violence and exposes the defenses, anxieties, and ideological naturalization which drives and constrains the pursuit of knowledge? Can we imagine and deploy a different pedagogy whose transformative possibilities begin with the ‘exception’, that which exceeds regulative ‘modernization’or ‘standardization’, without at the same time reproducing an elitist and restrictive culture of exceptionalism?87 Humanist theories of standard Latin (Colet’s litterature) and Erasmus’s concept of learned and literate civilitas make up two parts of the ideal child in humanist schooling. ‘[I]mplanting the seeds’ of piety, learning, and good manners ‘right from the earliest years’, litterature and civilitas inform the student body metaphorized as a national crop.88 Paradoxically, proper manners and ‘good’ literacy are ‘natural’ and ‘reasonable’ but still what young children need to be taught. Properly literate children are the school’s ‘harvest’, its pedagogical outcome. The young schoolboy is educable precisely because he doesn’t yet have what Colet and Erasmus say is natural to him. In St Paul’s school discourse, the ideal child is not yet himself, becoming rather than being. In humanist schooling the construction of the ‘natural’ masks the ideal of individual development. While the child is presumed to be originally innocent and pure, the school child is said to be morally and intellectually educable because he is incomplete and not wholly formed, like language which needs pruning or correcting, like vernacular speech which is grammatical only within the universal framework of Latin grammar. Clean habits, clean Latin, clean hearts, cleaning up. Humanist educational discourse ultimately reveals the paradox upon which its Pedagogic Authority is grounded — the educable child must be already chaste yet not fully formed. 87 

See Weber, Institution and Interpretation, pp. 236–52. Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium libellus, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), i, cols 1033B–C; Erasmus, De civilitate, in Erasmus, Collected Works, xxv, 273. 88 

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Can any literate schooling positively transgress disciplinary, metaphoric, and conceptual limits as part of its knowing and making? St Paul’s humanist discourse of the ideal school child proposes such an institutional pragmatics of knowledge. Colet and Erasmus imagine a pedagogy which erases blotterature and fosters pious Latinity and civilitas among the male children of London’s middle classes. By risking the fluid interaction between literate maturity and a positively resistant childhood, St Paul’s schooling also risks producing what Sartre described in his autobiography as a literate monster. The child entering the classroom lives in the shadow of the ideal child and becomes aware of the gap between the two and the bad faith successful schooling engenders: My truth, my character, and my name were in the hands of adults. I had learned to see myself through their eyes. I was a child, that monster which they fabricated with their regrets. When they were not present they left their gaze behind, and it mingled with the light […]. Everyone could follow their play. Not a shadowy corner […]. I was an impostor. How can one put on an act without knowing that one is acting?89

Sartre’s anxious language reveals Erasmus’s description of linguistic cosmesis and his account of St Paul’s architecture to be an unacknowledged hypotext. Both Erasmus and Sartre focus on the power of the pedagogical gaze. But whereas Sartre raises the question of the child’s authenticity, Colet and Erasmus imagine the St Paul’s schoolboy as a literate countersign, an exemplar of a new literacy. Schooled but innocent, the St Paul’s student is an ideal Latin learner yet not fully proficient, guided by humanist writing but natural, reasonable but uncultivated, in need of unlearning as much as learning. The hidden curriculum remains misrecognized when it is naturalized or universalized as human nature, piety, or eloquence. St Paul’s foundational discourse of the ideal child can be read as heteroglossic and heterotopic, an excess within the institution, a not-entirely scripted way of remembering what has been forgotten in institutional (mis)memory. The image of the Boy Jesus joins schooling as a family romance and new social origin with the governing concepts of ‘clene and chast laten’, the cultivated natural and the learning of unlearning. The child’s body and mind are fashioned within St Paul’s physical space and performative semiosis, which instantiate and reaccent the broader discourse on language, nationhood, and piety. But the St Paul’s boy remains an imaginary creation within educational discourse, situated between nature and culture. This imaginary child of humanist school ideology and literacy never quite fits with schooling’s assimilating and normalizing practices, even 89 

Sartre, The Words, trans. by Frechtman, p. 83.

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though he enables educational discourse and Pedagogic Authority to function. St Paul’s ideal child is the ground upon which schooling is enacted.

Festive Childhood The ritualization of the word. Curriculum as performance. In late medieval and early modern grammar schools, students recited or construed Latin sentences, composed sentences themselves (either in Latin or translating between Latin and vernacular), memorized and recited grammatical forms, responded to teachers’ questions, and learned to gloss and interpret texts by reproducing the teacher’s commentary discourse. As Latin learners, they were assessed, promoted, and disciplined. At St Paul’s, the regular activities of the school day and year were punctuated with various rituals and ceremonies which buttressed or enforced the school’s literate and social ideology. Boys were called to prostrate (apparently), textually guided prayer three times a day, saying ‘the prayer with due tract and pawsyng, as they be conteyned in a table in the scole’.90 The praying boys were scrutinized for their pronunciation of Erasmus’s Latin prayer to the Boy Jesus written on the wall. Literate piety. Pious literacy. The quarterly visits of the Mercers’ Company surveyors were occasions for the school staff and students to display the boys’ literate accomplishments and demonstrate how the merchants’ investments in the school were paying off. Finally, St Paul’s reinstituted the Boy Bishop festival as a part of school life and Latin literacy education.91 The controversial Boy Bishop festival further ambiguated St Paul’s schooling. Samuel Pepys’s seventeenth-century account of ‘Opposition Day’ exams (held during Candlemas) suggests how school practices and public discourse were ordered in the building. Pepys, the school’s most famous truant, attended St Paul’s more than 135 years after its refounding, but many of the school’s original rituals were still in place, with the classrooms downstairs and the ‘posing chamber’ (examination room) upstairs in the High Master’s quarters. As an alumnus, Pepys could observe the Mercers’ and teachers’ examinations of the boys: to Pauls school, it being opposicion-day there. I heard some of their speeches, and they were just as schoolboys used to be, of the seven liberall Sciences; but I think not so good as ours were in our time […]. and back again to Pauls schoole and went 90  91 

Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, pp. 277–78. Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 278.

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up to see the head forms posed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but I think they do not answer in any so well as we did; only in Geography they did pretty well. Dr Wilkins and Outram were examiners. So down to the school.92

The Mercers’ Company appointed the examiners, and the Master’s reappointment often depended on how successfully students answered questions posed to them — accountability, high-stakes testing, and outcomes assessment, seventeenthcentury style. St Paul’s ritual prayers linked Latin grammar and Christian (even monastic) piety: prostrate prayer three times a day, sung liturgy, and boys filing into the school each morning and offering hymns to the Virgin and the image of the Boy Jesus on the wall.93 As we have seen, the image of the Boy Jesus permeated the moral and cultural discourse of the newly refounded St Paul’s, as an icon, a discursive trope, and pedagogical stance. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some of the most theatrical public displays and rituals of schooling’s power and subjectivity were the Boy Bishop festivals. As part of St Paul’s new curriculum, Colet and Erasmus deliberately renovated a ‘Papist’, ‘medieval’ religious carnival and deployed it in the service of humanist literacy and the ideal literate child. The Boy Bishop festival also supported Colet’s plan to revitalize preaching from the pulpit (strongly supported by the king) and to revitalize St Paul’s cathedral by preaching at every festival.94 The festival, part of Christmastide celebrations, was especially popular in England from at least the thirteenth century. On the Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December), a chorister or schoolboy (sometimes, perhaps, a girl) was chosen from the cathedral school to assume some of the duties, rights, and privileges of the bishop for the day. The child could preach and preside but not actually celebrate Mass nor set diocesan policy.95 Other children assumed the duties of the deacons and others in the bishop’s household. The Boy Bishop was expected to host a feast for his youthful entourage and preach a sermon 92 

4 February 1663, in Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Latham and Matthews, iv, 33. See Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, pp. 276–79, Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen (no. 1211, dated 13 June 1521), iv, 517–18; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 236. 94  Statutes, in Lupton, A Life of John Colet, p. 278. See Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen (no. 1211, dated 13 June 1521), iv, 516; Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 235. See Gleason, John Colet, pp. 257–60. 95  See Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, pp.  144–55; Harrison, Medieval Man, pp. 162–77; Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, i, 105–10; ii, 190, 192, 195–96; Wooden, Children’s Literature, pp. 23–38. 93 

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at the cathedral mass for the Holy Innocents. Records dating back to 1245 at St Paul’s cathedral show purchases of lavish vestments, food, and gifts for the festival. Holy Innocents custom also encouraged disorder in the house. When line seven of the responsorial Psalm 123/124 was read out (Anima nostra sicut passer erepta est de laqueo venantium laqueus contritus est et nos liberati sumus), students jumped over the choir stalls and ran around the church, yelling loudly and disrupting the solemnity of the Mass. Given the regimen of the sixteenthcentury grammar school, the Christmastide holidays offered a controversial, raucous, energetic release from the daily routine of memorization, recitation, parsing, composition, and prayer. The child martyrs (innocentes) become merry pranksters. Modern continuations of the Boy Bishop festival seem to emphasize the honour and dignity of the priesthood and the depth of sincerity of serving the weak and poor.96 Because it foregrounded transgressive play, the popular Boy Bishop festival was sometimes criticized for giving too much authority and licence to children and for being luxurious and extravagant, especially as to the Boy Bishop and his retinue’s visits to various noble and religious houses. In his proclamation of 22 July 1541, Henry VIII suppressed the festival, calling it ‘superstitious and chyldysh’, that is papist, and a mockery of God, wherein children be strangelie decked and apparayled to counterfeit priestes, bishoppes, and women, and so be ledde withsonges and daunces from house to house, blessing the people and gatheryng money; and boyes do singe masse and preache in the pulpitt, with suche other unfittinge and inconvenient usages, rather to the derysyon than any true glory of God, or honor of his sayntes.

Henry’s Protestant rhetoric associated the Boy Bishop festival with Catholic theatricality and clerical aristocracy as well as with religious superstition and childishness, ‘for as much as the same doth resemble rather the unlawfull superstition of gentilitie, than the pure and sincere religion of Christe’.97 As we have seen, many extant Boy Bishop sermons, most composed by church and school authorities, used the festival to articulate Pedagogic Authority (recall the 1558 Gloucester Boy Bishop sermon). Some Boy Bishop sermons reproduce official moral discourse and admonish students to obey their elders and teachers, study hard, and lead pure lives. They deploy an ideal of the obedient literate child to critique contemporary adult vices and indulgence as much as schoolboy 96  See for example ‘Friends of Claines Church’, [accessed 10 September 2010]. 97  Quoted in Leach, The Schools of Medieval England, p. 136.

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rowdiness and blasphemy. But the unruliness of the festival undermines its appropriation within official moral discourse and discipline. The Boy Bishop festival, with its carnival riot of choristers jumping over the choir stalls, children presiding over religious events, temporarily usurping the bishop’s authoritative position, and preaching to the congregation and the school, does not directly correlate with Colet’s discourse of little virgin schoolboy and chaste Latin literacy nor with St Paul’s mercantile sponsorship. Nonetheless, the Boy Bishop festival and Erasmus’s sermon composed for the occasion (Concio de puero Iesu) did constitute a provocative part of the school’s theatricality and a heteroglossic retext of the school’s grammar curriculum, architecture, rituals, sponsors, and endowment. The Boy Bishop festival at St Paul’s reveals the limits of the vibrating energies and discursive multiplicities in the school’s foundation as a Deleuzean plateau. Henry VIII ’s 1541 suppression of the Boy Bishop festival seems to have addressed two questions to do with traditional clerical authority. First, the king was attempting to rei(g)n in the riot of aristocratic luxury and Catholic extravagance which the festival encouraged. Second, the king was trying to get hold of some of the destabilizing carnival aspects of the Christmas festival and reassert the educational mission of grammar schools. The Boy Bishop festival openly, if temporarily, subverted the authority of Church and school with irreverence, impersonation, and unruly Latin in the name of a sentimental, empathetic nurturing of young children. Around the time of St Paul’s refounding, the Boy Bishop festival in Europe was sometimes associated with carnival’s improvisational critique of clericalism in the pageant of the Mock Bishop or Pope, a variation of the Mock King carnival (sometimes celebrated on 26 December, Feast of St Stephen). The carnival preacher ritually desacralized the authority of the Church, while the mock pope or bishop, dressed in rags with a fish kettle for the chalice and dung forks for altar candles, celebrated a mock Mass and presented a ridiculous image of clerical authority. The mock bishop often preached a parodic sermon at the veneration of the ‘relics’ (perhaps animal bones) and the ‘purification’ ceremony. Often, the role of the mock pope or bishop was played by a fool or a child.98 Reformation carnival often affirmed local secular community alliances and asserted the laity’s economic rivalries with established elites while it desacralized Church authority through lay (usually young male) impersonation. 98 

On carnival culture and ‘grotesque realism’, see Bakhtin, Rabelais, trans. by Iswolsky, esp. pp. 1–58. For interesting fifteenth- and sixteenth-century German examples, see Scribner, Popular Culture, p. 90.

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St Paul’s version of the Boy Bishop festival is ambiguous, contradictory, possibly scandalous. In its performance context, the festival focused on unruly children, but Erasmus’s sermon Concio de puero Iesu and the school’s texts and icons of the Boy Jesus teaching in the Temple seem to be trying to resacralize the classroom through impersonation, doubling, and semiotic inversion. Karl Young distinguished drama as ‘impersonation’ from the ‘sheer revelry and hilarity’ of the Boy Bishop festival or Feast of Fools, which Young believed was regarded as ‘a ludicrous substitute’ for the true bishop.99 But Young’s account does not fit the festival’s institutional and performative context at St Paul’s nor the regular support given in late medieval cathedrals to the antics of the Boy Bishop and his ‘entourage’. Colet and Erasmus situate the ritual within the school as a utopian perfor­ mative space rather than as a marginalized event to release youthful energy. They subvert the festival’s subversion and retext its unruliness to support humanist literacy education’s own oppositional program. When the parodic carnival event is transmuted into a sacred game, Pedagogic Authority is embedded in school performance and the identification of grammar teachers with nurturing fathers (rather than mothers) and the Boy Jesus. Young male choristers mimic their elders but in prepubescent or barely pubescent Latin-pronouncing voices. In St Paul’s school, adult authority constructs a literate script for an upside down temporary world in which the Boy Jesus teaches his elders. St Paul’s incorporation of the Boy Bishop festival hovers between, on the one hand, role reversal, unexpected improvized excess, and play and, on the other, the scripted performance of humanist literate ideology and textually mediated Latin discourse. St Paul’s oppositional stance toward mainstream education, its selfpresentation as a model school, and the appropriation of the controversial Boy Bishop festival presented students and teachers with a complex stage on which to enact themselves as different kinds of school subjects. The humanist paradoxes and oxymorons of nonviolating literate ideology are articulated in Erasmus’s poems for the school (Carmina scholaria) and his sermon for the Boy Bishop festival (Concio de puero Iesu).100 These Latin texts structure much of the school’s explicit theatricality. Erasmus’s poems for St Paul’s and the Boy Bishop sermon were published together by Robert de Keysere (Paris, 1511), then compiled 99 

Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, i, 110. Carmina scholaria, in Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, pp. 297–300; Concio de puero Iesu, in Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, cols 599C–610A; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 51–70. 100 

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with Erasmus’s amplified De ratione studii and De copia and republished by Josse Bade (Paris, 1512). This publication history suggests the close links between the poems and sermons and St Paul’s grammar curriculum. In their correspondence (September 1511–March 1512), Colet asked Erasmus to send him the Carmina scholaria and De ratione studii to support the new school. The timing suggests that Erasmus, then in England, was composing his poems and sermon for St Paul’s school about the time he was completing his major work on pedagogy. The Concio became a very popular text and went through many editions in the sixteenth century. Erasmus scrupulously revised the text for the 1514 edition, and the Latin sermon was translated into English (1540), Spanish (1576), and Dutch (1607). Humanist oxymorons appear frequently in Erasmus’s poems for St Paul’s: for example, ‘illiteratas literas’, ‘inerudita […] erudition’, the worldly life which is death.101 Some are often associated with humanism, others not. The phrasal syntax, a positive noun and its negative or a cancelling derived adjective, asserts the superiority of an oppositional education program and a new literate origin. As in other humanist texts, literary discourse (in this case, verbal paradox and positive-negative couplings) becomes a privileged form for truth and a distinction from the conventional and mainstream. But Erasmus’s paradoxes escape their curricular containment and open a space for disruptive, more deterritorialized modes of Latin utterance within the Boy Jesus trope and the Boy Bishop festival. James Rieger has argued that Erasmus’s poems are ‘too patronizing to command the interest, much less the sympathy, of schoolboys’ and ‘the work of a man who does not understand children’.102 The schoolboys at St Paul’s, Rieger writes, could not have been taken in by the image of the Boy Jesus, who ‘was but a persona, through the moving lips of which one heard a distinctly schoolmasterish voice’. He notes Erasmus’s association of linguistic dirt with moral and physical slovenliness, as well as Erasmus and Colet’s association of chaste studies with Christian virginity.103 Erasmus’s poems, he asserts, when read in the context of humanist education, reflect ‘an attempt to integrate all those activities which properly belong to man and, by so doing, to make man “universal”’. The image of the Boy Jesus was an appropriate symbol for the ‘ideals of the liberal schoolroom, auspice Iesu, [which] had not yet degenerated into those of the finishing school

101 

Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 88, l. 15; 87, ll. 4–5; 89, ll. 3–4. Rieger, ‘Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus’, p. 188. 103  Rieger, ‘Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus’, pp. 188–89. 102 

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and the workshop’.104 Despite his criticisms, Rieger finds that Erasmus’s poems ‘epitomize’ humanist educational thought, and he reads the Carmina scholaria with liberal sympathy for a humanist educational program as opposed to technical or scholastic education. Rieger’s reading downplays the Boy Jesus poems’ influence on St Paul’s schoolboys and teachers because he does not situate the poems within the school’s ritualization of the word. That Erasmus’s poems are full of linguistic play and moral instruction does not make them ineffective, but it does suggest how pupils and teachers might have responded to them or performed them in school. Focused on the literate child, St Paul’s semiosis — texts on the walls, classroom talk, distinguishing architecture, Latin pedagogy, rituals — foregrounded the educational figure of the Boy Jesus teaching in the Temple rather than the penitential image of the crucified Christ displaying his wounds and inviting meditation and devotion. We can imagine ten-year-old schoolboys alternately caught up in, miming, put off by, resistant to, parodying, subverting, and sometimes just oblivious to the school’s overt attempts to shape their subjectivities, just as young students today are during many school ceremonies, rituals, and celebrations. Figures of chastity and virginity permeate Erasmus’s poems and thus reinforce St Paul’s school discourse elsewhere.105 The Latin texts hung on the school walls in full view of the pupils, teachers, and the public. The Latin texts in situ also helped orchestrate school performance. Jesus inspires ‘puris | Moribus’ (pure habits) and abolishes ‘Spurcis moribus’ (base habits).106 The schoolboys are a ‘virgineae gregi’ (flock of virgins) or ‘angeli’.107 Puritas is the governing virtue, in behaviour, study, and grammar. The poems, together with the icon of the Boy Jesus on the wall, connote the classroom as sacred space: ‘Sedes haec puero sacra est Iesu’ (This place is sacred to the Boy Jesus).108 The classroom architecture materially associated the virginal child with the image of the teacher as a nonviolating authority. The High Master’s chair was positioned beneath the Boy Jesus icon and Carmen 86 (‘Discite me primum pueri’ [Boys, listen to me first]) on the wall behind him.109 Who would the schoolboys be listening to? What connections might they draw 104 

Rieger, ‘Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus’, p. 193. See Rieger, ‘Erasmus, Colet, and the Schoolboy Jesus’; Gleason, John Colet, pp. 217–34. 106  Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 86, ll. 1–2; Carmen 87, l. 4. 107  Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 88, ll. 6, 9. 108  Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 87, l. 1. 109  Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517; see Seabourne, The English School, pp. 13–14. 105 

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from the visual scene? Who is speaking here? child or adult? The deixis of address is delirious. The late medieval and early modern schoolboy was often represented as a whining, sniffling, lazy clown dragging his satchel. But Erasmus’s Carmina scholaria portray the young child as a holy and undefiled temple and the classroom as another sanctuary where the literate voice of instruction belongs ambiguously to adult and child. When the teacher spoke from the Master’s chair at the front of the classroom, he was backed up by the image of the Boy Jesus and a Latin poetic text. Each day in the main classroom, the boys looked at a scene of ambiguous authority: the Master in his chair beneath the image of the Boy Jesus and a Latin poem telling them to listen to the boy, not the adult — Auspice Iesu.110 The Latin text in the classroom yields multiple voices. The pupils knew that the master’s voice and disciplining hand were immediately present in the classroom. Yet the Boy Jesus icon and the prosopopoetic Latin text (textually presenting a first-person voice which a reader impersonates) also orchestrated classroom performance because the image of the Boy Jesus ‘totus grex adiens scholam ac relinquens hymno salutat’ (was greeted by the whole body [students and teachers] with a hymn when they enter or leave school).111 As the young boys became more skilled at Latin literacy, they could read, construe, and remember the poems more proficiently and could internalize schooling’s linguistic and sociocultural norms. Erasmus’s Latin poems thus were potentially transgressive and subversive, but never necessarily so. They represent humanist Latin literacy and piety in terms of oxymorons, multiple voices, and carnival reversal. But as part of schooling’s ideological practice they also maintain Pedagogic Authority by framing the Boy Jesus’s displacing speech, Discite me primum (Listen to me first), within grammatical discourse and institutional authority (the voice of the Master). St Paul’s Boy Jesus as teacher replaces Margery Kempe’s Jesus as the ‘best clerk’. The model humanist school repeats late medieval school discourse, but differently. Erasmus’s paradoxical ideal literate child — the unviolated, virginal product of pedagogical intervention, educated into a new beginning — represents an attempt to cover over a conflict within humanist schooling. By characterizing ‘true learning’ as chaste and pure, Erasmus and Colet regender traditional male education and knowledge. The ideal literate boy is humble, disciplined, pious, 110 

Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 90, l. 4. Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. by Allen, iv, 517–18 (no. 1211, dated 13 June 1521); Erasmus, The Correspondence, trans. by Mynors and Thomson, viii, 236. 111 

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virginal, and wise. While other Boy Bishop sermons use this reversion to ‘original’ childhood as an analogue of spiritual purification, St Paul’s entire discourse of schooling is structured by the inversion and paradox. St Paul’s social education and Latin literacy deploy nurturing to efface nurture and return the child to a state not anterior to education but idealized within educational discourse. This rhetoric repeats the discursive movement we noted earlier, in which humanist schooling constructs a linguistic ideal prior to the formalization of rules and for which it claims the Pedagogic Authority to speak. Interventionist schooling is thus made to seem invisible, natural, just there; the literate schoolboy is imagined to be unviolated. Latin and vernacular literacy are naturalized as ways of completing the schooled human being, fulfilling what is said to be lacking in the child before schooling. However, Carmen 90 takes this humanist ideal further and reveals, perhaps unintentionally, a different contradiction within Pedagogic Authority. The poem, mounted like the others on the school walls, foregrounds civic humanism and English nationalism as educational goals. Carmen 90 represents the school as both a workshop and a natural space. The school is an officina (workshop) where the rudis […] pubes (unformed boy) is fashioned. Then the poem shifts and the school becomes a sylva (forest).112 The textual order of these images reverses the natural order of production, from forest to lumber to furniture. Erasmus’s poem elaborates the forest image in two directions: as natural growth and as material for (manufactured) human production. The forest, like language, is a natural growth which education can fashion, cultivate, civilize. The forest provides raw material and serves as the source for those seeds (semina) of the nation which will blossom into literate adult Englishmen when ‘studiisque castis | Culta’ (cultivated with chaste studies).113 Henry VIII ’s preface to the 1542 edition of St Paul’s Latin grammar used similar language, referring to schoolboys as the ‘furniture’ of state made from wood harvested and then crafted in the workshop/school. In this poem, Erasmus represents schooling as a craft or gardening (figures later deployed by Comenius and Locke) or as a natural process, but not as a violating intervention. The images of the Forest and the Workshop remap the educational debate between nature and nurture. While many of St Paul’s metaphors of chaste learning undermine the distinction between nature and nurture, Carmen 90 connects the idea of nonviolating schooling with chaste cultivation by juxtaposing the Forest/Plant and the Workshop, raw materials and the institutional site for cultivation.

112  113 

Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 90, ll. 3, 5, 17. Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 90, ll. 11–12.

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Erasmus is often described as a pacifist and internationalist, but Carmen 90 connects schooling with expansive English nationalism. When writing about or for St Paul’s school, Erasmus appeals to an emerging idea of English national humanism, an idea which Erasmus himself helped bring into being. He redescribes the nation as a humanist family whose father is John Colet: Ludus his sylvae pariet futurae Semina, hinc dives nemus undequaque Densius surgens decorabit Anglum Latius orbem. (This school prepares the seeds of the Future woods; hence the rich grove, everywhere Surging more densely, will more widely Adorn the English world.)114

The discontinuous phrase ‘Anglem […] orbem’ implies a global reach (‘Latius’), which England was nowhere near achieving in the early sixteenth century, suggests that the ‘English world’ is as much a linguistic as a material or geographic place. Erasmus implies that England’s worldwide advance and the globalizing of the English language are both supported by chaste Latin literacy at St Paul’s. The ideal of chaste Latin literacy and St Paul’s schooling are instrumentalized as the fertilizer for growing global Englishness. Erasmus’s sermon for St Paul’s Boy Bishop festival, Concio de puero Iesu, appropriates the festival’s linguistic and ceremonial transgressions to articulate again humanist ideology of the ideal literate child. Intended for delivery each year by one of St Paul’s choristers, the text uses a modified form of the university sermon, with divisions on a scriptural theme, to script a performance by a young boy speaking in Latin before the student body, teachers, and public. Through the sermon, the Boy Bishop performatively reproduces the Boy Jesus, the genius loci and speaking statue of St Paul’s school. Erasmus’s sermon reiterates humanism’s ambivalence about schooling’s Pedagogic Authority: true learning is intellectual purity and innocent chastity, foolish wisdom in the eyes of the world is in fact exemplary schooling. Like the Carmina scholaria and Colet’s Convocation sermon at St Paul’s (1511), Eramus’s Concio wittily distinguishes between clean, pious, chaste learning and dirty, worldly, false learning, between what is acceptable to God and what is acceptable in the world. Even though schooling aims to socialize and prepare students for 114 

Erasmus, The Poems, ed. by Reedijk, Carmen 90, ll. 17–20.

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the adult world, God rules. Even though St Paul’s curriculum goal was to grow and shape young boys into proper, literate English citizens, the Concio intervenes in the ways of the world. The Boy Bishop sermon and the festival which frames it create a gap or other space within cultural reproduction. In the sermon, Christ nurtures people with true piety, while St Paul’s, the proper school, nurtures boys with true learning. Erasmus’s text, delivered aloud by a schoolboy impersonating a bishop, rein­ forces many ideals of childhood which underwrite Colet’s school. Invoking St Paul’s model child, the Boy Jesus, the preaching chorister calls on his fellow students to be castos, puros, incontaminatos, mites, simplices, tractabiles, expertes fuci, ignaros doli, nescios invidiae, parentibus morigeros, praeceptoribus dicto audientes, mundi contemtores, rebus divinis addictos, piis litteris intentos, nobis ipsis quotidie meliores, probatos superis, gratos hominibus, odore bonae famae quam plurimos ad Christum allicientes (chaste, pure, unspotted, meek, simple, docile, free from deceit, ignorant of guile, unknowing of envy, obedient to our parents, responsive to our teachers, taking no thought for the world, intent on the divine and occupied in the study of scripture, daily better than our own selves, acceptable to the heavenly host and pleasing to men, drawing as many as we may to Christ by our good repute).115

The Concio’s literate child is a bit more otherworldly than the ideal child modelled in other Boy Bishop sermons. But performatively the text-guided speaking child is no less unruly. St Paul’s Boy Bishop, like the Boy Jesus, is an impossible image of the perfectly schooled child and the perfect teacher. A monstrous hybrid, the ideal literate boy turns everything upside down. Like the Boy Jesus, the ideal child destabilizes traditional social codes, especially those foundational for schooling, literacy, and commerce: ‘Is vero demum sapit, quo mundo desipit, & nil nisi Christum sapit’ (He is truly wise who acts foolish to the world and who knows nothing but Christ).116 The ideal child in the Concio is the exemplary pupil and the authoritative teacher. The figure of the Boy Jesus in the Temple collapses schooling’s distinction between students and teachers and underwrites the carnival speech of the Boy Bishop as a transgressive impersonator. The impersonating speaker of the Concio, unlike speakers of other Boy Bishop sermons, embodies 115  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 606F; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 66–67. 116  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 605E; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 65.

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and performs a witty, learned Latin discourse, an adult discourse in the mouth of a boy, which counterbalances the school’s image of tender ‘babes’ with ‘lytel whyte handes’ in the classroom. The Boy Jesus teaching in the Temple becomes the exemplary sixteenth-century schoolboy earnestly pursuing virtuous studies, dedicated to pious learning, eloquent in Latin composition, obedient to his parents and elders, and authoritative on the Law and textual tradition.117 The Boy Jesus and his theatrical double, the Boy Bishop, are model humanists. Elaborating on Luke 2. 40 (‘The child grew and became strong. He was full of wisdom and the grace of God was in him’), the Concio inverts the worldly hierarchy of foolish child and wise adult. The sermon and its performance (reading aloud) deterritorialize adult wisdom, the presumptive goal of education: ‘Quod si virum adsequi non possumus: saltem pueri puerum imitemur’ (If we cannot follow in the steps of the man, let us as children at least imitate the child).118 As children, we act as children in the name of Christian virtue. As the pronouns of address indicate, the sermon is performed by a boy as a boy, reading from an adult humanist’s text. To whom does ‘us’ refer? Again, deixis is delirious. In addition, the sermon and the child speaker deterritorialize the biological child and reestablish both the individual child (puer) and the concept of childhood (pueritia) as sacraments (sacramenta) and a spiritual state.119 Just as Erasmus in De civilitate had deterritorialized eloquence so that was no longer the exclusive property of the aristocracy, in the Concio he detaches childhood from the child and wisdom from adults. The trope of the child is of course important in Jesus’s Gospel message, but at St Paul’s puer becomes a signifier whose referent floats in discursive space, even though the material practices of school continue to attach the signifier to young children’s bodies and minds. Schooling teaches all of us. The Concio separates childhood as a goal from childhood as a developmental stage, just as humanists’ theory of Latinitas governed by correct writing separated speech from Language (Grammatica). Tasks of nature (physical) require maturity, but tasks of grace (spiritual) require childhood.120 In the Concio, the words spoken from a text to boys, teachers, and the public by a young boy impersonating a 117 

Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, cols 605C–E; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 64–65. 118  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 604E; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 63. 119  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 604A; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 62. 120  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, cols 604C–D; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 63–64.

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bishop destabilize adult authority and redescribe the worldly wisdom of adults as real folly. The sermon eloquently but explicitly critiques the status quo and adult authority in a Latin style which the Boy Bishop and other students are supposedly moving toward but have not yet achieved. That is, Erasmus’s sermon text provides the schoolboy with a spoken and written proficiency he has yet to attain, and Erasmus’s voice is articulated as a child’s. Proper knowledge, following another Biblical assertion, grows from pure, chaste, childlike faith, not from the subtleties of philosophical dialectic nor from ‘dirty’ worldly arguments. In the voice of a young boy, the sermon presents a critique of scholastic language and a humanist valorization of affective appeal and exemplary persuasion. Following Quintilian’s concept of the vir bonus, the good speaker is said to be the good man, and the good man is properly educated. Moreover, the good literate man grounds the humanist ideal of education and society and is the product of humanist schooling. The origin is in the product. The Boy Bishop’s voice, guided by Erasmus’s text, articulates a counterhegemonic ideal in a Latin he did not write but was expected to be able to read. The Boy Bishop is both textually excessive and performatively necessary, a transgressive instrument, a monstrous hybrid. The Concio performatively retexts its own concepts and metaphors of childhood and literacy. The sermon begins as a reenactment of the Boy Jesus in the Temple, the exemplar of wisdom, but then deterritorializes the semantics of the status quo. The riot of the Boy Bishop festival frames both play and high seriousness. Together, text and performing voice negatively articulate the Christian paradox of childish wisdom, unlearned learning, illiterate literacy, and the proper Christian literate as a child of God (Matthew 18. 3–4, 19. 13–15). The rhetoric of the Concio displaces God the father with the image of a wise virginal child. Childhood becomes the chaste condition to be cultivated by all pious souls.121 This figurative substitution was also crucial to some forms of late medieval affective piety and negative spirituality. But unlike affectively performative Christians, the schooled St Paul’s boy was expected to become a citizen of the State. The Concio asserts the paradox of St Paul’s humanist schooling: the properly schooled child becomes a child, untaught, literate, and wise, as well as a literate subject with a prestigious place in the adult social order. At least that’s the plan. Erasmus’s sermon foregrounds this deterritorialization of childhood and literacy in apocalyptic and carnival language: ‘Videte ut omnem rerum ordi­ nem hic puer invertit, qui loquitur in Apocalypsi: Ecce ego nova facio omnia 121 

Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, cols 605D, 606E; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 62, 66.

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(Revelations 21. 5) (You see how this child turns the whole order of things upside down: it is he who says in the book of Revelation, ‘Behold, I make all things new’).122 But which child: Jesus? the speaker? the schoolboys? Thye referent for puer is ambiguous. Moreover, Erasmus has rearranged the Biblical text in this citation. In Reveleations, the apocalyptic speech belongs not to the Boy Jesus but to the Resurrected Jesus, who announces the arrival of a ‘new heaven and a new earth’, the New Jerusalem. Interestingly, Erasmus omits the rest of the passage from Revelation, in which Jesus adds, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true’ (Scribe, quia haec verba fidelissima sunt, et vera). Prophecy and literacy are under the sign of Jesus, the Boy and the Risen Savior. Erasmus’s sermon linguistically pastes together two different times, childhood and the afterlife, by attributing the Revelations speech to the Boy Jesus. The sermon speaks of a child outside of school. Childhood, not schooling, is said to constitute the possibilities for transforming the world. Later, the Concio associates Christian virtue as a second childhood with another, more traditional image of moral virtue: the Christian as God’s soldier in a battle against the world. This potent image was key to many Protestant and humanist polemics. Recalling Erasmus’s powerful rhetoric of militant piety in the Enchiridion, the Concio speaker addresses the children in the audience as soldiers in Jesus’s army against the ‘armies (militiae) of the world — that is, of the devil’.123 While the second part of the sermon emphasizes that ‘Christianity is nothing other than a rebirth (renascentia) and a sort of renewed infancy (repuerascentia)’,124 the first and third parts focus on the theme and figure of the boys in Jesus’s army (Romans 13. 11–14). Jesus, the unblotted teacher (praeceptor) who gives birth to the literate illiterate child and chaste Latin, is also the commander (imperator) of a children’s army and the model for the militant Christian life.125 The sermon stages an impossibly transgressive image: the Boy Jesus as ideal teacher and pure student nested within the traditional image of militant Christian chastity. This opposition between two male identities, the Virgin and the Warrior, reproduces a longstanding tension within Christian moral discourse. From the 122 

Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 605D; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 64–65. 123  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, cols 599F–600A; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 56. 124  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 604A; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 62. 125  Erasmus, Opera omnia (Leiden 1703–06 edn), v, col. 600D; Erasmus, Collected Works, xxix, 57.

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early Church Fathers to Spenser’s Red Cross Knight and Britomart (male and female knights of Chastity) to nineteenth-century British missionaries, the armor of Jesus has been associated with purification and chastity. When this trope is voiced by a schoolboy impersonating a bishop and performing a Latin text written by one of humanism’s most subtle advocates, we confront a powerful rhetoric and a radically disorienting discourse. A boy who extols the virtues of spiritual childhood might seem to be a straight performative literalization of the metaphor for grace. But in the discursive situation of the sermon, that is, the performance context of the Boy Bishop festival, the idea of childhood becomes detached from the embodied voice of the child impersonating a bishop and reading aloud a Latin text he did not write. Like ideal language in humanist grammar, the articulation of childhood is deterritorialized and floats beyond the overt control of individual speakers. Erasmus’s Latin text is supplemented by the speaker in a child’s body in a ritual authorized by the school. School ritual, performance, and language theory converge on the literate child. Childhood is positioned in the sermon and the festival as part of the institutional apparatus of official moral discourse, but performatively the multiply-gendered child as subject and object of pedagogy cannot be entirely contained within school ideology. In the Boy Bishop’s performative discourse, Erasmus and Colet regender the foundation of European rationalism and the masculinized national subject. Erasmus’s texts for St Paul’s question some of the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century concepts and dispositions shaping the intense examination of the human body, passions, and instincts. But in his Concio the discourse on the ideal child, disembodied childhood, and chaste Latin constructs a rhetoric of reason consistent with the Enlightenment model in which passion is associated with the dirty body and innocence with knowing.126 The Concio de puero Iesu enacts a poetic theology and tries to rationalize Erasmus’s implicit dread of worldly pollution and textual blot by preinscribing the voice of the rebellious child. What is sacred is set apart, different, not dirt. The humanist ideal of learning and higher literacy, articulated throughout the Concio and the discursive practices of St Paul’s schooling, monstrously proposes that education can serve the State by creating a class of pious, Latin-trained literates able to handle the increasingly textual bureaucracy of a centralized monarchy, who at the same time are sacred subjects freed from lower-class pollution, linguistically purified, skilled at reading morally instructive Latin literature, the Bible, and vernacular texts, and well-prepared for higher studies. This is the impossible literate child of humanist schooling. 126 

See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, ed. by Noerr, pp. 192–96.

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St Paul’s curriculum and the Boy Bishop festival thus mark a double trans­ gression at the heart of humanist education. Erasmus and Colet appropriate the carnival riot of a controversial festival and redirect, retext, it for a different kind of transformative education. Erasmus’s Concio and Latin poems for St Paul’s walls utter the humanist scandal of childish wisdom and illiterate literacy through the voices of a schoolboy and the Boy Jesus.

Retexting and Reappropriation St Paul’s foundational discourse suggests how humanist schooling and Latin grammar education were located in the gap between the power and marker models of literacy. Erasmus, Colet, and other humanist educators established a canon of classical texts which they claimed embody not only Latin grammaticality but standards for all writing and reading. Humanists promoted this biliterate curriculum as universally valuable for all, but especially for males, if they had the ability, discipline, and opportunity to learn. The founders sought to reform society spiritually and professionally by cultivating an educational model which assimilated Christian ideals of piety to new standards for Latin and general literacy, especially within the mobile and anxious urban commercial classes. By helping expand lay people’s access to grammar education in the early sixteenth century and admitting qualified young boys without fees, Erasmus and Colet proclaimed through institutional discourse and practice that ‘chaste Latin’ literacy was a universal educational goal and also fundamental for the English nation. Colet and Erasmus’s refounding of St Paul’s shifted the domain of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century literacy in several ways. The school altered the archive of school texts and architecture in early Tudor English by producing and disseminating curriculum guides, grammar texts, and scripts for school rituals. These new texts influenced attitudes toward vernacular as well as Latin reading and writing. The school also provided a desirable public follow-on for the network of London pettie and ABC schools, which taught children minimal vernacular literacy. In the shadow of a lapsed cathedral school, the new St Paul’s school architecture and commercial sponsorship was culturally linked to the prestigious Inns of Court. Finally, St Paul’s continued the English practice of teaching Latin grammar and literacy in the vernacular and helped renovate the role of Latin language ideology in western literacy practices and standards. But as we have seen, St Paul’s schooling is a multi-voiced social text, an assemblage of discursive and performative utterances which present different

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views of literate goals, language usages, and subjectivities. As with other forms of textual practice (glossing, commentary, language mixing) St Paul’s school utterances in texts, pedagogy, and rituals pose the questions, Who is speaking in class? Who is speaking for literacy or education? The image of the Boy Jesus, the figure of chaste Latin, and the transgressive Boy Bishop festival were destabilizing practices within institutional formation. The voice of the preaching Boy Bishop reading from a prepared Latin text during Christmastide and advising his peers to be studious and obedient does not correlate exactly with the festival’s tradition of loud voices and the antics of rowdy boys running through the sanctuary and presiding over their elders. But the Boy Bishop sermon and Erasmus’s poems explicitly challenge the organized curriculum and speech and writing in school by collapsing the teacher and the students into the monster-child, the child as teacher, pupil, origin of piety, product of education, and cofounder of the literate national family. Again, who is speaking and who speaks for literacy and education? Erasmus’s sermon scripts a theatrical Latin performance which articulates a paradoxical literacy curriculum, unlearned learning, illiteratus literatus, and deliberately departs from utilitarian or pragmatic literacy. The Boy Bishop festival supplements and retexts the economy of excess and loss embedded within St Paul’s explicit curriculum and practices. In the festival moment, the Boy Bishop displaces the chaplain or schoolmaster by performing the role of the schoolboy Jesus. As a performative literate symbol, the preaching boy temporarily but pointedly effaces the difference between master and student and inverts the distinction between child and adult. The carnival discourse of the Boy Bishop festival prolongs the inversion of the social and pedagogical hierarchy and creates a masked childish speech to articulate a humanist critique of worldly values. Unlike other carnival transgressors, Colet and Erasmus create disorder not with dirt and lower-order scandal but with the unsoiled child and chaste Latin. The trope of the teaching Boy Jesus, potentially disruptive yet appropriated for institutionally licensed carnival daily, not just seasonally, is disseminated ideologically throughout the discourse of St Paul’s school: in classroom images, texts, and ritual performances. These pedagogical images present children’s power as both a threat and a potential. When the Boy Bishop gives his voice to the humanist educational project or has his voice seized, Erasmus’s written Latin text becomes part of his speech. Again, who is speaking? The voice of the young boy uses Latin syntax and rhetorical gestures authoritatively. A boy’s body and voice are attached to the words of the Latin text. The Latin-speaking boy child becomes the body image of power — a subversive moment. The figure of the Boy Jesus redescribes the school as a community of learners for whom childhood is not just a part of life but a

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condition to be discursively claimed, a mature goal rather than a state to be outgrown. What is the authority of schooling which takes its own parody as policy? The figure of the wise, virgin child runs counter to the force of Pedagogic Authority to control or contain social conflicts and difference within the school site. The scene of the young Jesus teaching in the temple is a powerful, positive image of transgressive authority, so it is not surprising that it has often been suppressed or set aside in western educational discourses. Situated prominently in the foundational discourse of St Paul’s school, the image and rituals of the Boy Jesus retrieve something of that Biblical story’s violating, transgressive potential, even as young boys are figured as ‘soft’ and in need of developmental, age-appropriate Latin instruction and chaste literacy to protect them from the world’s and usage’s violation and dirt. Humanist education and literacy training continued the linkage of writing and morality fostered in monastic and cathedral schools but took the ideals into the world. The ideal child at St Paul’s is structured as a linguistic, social, and somatic difference, violating as well as in danger of being violated, and which school authority deployed to efface its own pedagogical interventions. This impossible figuration of childhood and schooling comprises a powerful institutional interpretation and response to the urgent connection, which humanism itself fostered, between education and virtue. But who’s speaking, and whose future is being shaped? As a public space, St Paul’s was first positioned in 1510 as a model school because its founders linked official school ideology with school practices, architecture, classroom arrangement, textbooks, funding, and sponsorship. But decades later, the regulating idea of the Boy Jesus and chaste Latin became the problem, the dirt, in the school’s public discourse. Sometimes, institutional riot is contained by institutional drift. Like all schools, St Paul’s was a contingent, embedded, networked institution, not an autonomous unit. Its curriculum, pedagogical practices, ideology, and reception shifted over time. Henry VIII saw Colet and Erasmus’s other tropes for literate pupils — the ‘crop of the nation’ and the school as a ‘second family’ — as a discursive opening by which he could appropriate the school’s organization and texts within a nationalist school discourse under the administration of the crown rather than urban companies. After 1543, Peter Ramus and others attacked St Paul’s reform rhetoric, buttressed with Cicero and Quintilian, as outdated, exclusionary, and impractical for the majority of students, who they said needed more useful and rationalized literacy skills. Other schools made use of St Paul’s Latin grammar textbook and classroom organization and disseminated the school’s foundational discourse. Edward VI proclaimed that the Latin grammar composed by Lily, Erasmus, and Colet should become England’s schoolbook for Latin and vernacular literacy, while St Paul’s

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Statutes and organization were used by other schools, for example, the Merchant Taylors’ school (founded 1561) and Sherborne grammar school (founded 1565). But Henry VIII and Edward VI did not continue the discourse of clean and chaste literacy studies in their attempts to unify or nationalize English schooling. Erasmus and Colet’s paradox of the monster-child, the wise virginal child, and the conflict between nationalism and philosophical humanism were displaced by the royal control of grammar schools. Different types of schools (petty, song, grammar) were grouped together because they were considered critical to the formation of English nationalism and lay piety (now we would say ‘vital to the national interest’) and because they nurtured England’s soft babes in the womb of the State. By the mid-sixteenth century, sacred classroom space was becoming state space in Tudor England, and the figure of the school as the family of England’s future citizens was disseminated in a proto-national school system. By resituating St Paul’s school within a plan for national education and by effectively abolishing the Boy Bishop festival as a vestige of Catholic superstition, Henry VIII made the rhetoric of English schooling more monologic, more centralized, and more overtly aimed at producing socially useful literate subjects. The increasing social power of lay education and literacy also reaccented St Paul’s educational mission. In 1510, St Paul’s was referred to as the ‘Jesus school’ and the ‘Virgin’s school’, but after 1550, it was called ‘Colet’s school’. Sometime prior to 1562, the wall icon of the Boy Jesus was removed from the school, and around 1615 (when Milton was a St Paul’s schoolboy) a bust of Colet was put in its place. Increasingly secularized schooling may have subordinated Christian piety to State and ruling class ideology, but that just directed schooling’s moral discourse to the same ends by different means. The emphasis was still on preparing biliterate, well-mannered male citizens with cultivated literacy and a sense of social usefulness. And to be sure, St Paul’s students took their acquired literacies in many different directions, not all of them in the service of the nation of God. But by removing the Boy Bishop festival and images of the Boy Jesus from the school, later school overseers purified and retexted the educational space for their own ends. ‘What is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way’.127 Institutional memory can be, is already, rewritten. At which point, St Paul’s foundational discourse ceased to be a plateau and entered history as a repressed transgression, perhaps to be read again.

127 

Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. by Prenowitz, p. 19.

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ne aim of writing this book has been to locate, or relocate, later medieval writing within a general understanding of multilingualism, textuality, and language ideology. Later medieval literacies reveal how different writers, readers, communities, and textualities blurred and disrupted many of the normative and functional stratifications of Latin and ‘vernaculars’. Latin and the ver­naculars, along with Hebrew and Arabic, occupied mobile positions within different sociolinguistic and literate networks, with different centress of gravity and authority. Latin continued to function as a normative code and a language ideology governing grammaticality and proper sensemaking, even as vernacular writings became more prevalent and prestigious. But increasingly, Latin’s status as a restricted and elite learned discourse or as the arbiter of grammaticality and writability was destabilized by new and different Latin users and vernacular literate contexts. As the previous chapters have shown, new kinds of literate people sometimes adopted the traditional authority of Latin discourse, but sometimes they did not or they retexted Latin writing within multilingual dis­ course, as in Middle English charms or macaronic poems. When vernacular liter­ ates mixed or poached on Latin discourse, they participated in Latin literacy but with different, sometimes transgressive, goals and beliefs. This book contributes to a critical social history of writing and literacy. Numbers and critical mass matter, but I have focused less on the demographics of growing literate consciousness among different social groups and more on what I take to be the significant relations between Latin and vernacular literacies: how multi­lingual literacies destabilized language ideology in the later Middle Ages, how functional boundaries between languages were blurred or became more fluid, enabling or requiring more people to participate in literate communities and exchanges across different languages.

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Many kinds of medieval writing — poetry, drama, glosses, devotional writing, interpretive commentary, grammar, philosophy — contributed to the unsettling of language ideology and sociolinguistic order. In different genres and codes, writers mixed languages and varieties to create creole writing; they theorized grammatica across languages; they shifted between Latin and the vernacular in hyperliterate discourses.1 Hyperliteracy and multilingual writing undermined many of the received cultural binaries which modern readers sometimes continue to maintain as historical facts about the Middle Ages: Latina/vulgus, elite/popular, sacred/profane, clerical/lay, private/public, oral/written. As we have seen, Ovid was read in different reading formations which presumed, prohibited, or produced different readers and subjects, and different medieval ‘Ovids’. Scripture and devotional texts, too, were more and more desired by and available to new readers in the later Middle Ages in Latin as well as vernacular versions. Sometimes readers engaged with Latin texts in vernacular versions with framing commentary, as in the Ovide moralisé, Christine de Pizan’s Épistre Othéa, or glossed Bibles. When these canonical texts circulated as retexts in different languages, or in multilingual texts with textual reframing, they brought different kinds of readers and writers into contact or contest within the literate network and produced heterogeneous readings alongside mainstream readings. This interplay between dominant and counter discourses challenged traditional clerical and social power and questioned or retexted received interpretations, theological understanding, and established social doxa (especially the Church’s). Another argument threaded through this book has been the way different writers and readers made themselves up or were made up by specific textualities and social literacy networks. Consider the literate lives of two fifteenth-century women, Margaret Paston (1423?–84) and Laura Cereta (1469–99). They illustrate the semiotic complexity and unstable yet powerful social meanings of writing and reading in multilingual contexts in the later Middle Ages. Cereta and Paston were literate within multilingual situations which included Latin discourses and at least one vernacular, but they constructed different literate identities and produced different kinds of writing through the ways they composed and interpreted texts. Initially, at least, each woman’s reading community was small, defined primarily in terms of family connections or intimate reading groups, although Cereta also deliberately and consciously wrote for a wider humanist readership. The women’s writing lives illustrate new pathways within textual culture available to lay people in the later Middle Ages. Materially and procedurally, 1 

See Amsler, ‘Jakobson’s Dominant’.

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many of their literate behaviours were not radically different from those of many lay gentry and urban middle class men of the time. But we can’t talk about the medieval women’s literacies without also taking into account their class and social status and the fact that their participation as women in what were otherwise normative literate activities was itself destabilizing to late medieval literate order (for example, Kempe and other female dissenting preachers, Christine de Pizan as a writer of moral authority). Starting with literacy as practice, we see how Cereta and Paston acquired and used Latin and vernacular literacies for different social functions and contexts: for autobiography, land management among the gentry, devotions, public intellectual argument by lay people and clergy, public recognition, and creating and sustaining female sociotextual communities. Their different relations to Latin texts and to public authority, as well as their gendered positions as literate women capable of producing texts which produce real world effects and are read and responded to, suggest how the later medieval literate archive exceeded earlier traditional boundaries. Laura Cereta was the oldest daughter of a well-to-do attorney and magistrate from Brescia and a mother with landed connections going back several generations. Although Laura was sickly, her father insisted she learn Latin as well as Italian literacy, and at age seven, she was sent, like other upper-middle class Italian girls, to a convent to be educated by a nun in Latin grammar. At age nine she was brought home, but she soon returned to the convent school and her female grammar teacher. At eleven, her father again brought her home, in part to care for her younger siblings. But she continued her studies on her own and quickly became a skilled Latinist and a passionate student of classical Latin literature. She often studied late into the night after the household was asleep. Cereta became her father’s amanuensis and later was active in humanist intellectual circles. She married at sixteen and was widowed at eighteen. After her husband’s death, she wrote numerous Latin letters to family, close friends, and potential patrons on a wide range of topics, including peace, women’s education, women’s predicament in marriage, and her troubled relations with her mother and husband. Eventually, Cereta, like Cicero, Petrarch, and other humanist writers, collected her eightytwo epistolae familiares and one satirical dialogue into a manuscript to circulate; although the letters had circulated among a small group of readers, the collected text was never printed nor did it receive wider reading until much later. Laura Cereta was a biliterate, educated, upper-middle class urban woman whose written Latin compositions created a destabilizing subjectivity and ­textual performativity by which she publicly intervened on key topics in humanist discourse. Although she was well educated and ambitious, Cereta was still among a minority of women literates in society, even by fifteenth-century standards

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in northern Italy. Despite her friendships with some leading humanists of the time, she keenly felt the sting of public criticism simply for being a publicly literate, Latin-writing woman. Rather than trying to assimilate to dominant male discourse, Cereta’s work is marked by her bending of masculine humanist Latin vocabulary and tropes, the female-oriented topics she addressed in terms of social status and cultural power, and the style and strategies by which she conducted her arguments. She articulated a distinctly dissenting subjectivity, as daughter, wife, and unruly Latin literate intellectual in the predominantly male humanist discourse. The hostile attitude she records toward educating women, even among socalled enlightened humanist intellectuals, helps us calibrate the implications of Erasmus and Colet’s regendering of St Paul’s schoolboys as virginal, tender babes. Clearly literate in Italian and elite Latin, Cereta desired to pursue Latin studies in order to join the intellectual conversation with other educated humanists. She read Latin authors and scripture for style and content and composed learned, engaged arguments on topics about which she held strong, decidedly minority views. For instance, in a letter to Santa Pelegrina, probably a nun with whom she had fallen out and who was perhaps based at the abbey in Chiari where Cereta was educated, Cereta reworks the Ciceronian and humanist ideal of amicitia (friendship, patronage) to carve out social space for female friendships and lit­ erate community: But if you have anything to say that would refute my complaints, I am asking you, trusting in your wisdom, to write it in a long and elaborate letter (ornatissimis litteris). Still, I want this whole matter to be put to rest, and I want this plea of mine to succeed. Only the truth should be taken into consideration, since in our situation it is the case that each one of us should aim to teach, not to defeat the other. For what can it mean for a friend to be victorious over her friend?2

Writing Latin together, rather than speaking Italian together face to face, is how Cereta hoped the two women could repair their friendship and reconnect with one another as intellectuals and friends. In another letter, she criticized the Bishop of Brescia for not taking better care of the city’s cathedral and its relics and possessions. Elsewhere, she expressed scepticism as to the stated aims and merits of war and sadness at the loss of so many Italian and German lives in the 1487 conflict.3 Cereta shaped her Latin literacy, after acquiring the skills for construing and composing sophisticated Latin text, by retexting many of the received terms and concepts of humanist discourse. That is, she reterritorialized a received dis­ 2  3 

Cereta, Collected Letters, ed. by Robin, p. 137. See Cereta, Collected Letters, ed. by Robin, pp. 46–48, 161–64.

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course within a different, female subject position. She nurtured her relations with other literate, learned women while she also disputed with contemporary male intellectuals, past writers such as Boccaccio, and some women, who claimed that women were intellectually or morally inferior to men or should not be given access to higher learning.4 Whereas many later medieval women’s literacies were grounded in affective devotional reading, Cereta’s biliteracy was driven by her devotion to Latin letters and the humanist ideal of classical or Ciceronian Latinity. She was literally performing a female differend in a male Latin discursive space. She used available Latin vocabulary differently to advocate widening social power and literacy education for women, or at least for women of a certain rank. She specifically identified herself as a scriptrix, used agricultural and harvest metaphors to describe her reading and writing in bodily, emotional terms, and disputed claims that women were incapable of or unsuited to higher reasoning and advanced literacy. Like Christine de Pizan in many of her writings, Cereta framed many of her letters as re-readings of the available archive of Latin and vernacular writing on women. She presented herself not as an exceptional individual but as an example of what women in general are capable of when given the same educational opportunities as men. In that sense, Cereta was very much writing in Latin as part of a collective, even if that collective was only abstractly identified (women) and not all members were able to read and write Latin. Cereta’s writing performs the differend of multilingual literacy. Her letters, although read within a restricted community at the time, represent a significant reshaping of the received textual archive as articulated in Latin and vernacular texts. The rural gentry woman Margaret Paston might seem to be the antithesis of Laura Cereta, but both were literate, letter-writing women, although with diff­erent textual and multilingual affiliations. Margaret Paston’s 104 letters are in Middle English, not Latin, and primarily address domestic and legal matters related to maintaining, defending, and managing the Paston family land holdings or managing the sometimes controversial romantic and personal relations of family members, principally her and John Paston’s seven children. Margaret Paston dictated her letters to several lay and clerical male scribes affiliated with the Paston household. Like Cereta, she wrote consistently for a restricted range of readers, that is, her husband and two eldest sons. But unlike Cereta, Margaret Paston wrote in her native vernacular and never intended to collect her letters nor imagined herself to be writing ultimately for a wider reading audience. She 4 

See, for example, Cereta, Collected Letters, ed. by Robin, pp. 74–80, 81–82.

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was dictating and writing ‘to the moment’ and often under great physical and emotional pressure. Margaret Paston’s letters, written over most of her adult life (1441–82), reveal her shrewd handling of her family’s affairs and the estate’s legal affairs, involving many kinds of documents in Latin and English. Throughout Paston’s lifetime, the family’s landed wealth and stability were uncertain and sometimes under threat of armed takeover. Sometimes, she and her family were forcibly evicted from dwellings or prohibited by hostile lords or neighbouring gentry from receiving land rents from tenants. She and her lawyer husband were in frequent written contact while he was away in London on family business, which was often during their married life. Whereas Cereta skilfully composed eloquent and impassioned Latin critiques of misogynist arguments, Margaret Paston, based on her surviving letters, was adept at providing compelling and detailed Middle English narratives and reports on significant conversations. Just as important, she was skilled at sorting through the tangle of Latin and English writs, deeds, waivers, and other documentary formulae required for estate management. Her letters provide rich evidence for how legal texts were handled in a collaborative literate context. Paston depended on her vernacular letters to and from her husband and sons, and therefore on her scribes, to maintain a textual network of communication and decision making upon which the family’s socio-political status and economic security depended. Comparing Cereta’s and Paston’s writing and literate lives with Margery Kempe’s, we discover a number of commonalities and some important differ­ ences which partly map the literacies and reading formations among lay people of different regions and social backgrounds in the later Middle Ages. So far as I can tell, all three women received literacy instruction from parents, clergy, and/ or female religious at home or in religious houses or both. Paston and Kempe continued to rely on male collaborators and scribes to read and write their ver­ nacular texts. Clergy made up Kempe’s circle of collaborators, while Paston relied on at least one friar and several literate laymen affiliated with her household. Cereta, on the other hand, was deeply involved in individual Latin studies and wrote primarily within the humanist genre of the familiar letter for a small but public intellectual community of men and women. Kempe’s use of Latin was determined by her familiarity with liturgy and a few devotional writings, notably those by Rolle and Ps-Bonaventure; Cereta relentlessly studied classical Latin literature, especially Cicero, Virgil, Catullus, and Persius, to judge from references in her letters. While Kempe shared Cereta’s desire to textualize her life story, the two women differed as to their motives, strategies, and textual formats for life writing. Cereta argued in Latin prose on behalf of women’s education and public

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reputation within the context of humanist intellectual discourse. She also, no less importantly, wrote Latin texts to gain recognition and social capital for herself as a learned female writer who exemplified what many women could accomplish if given the opportunity. Kempe, on the other hand, used her literacy network to read religious texts collaboratively and dictate her life story in English to at least two scribes. She wanted to textualize her life and establish her public identity as a devout visionary woman whose example could help reform the contemporary Church. In a sense, Kempe was just as concerned with public recognition as was Cereta, but in her Booke Kempe’s motives are cast in terms of what Jesus tells her to do in her visions or her desire for improved piety or what a friendly friar entreats her to do in order to show others the way to proper salvation. Whereas Cereta was trying to intervene in learned Latin discourse, Kempe’s literacy was affiliated with more widely available vernacular and Latin phrases and tags and with a Church reform project which she was inside and outside of simultaneously. She wore bits of Latin text as part of her performative piety, just as others used Latin writing as charms or sacred ‘things’, textual objects which were thought not just to have meaning but to be effective as written objects. Unlike Cereta and Kempe, Paston was not concerned with public recognition in her writing. She used vernacular personal narrative, informed observation, and a working knowledge of Latin legal discourse primarily to support her advice and information as she managed the Paston family estates. For Paston, writing was as much about action as about reporting. As an estate and household manager, she used her letters to advise her husband, initiate actions, and establish criteria for decision making in both legal and personal family matters. Unlike the writings of Kempe and Cereta, the vernacular letters of Margaret Paston were highly pragmatic texts concerned with day-to-day business and maintaining a network of support among the East Anglian gentry. The functions and situations within which these literate women used and composed texts were constitutive of their literacies: for autobiography, land management among the gentry, devotions, religious doxa, public intellectual argument by lay people and clergy, public recognition, and creating and sustaining female sociotextual communities. Style, syntax, and vocabulary were part of their literate performativity. Cereta’s Latin compositions are filled with the elaborate metaphors, metonymies, and verbal intertextualities characteristic of early humanist Latin discourse, but her prose is much more direct and straightforwardly representational than the writing we earlier read by Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and the Mankynde writer. Neither Paston’s nor Cereta’s writing shows the sort of language mixing or grammatical transgressions we

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found in Mankynde or some Middle English lyrics and which shaped the ideological struggle over Latin as the incarnation or linguistic reference norm of grammatica. In this respect, the women’s written English or Latin is orthodox, straight, classically representational. More distinctive of Paston, Kempe, Cereta, and Christine de Pizan as female writers was the ways they chose to create gendered identities for themselves as part of their linguistic and textual performances and how they textualized their affective and bodily responses to visions, experience, and intellectual or domestic work. Paston often represented herself not only as a lone woman under siege or in physical danger but also as a woman who knew how to meet force with force, order arrows for protection, and locate the best place to buy cloth in London. Cereta frequently accomplished her self-fashioning by adopting female semantic marking (scriptrix, furatrix) or portraying her intellectual passion and study in affective ways and in relation to normative female roles: I have no leisure time for my own writing and studies unless I use the nights as productively as I can. I sleep very little. Time is a terribly scarce (parsimonia) com­ modity for those of us who spend our skills and labor equally on our families and our own work. But by staying up all night, I become a thief (furatrix) of time, sequestering a space from the rest of the day, so that after working [reading, writ­ ing] by lamplight for much of the night, I can go back to work [embroidering] in the morning.5

Cereta expresses the conflict between her Latin studies and the work expected of her as a woman in the household or in the community in affective as well as programmatic terms. Her social position and gender as a literate woman are never suppressed in her writing. In addition to examining multilingual writing in poetic and commentary texts and exploring how literacy makes people up, a third thread in this book has been to analyse how multilingualism destabilized Latin language ideology. A crit­ical socio­linguistics of literacy focuses on language mixing, power, and writ­ing and reading across languages, specifically in written discourse. Lan­ guage mixing and multilingualism have been and continue to be worldwide phenomena, more normal than exceptional in societies. In later medieval writing and literacies, multilingualism was constitutive not only of individual texts but of linguistic domains, in translation and learned contexts as well as in other social contexts which depended on or were shaped by texts. Many of the texts considered in this book instantiate multilingual writing; many also represent or 5 

Cereta, Collected Letters, ed. by Robin, pp. 31–32.

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critically reflect on what multilingualism meant in later medieval society and how multilingual literacies made people up within the structuring structures of sociolinguistic, cultural, and religious order. Lay people’s growing desire for and access to privileged language and discourse, especially Latin or learned discourse, constituted one of the major shifts in the cultural balance of later medieval society. Sometimes that involved vernacular retexts of Latin texts. Other times, it involved lay people’s acquisition of some kind of literate competence in Latin. Still other times, it simply meant that lay people wanted to be able to read and/ or write texts and to use them within particular communicative networks. Both Cereta and Paston were closely involved with Latin discourse, one more elaborately than the other, in different ways and for different purposes. Hermann of Scheda first acquired Latin literacy not within the assimilating context of conversion but as an alternative to his biliteracy (German and Hebrew) and as part of his questioning of Christian readings of Jewish scripture. As I argued in Chapters Two and Six, language study after about 1050 was divided among pedagogical grammar, which instructed vernacular speakers in Latin literacy and speaking, and theoretical (speculative) grammar, which focused on the causes of imposition, modes of signification, and the relations among language, concepts, and reality. Medieval linguistic theory was developed primarily in commentaries on Aristotle and Priscian and treatises on universal grammar. Latina was taken as the embodiment of Language itself. The relations between grammatical theory and grammatical pedagogy had an important effect on everyday and poetic perceptions of language mixing, usage, and sensemaking. Within this complex textual field of theory and practice there exist several counter linguistic discourses, combining pragmatic and cognitive analyses of constructions, word classes, usage and semantics in grammatical discourse or exploring linguistic theory and literate versions of language and language mixing in poetic or dramatic texts. Peter Helias (in his Summa super Priscianum), William Ockham, and other grammarians and philosophers of language outlined new theories of language structure and language change to account for what they called the ‘enlarging’ of language through derivations, pragmatic theories of meaning, new types of constructions, and semantic expansion. These grammarians and philosophers framed grammaticality and language theory in terms of the changing nature of Latin and vernaculars and in terms of the interaction between Latin and vernaculars. Together with poetic writing which interrogated or struggled for literate authority, these texts constituted a discursive rupture within the textual field of grammatica. In texts such as Helias’s Summa, the Ancrene Wisse, vernacular translations of religious writing, or personal letters, congruitas, normally keyed to conventionally

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ordered, formal linguistic constructions, began to be defined according to a different kind of grammaticality, one determined more by pragmatic contexts and reader or listener assumptions. Later medieval notions of grammaticality created a larger space for usage and tended to resonate with at least one of Peirce’s descriptions (1906) of the ‘dynamic’ or ‘dynamical object’: ‘the dynamical object does not mean something out of the mind. It means something forced upon the mind in perception, but including more than perception reveals. It is an object of actual Experience.’6 For Peirce, the dynamic object emerges as a cognized some-thing, with both spatial and temporal relations to the ‘immediate object’, which is ‘the Object as the Sign represents it’.7 The ‘dynamical object’ cannot be represented in itself but only signified indexically or gesturally. We cognize or recognize objects or concepts through the semiotic mediation of representations of the dynamic object which ‘causes’ us to represent and express our perceptions or intuitions as an immediate (in-mediate) object. As we acquire or are confronted with new information or semiotic interpretants or experiences or texts over time, we can — in fact must — revise or transform our representations of the dynamic object or else maintain received appearances and meanings through conceptual and institutional ideology. Understanding, then, begins with the perception of the difference, the gap, between the immediate and the dynamic object. Texts and literate communities are dynamic objects and social spaces without hard borders. Language use ‘causes’ us to construct grammar and semantic criteria and syntactic, morphological forms and contexts which account for utterances as meaningful, not just ‘correct’. Those late medieval grammatical theories with strong pragmatic or usagebased criteria outline the ground upon which much language mixing and hybrid language usage occurred in medieval writing. A pragmatic approach to Grammatica or Latina, the linguistic system which constitutes acceptable or meaningful utterance, takes account not only of the speaker or writer’s intention or abstract language structure but also the audience’s understanding, contexts for usage, semantic changes over time or space, and readers’ responses. In multilingual writing, grammaticality works across as much as within languages. Multilingual literacies create textual fields where language theory is revised as literate practice in multimodal contexts. The poetic, autobiographical, devotional, and everyday texts we have considered are not just representations of medieval literacy but textual acts and performances, immediate objects which prompt us to consider 6  7 

Draft of a Letter to Lady Welby, 9 March 1906 in Semiotic and Significs, ed. by Hardwick, p. 197. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. by Hartshorne and Weiss, iv, 536.

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them as dynamic objects which initiate an open-ended chain of signifiers, which then depends on readers and users for their meanings and signification. As I have argued, by 1100 Latin was no one’s Primary Discourse or home language, although people did learn Latin from private tutors or parents as well as from priests and nuns in grammar schools and advanced schools. In the later Middle Ages, there were different and functional degrees of proficiency in Latin or vernacular literacy, differences which encoded social power and created social contests. Functional load intersected with vernacular literacies and speech in contact situations, which might be geographical, institutional, sociocultural, or on the page.8 Latin grammar was a dividing practice or stood in for Universal Grammar as Grammatica or Latina, but peoples’ increased access to both vernacular and Latin literacies created new pathways to meaningful utterance using more than one language or discourse at a time. Given its ideological and institutional functions, Latinity was never far from any medieval vernacular written discourse, even if Latinity was contested, suppressed, or coopted by nonclerical or non-learned readers and writers. Not all language mixing or writing across languages can be described as vernacularization or translation. As the audiences for Latin and vernacular writing expanded, so too did the kinds of interpretations and ways of reading texts. Dissemination fed heteroglossia, and vice versa. Medieval multilingual literacies thus challenge several assumptions embedded in formulations of ‘diglossia’ (Ferguson) and ‘extended diglossia’ (Fishman), formulations which have been at the foundation of modern sociolinguistics.9 Ferguson and Fishman point to the functional stratification of languages or language varieties in a speech community and show how that stratifying works ideologically to convert functional difference into power and prestige. However, both seem to adopt relatively restricted and homogenous notions of literacy, regarding it primarily as inscription or print that codifies an H language or variety through formal schooling and institutional discourses, thereby excluding L languages or varieties as ‘vernacular’ or ‘dialect’ and therefore unwritable. But, as we have seen, later medieval literacies were much more varied than Ferguson or Fishman’s descriptions of diglossia allow. In the later Middle Ages, older, more restrictive definitions of literatus were being redescribed ad hoc and in situ. Medieval literate networks or communities were defined principally by the ways people could access and use or appropriate texts, including how writers and readers mixed languages, acquired access to and competence in Latin, one 8  9 

See the classic and still indispensable statement in Bäuml, ‘Varieties and Consequences’. Ferguson, ‘Diglossia’; Fishman, ‘Bilingualism with and without Diglossa’.

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or more vernaculars, or both, and also by the ways writing, reading, listening to, and handling texts enabled people to arrange their worlds, make decisions, and gain, seize, or maintain power through textual authority. A late medieval literate network could be as small as Margery Kempe, her two clerical readers and translators, and her scribes working with English and a few Latin texts to produce a single autobiographical narrative. Or a literate network could be as elaborate and extended as a commentary discourse on Scripture or Ovid in English, French, and/or Latin composed by multiple writers and read across several centuries. Later medieval notions of ‘authorship’, not exactly equivalent to auctor, were variable; later in print culture people appropriated some but not all medieval notions of authorship as their ancestors. Moreover, later medieval literacies in multilingual contexts present a very different perspective on language mixing, textuality, and grammar from what Ferguson described as a ‘relatively stable language situation’ in which a prestige variety or language (H) is established by formal education, writability (grammaticality), literary status, a formal register, and formal contexts. In the contentious world of religious dissent, whether Latin or vernacular versions of scripture and commentary were prestigious and central to the community’s identity depends on which textual community we are looking at. * * * The Latin tradition of the accessus ad auctores was an important framing discourse within academic and elite literacy and textual criticism. As we have seen, medieval accessus provided readers with an introduction to or way of approaching canonical authors in the grammar curriculum. Rather than repeating the text to which it was attached in manuscript, the accessus established key markers of textual identification and interpretive contexts to guide interpreters. But of course readers could simply skip the accessus, read against the grain it prescribed, or bend and twist the accessus categories to other meanings. Suppose the accessus were deterritorialized, then reterritorialized at the end of a book, this book, and retexted as a closing. Who is the author? Principally, myself as an utterer and inscriber (something more than a data entry person or keyboardist). But academic writing is intertextual, cross-referenced, and interpersonal, and quotations, formulas, and contexts signify fields of inquiry and textual knowledge within dialogical discourse. I write as a literary critic, linguist, theorist, cultural critic, teacher, teacher of teachers, Latinist, language activist. Foucault’s question, What is an author?, reworks the medieval accessus question by opening up the name as a signifier. Many medieval texts were unattached to named authors. Most involved

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some sort of literate collaboration among different actants, contributing different skills or functions to the manuscript production. In print and postprint cultures, named authors are more ubiquitous and with greater commodity value, but text production is no less collaborative. I am an author-function in so far as the name of the author locates the meanings in the book around a consistent proper name. But this book’s discourse, theoretical framework, and actants are plural, not singular, texts within an imagined text, just as there are literacies, not a singular Literacy. Eclecticism is prismatic and dynamic, nuanced and appropriate to practise, not incoherent. What is the subject? This book focuses on literacy, textuality, and language mixing in the later Middle Ages, but its ‘subject’ is textual knowledge and textual culture. Literacy is the category name for textual practices. For one reader, the book is too ‘theoretical’. For another, it is too ‘linguistic’. For yet another, it is too much ‘about’ literary texts. This book attempts to articulate those discourses to one another. What is the author’s intention? I have questioned closely assumptions about the modernity of literacy in relation to preprint modes of reading, writing, and using texts. I also bring together linguistic and literary inquiry within an historicized reading of textual practices. My aim is to understand writing as textual work, ideological as well as counter-hegemonic, and the cultural forms to which texts subscribe. What is the utility of the text? I have my intentions and hopes, but the text is the reader’s, and you can use it as you want or need to. I mean that. Often, medieval accessus treated the question of utilitas didactically in terms of ethics: How does the canonical text to be read contribute to the reader’s ethical education or development? Questions of language theory, grammaticality, textualities, and literate subjectivity are very much concerned with ethics and social justice in that they underwrite many of our notions of how we make people up, how we value people according to their language use, place in literate culture, performance in school exercises, and so on. Moreover, as many literate medieval women’s experiences attest, who can read and write is not necessarily in synch with dominant culture’s notion of who should read and write. Critically opening up the domains of medieval literacies includes recovering important vernacular and Latin writing among non-elite groups and reassessing the roles of texts and text making for creating and sustaining medieval communities of practice, with dissenting and authoritative voices, political or economic agents, and creators of new poetic voices and forms. Critical sociolinguistics must keep open to the possibilities for excess, emancipation, and creative nonconformity with literate and linguistic forms.

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What is the title? Not a trivial question. A book’s title, its name, is part of its given or presumed location within the textual archive and also part of its commodification and circulation. The fact that many medieval texts, especially lyric poems, did not have official titles and the fact that many titles of texts were embedded within the framing apparatus of incipits and explicits suggest how medieval writing was not always composed with an eye toward its future place in the textual archive. Or that medieval writing was already different to the archive within which it was produced. Textual production is asynchronous with textual receptions (and I mean the plural), despite our critical and cultural investments in authorial voice and the writer’s control of audience and design. I would have called this book Retext, but the editors liked the title Affective Literacies better. We collaborate and retext. We make, write, read, and remake. To what part of philosophy (intellectual discourse) does the text belong? Good question. Literary criticism in a semiotic context is not just reading or interpreting a text. Theories of grammar, linguistic meaning, and text format have everything to do with how we read texts or how we reread our reading of texts. It is not useful to separate literary history from criticism and theory. What is the relation between literary criticism, literary theory, and literary history now?10 Balancing theory and practical criticism has been a debate within research and writing in the humanities at least since the 1960s and the Structuralist Controversy symposium at The Johns Hopkins University (1966). It’s been an even more contentious and boundary-marking debate within medieval studies. Among other historicists, Alistair Minnis has claimed many contemporary readings of medieval writing (mostly literature) are insufficiently historicist in that they adopt or apply to medieval texts modern literary and cultural theories ‘which have no historical validity as far as medieval literature is concerned’.11 Clearly, this book has closely examined the medieval literate past and practices, but my critical historicist interpretations are framed and fortified by, indeed emerge from, contemporary theories of textuality, literacy, and discourse. I have been concerned not only to take the theory door into our understanding of medieval cultures and textualities but also to rearticulate medieval multilingualism and literacies to modern understandings of reading, writing, and language. Medieval studies has a great deal to say about both historicism and construc­ tions of modernity, then and now, but how to say it, in what register, to what imagined audience, is not entirely clear. We can’t cordon off the modernity, 10  11 

See Spearing’s recent statement on this question in Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, pp. 1–36. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, p. 1.

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the contemporaneity, the theoretical import of reading in any era from our understanding of whatever constructions of the past we retext and their relation to the present or the future of reading and knowledge. The Middle Ages, as defined by the Renaissance humanists, was a long period deeply involved with sign relations and signifying practices and with complex notions of manuscript textuality and textual culture. Peirce and Jakobson both expressed their debts to medieval philosophers and semioticians. Perhaps it’s time medieval semiotics became a starting place rather than an ‘application’ of modern theory. The turn to the study of ‘medievalism’ has been no less contentious. Some modernist scholars and readers see the rise of medievalism studies as outclassed medievalists poaching on modern territory. On more than one occasion, I have heard scholars and critics of post-1600 literatures respond to medievalists talking about modernity by saying ‘Why should I support some medievalist trying to retool himself just because his period has become irrelevant?’ On the contrary, the modernity of the Middle Ages and the medievalism of Modernity remain open and very relevant questions, requiring critical theory and careful reading across temporal and academic borders and a re-examination of our assumptions about past and present literacies in post-print, digital contexts. What are the causes [causae] of the text? What motivates the text to become realized? The question is not unlike Peirce’s problem of the relation of the Immediate Object to the Dynamic Object. Formally, this book is organized as a set of interrelated chapters discussing different aspects of later medieval literacy and language as theory and practice. Efficiently, it has been produced partly as a compilation of smaller pieces of writing, partly as a continuing reflection on key questions in sociolinguistics and semiotics. Materially, this book is a written linguistic object referring primarily to other written linguistic objects, but like those other texts, it depends on readers to activate the material elements into meaningful signifiers and connected discourse. The book can’t make sense on its own. Finally, there is no finally. This book goes into material and social circulation as a particular kind of linguistic practice. Its life as a text, as something more than paper or electrons on the screen, is what you and I do with it. When the book becomes a ‘published’ text, I become one of you and it is one of the nodes, sites of possible contact and exchange, within the archive we have. Is it really possible to conclude the book if there is no moment when one becomes fully Literate, if there is no final Literacy, if textuality is a contingent and open system? Con-cludere (L. ‘close completely’): to bring to an end; to determine, resolve, or reach agreement on. What sort of agreement or understanding have we come to, and how would we know, being spatially and temporally discontinuous readers? I have been pressing the case that textuality is a contingently open system

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of affiliations and activities. What and how we read and write, with what codes, strategies, and sympathetic or indifferent affects, with what distances or retexting, make up social meaning within a network community of available structures and utterances. Here has been one way to reconsider and retext those claims. The book is always unfinished, not yet.

Bibliography

Manuscripts and Archival Documents Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 315 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 35 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 1. 39 Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 12.7 Chicago, Newberry Library, Vault Case, MS 183 Chicago, Newberry Library, Vault Case, MS Folio 179 Dublin, Trinity College, MS 270 Durham, Durham Cathedral Library, MS C. vi. 26 London, British Library, MS Additional 12195 London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina A. x London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C. xiii London, British Library, MS Harley 4431 London, British Library, MS Sloane 122 London, British Library, MS Sloane 2584 London, British Library, MS Sloane 2593 Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS N 254 sup. Oxford, All Souls College, MS 82 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 354 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1462 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 819 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Buchanan e. 3 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1

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Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. bib. d. 10 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. misc. c. 66 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lat. th. e. 30 Oxford, Lincoln College, MS 27 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds français 606 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 7998 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds latin 8253 Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 489 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS EL 26 C 9 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 26061 St Peterburg, Rossii’skaia natsional’naia biblioteka / National Library of Russia (formerly Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library), MS Lat. F. V. I.3

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Index nominum

Abelard, Peter: 71–73, 88, 145 and autobiography: 156 and Hebrew: 151, 176 Historia calamitatum: 260, 262 and Jews: 179–80, 184 Sic et non: xxi, 40–42, 93 Ælfric of Eynsham: 94 Alain de Lille: 259, 270, 328, 332 Ancrene wisse: 35, 118, 123–24, 125, 133, 371 and affective literacy: 110–16, 147, 202 use of Latin: 29, 51, 62 Anderson, Benedict: 48 Andrew of St Victor: 175, 185 and Hebrew: 151, 164, 189, 190 on Hebrew scripture as littera: 160, 178, 180–82, 184 Anselm of Canterbury: 116–17, 118, 125, 207 Aristotle: 67, 73, 93, 105, 198, 371 commentaries on De interpretatione: 72, 74, 292 Arnulf of Orléans: 206–07, 208–09, 211, 224 Arundel, Thomas (Archbishop of Canterbury): 16, 29, 79 De heretico comburendo: 254–56 Augustine of Hippo: 44, 118, 122, 131, 167, 168, 196 and autobiography: 165, 169, 170, 188 on silent reading: 104, 107–09 Bacon, Roger: 68–69, 151, 176, 182 Barthes, Roland: 36, 88–89, 106, 130 Berchorius (Bersuire), Petrus Ovidius moralizatus (De formis figurisque deorum): 211, 217, 220–26

Bernard of Utrecht: 241 Bibbesworth, Walter: 254 Bokenham, Osbern: 198 Bonaventure on modes of writing: 39–40, 43 and Pseudo-Bonaventure: 368 Bosquet, Alain: 47 Bourdieu, Pierre: 8, 20 and Jean Claude Passeron: 326–27 Camille, Michael: 92 Campin, Robert: 124–25, 127, 133, 141 Cereta, Laura: 365–70 Cerquiglini, Bernard: 42, 44 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 21, 38, 43, 51, 52, 194, 203, 204, 214, 226, 227, 239, 264, 278 and dialect: 292–93 glosses in Canterbury Tales: 99 Legend of Philomela (Legend of Good Women): 240, 243–50 Merchant’s Tale: 129 Prioress’s Tale: 324 representations of writing and reading in: 2, 120, 122, 143 Chaytor, H. J.: 6 Christine de Pizan: 194, 240, 245, 248, 365, 367, 369, 370 and Ovidian narratives: 203–04, 215, 226–27, 250 Épistre Othéa: 233–39, 364 representations of writing and reading in: 2, 119 (Fig. 1), 120 (Fig. 2), 121–23, 128–29, 130, 138 Colet, John: 303–62 (passim) Curtius, Ernst R.: 6–7, 8

416 Index nominum

Dante Alighieri Convivio: 85–87, 89, 90, 93, 97, 100 De vulgari eloquentia: 80–84, 150 Inferno, Canto 5: 144–47 De Bury, Richard: xiii–xiv, xv, xvi, xix, xxi, 2 de Certeau, Michel: 9, 19, 186 Deleuze, Gilles (and Felix Guattari): 32, 106, 307, 347 Derrida, Jacques: 31, 36, 39, 92–93, 101, 194–95, 330, 362 Dives and Pauper: 51, 257–58 Douglas, Mary: 273, 330 Duffy, Eamon: 274 Dymmok, Roger: 18–19, 27, 28, 30, 257 Erasmus, Desiderius: 303–62 (passim) and founding of St Paul’s: 303, 305–06, 313 Concio de puero Iesu: De civilitate: 310 De ratione studii: 304, 310 on status of grammar teachers: 317–19 poems for St Paul’s school: 304, 314 Ferguson, Charles: 49–50, 373–74 Fishman, Joshua: 49–50, 373–74 Foucault, Michel: 9, 36, 52 and archive: 30–31, 37, 193–95 author-function and medieval authorship: 39, 374 on spaces and power: 303, 312–13 ‘ritualisation of the word’: 304 Gee, James Paul: xix–xx, 1, 149, 304 Genette, Gérard: 157–58, 277 Ghosh, Kantik: 256 Grandisson, John (Bishop of Exeter): 3 Grimestone, John: 93 Guillaume de Conches: 69–70, 90 Gundissalinas, Dominicus: 71, 81 Helias, Peter (Summa super Priscianum): 288 on congruitas: 73–76, 371 on figura: 77 theory of grammatica: 70–71, 296 Henry III (King of England): 28 Hermann of Scheda: 149–92 (passim) Hugh of St Victor: 200, 238, 284 and sensus literalis: 160, 175–78, 207 and ‘skipping reading’: 207

glosa v. commentum: 89–90, 100, 210 Hunt, Tony: 91 Isidore of Seville: 34–35, 199, 208 Jakobson, Roman: xviii–xix, 36, 377 John of Salisbury: 34–35 Kempe, Margery: 30, 42, 111, 253, 351, 365, 370 and affective literacy: 130–31 and collaborative literacy: 2, 4, 21, 258, 368–69, 374 and vernacular scripture: 28, 33 Latin usage: 262–70, 271, 278, 301, 368 Kilwardby, Robert commentary on Donatus maior: 76 commentary on Prisicanus minor: 68–69 on usus: 288 Kingston, Richard (Dean of St George’s Chapel, Windsor): 63 Knighton, Henry: 16–17, 29 Kristeva, Julia: 36–37 Laȝamon (Brut): 29–30, 43, 90, 94 Langland, William (Piers Plowman): 42 and lay Latin literacy: 55, 252–53 and multilingualism: 51, 62 Lanterne of Liȝt: 51, 257 Lily, William: 312, 317 grammar textbooks: 310, 324, 333, 334, 361 headmaster of St Paul’s: 308 Lugard, F. D. (Governor of Hong Kong): 7 Lyotard, Jean-François differend: 29, 44, 191, 260, 367 Mankynde: 282–301 Matthew of Vendôme: 77 Mills, Robert: 103 Mirk, John: 251 baptism and multilingualism: 59–61, 81, 269 Milroy, Leslie: 162–63 Newton, Humphrey: commonplace book: 21 illustration of wound on Christ’s side: 137n Nichols, Stephen: 103, 260

Index nominum

Nietzsche, Friedrich: 220 and grammar: 47 on ‘chain of reinterpretations’: xxiii–xxiv, 37–38 Ockham, William: 54 (Pseudo-Ockham): 71–72, 371 Ovid: xxiv, 40, 41, 59, 96, 194, 197 Amores and affective reading: 129, 146 and ‘marker model’: 3, 26, 38, 43 Heroides and congruitas: 76 Metamorphoses: 199–250 (passim) ‘Philomela’: 239–50 Ovide moralisé: 211, 227–33, 234, 239 Passau Anonymous: 16, 20 Paston family: 2, 13, 225 Margaret Paston as writer and reader: 2, 14, 364–65, 367–69, 370–71 Peirce, Charles Sanders: 377 ‘aggregate of effects’: 338 and indexical signs: 34 ‘dynamical object’: 135, 372 on abduction: 108–09 on ‘unlimited semiosis’: xxiii Philip de Harvengt: 53–54, 66 Pratt, Mary Louise ‘contact zone’: 153–54 Priscian: 33, 41, 75, 201, 323 Quintilian: 361 on reading: 104–05, 195, 197 on teaching: 317, 319–20, 321, 322, 324 vir bonus and eloquence: 356

417

Reynolds, Susan: 96–97 Richard of St Victor on sensus literalis: 38 relations with Jews:175, 180, 181 Rieger, James: 349–50 Robert of Melun: 87 Romance of Flamenca: 138, 143–44 Roman de la rose: 51, 201, 239, 259–62, 274, 291 Rupert of Deutz: 184–85 Samuels, Lisa: 5 Sartre, Jean-Paul: 343 Scribner, Sylvia (and Michael Cole): xvii Silverman, Hugh: 42 Somerset, Fiona: 56 Stock, Brian: 25, 27 Stork, Nancy: 91 Street, Brian: 101 Thomas of Erfurt: 74 Trefnant, John (Bishop of Hereford): 283–84 Vatican Mythographers First Vatican Mythographer: 241–42 Third Vatican Mythographer: 242–43 Villani, Giovanni: 11–12, 56–58 Waquet, Françoise: 47 Wieland, Gernot: 91 Wyclif, John: 17, 56 and vernacular scripture translation: 16, 28, 79, 254, 257 as auctor-function: 18–19, 27, 98, 256–57

Index rerum

Anglicized Latin; see Grammatica ‘As I went out on Yol Day’ (BL, MS Sloane 2593): 276–82 Charms as multilingual writing: 4, 66, 253, 259, 363, 369 in BL, MS Sloane 2584: 271–75 ‘Contact zone’ (Pratt): 150, 153–54, 156, 158, 172, 176, 186, 188, 191, 197, 301 ‘deterritorialization’, ‘reterritorialization’; see Textual practices Discourse and accessus ad auctores: 42, 198–99, 203– 06, 210, 215, 240–41, 245, 374–76 Borderland Discourse (Gee): xx, 147, 149–50, 152, 154, 176, 304 commentary discourse: xxi, xxiv, 22–27, 29, 30, 35, 39–40, 67, 87, 157, 160, 167, 171, 173, 175, 180–81, 183, 189, 190, 208, 241 and hyperliteracy: 41–45, 55 Dante on commentary discourse: 85–86 on Latin grammars: 67–68, 72, 74 on Ovid: 30, 190, 194, 195–97, 202, 205, 209–14, 216–22, 224, 226, 231, 233–34, 238, 242–43, 247, 248, 250 glossing discourse: xxi, xxiv, 2, 3, 5, 30–43 (passim), 62, 65, 67, 72, 78, 84–100, 103–04, 109, 112, 133, 135, 155, 172, 173, 197, 198, 203–11 (passim), 215–19 (passim), 225, 232–38, 245, 247–48, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268, 285, 334, 344, 360, 364

Primary (Gee): xix–xx, 4, 48, 80, 82, 86, 149, 156, 165, 166, 169–70, 174, 196, 373 Secondary (Gee): xix–xx, xxii, 4, 48, 80, 82, 83, 86, 89, 96–97, 149, 156, 166, 168, 169, 174, 190, 196, 304 Grammatica and Latina: 66, 69–70, 73, 74–75, 78–79, 80, 83, 85, 91, 199, 284, 288, 291, 296, 364, 371, 372, 373 and ‘grammaticality’: xxviii, 9, 37, 60, 64–65, 66–80, 91, 96–98, 100, 197, 253, 259, 262, 263, 269–70, 273, 275, 283, 285–86, 288, 291, 293, 296, 298, 300–01, 331, 334, 359, 363, 371–72, 375 and Latin language ideology: xxiv, 5, 6–8, 20, 23, 47, 53, 59, 66–67, 69, 76, 78, 82–84, 86, 89–90, 95, 97, 98–99, 150, 155, 170, 188, 256–57, 258, 270, 274, 287, 291, 296, 300–01, 308, 317, 330, 332, 336, 359, 370 and midwives: 59–61 and universal grammar (UG): 66–72, 151, 175, 261, 270, 285, 292, 301, 340, 342, 371, 373 congruitas: 73–75, 371 Latinized English, Anglicized Latin: 60, 285, 289, 290–91, 298–99, 301 littera: xiv, 33–36, 53, 67, 92, 96–97, 117, 144, 160–61, 202, 228, 241–42, 244, 252, 254, 271, 273, 292, 305, 315, 330–31, 333

420 Index rerum

ordo: 71, 75, 82, 98, 301 ordo artificalis, naturalis, ciceronianis: 96–97, 199, 212, 268–69, 275 and OR-DO glosses: 96–98, 285 Hebraica veritas: 182–83, 188 ‘Latin language ideology’; see Grammatica Latinized English; see Grammatica Literacies accessus ad auctores: 42, 198–99, 203–06, 210, 215, 240–41, 245, 374–76 affective: xxiv, 18, 22, 26, 43, 101–47 (passim), 162, 197, 202, 207, 245, 248, 250, 262, 266–67, 269, 278, 282, 356, 367, 370, 376 Anselm on: 113, 116–18, 125, 207 definition: 102–03 traces of affective reading: 118, 119, 120, 311 affectus: 43, 103, 116, 118, 122, 143, 146, 202, 212, 226, 241 biliteracy, biliterate: xxii, 150, 154, 359, 362, 365 models ‘conduit model’: xvi–xviii, 104, 327, 336 Great Divide Theory: 26, 101 hyperliteracy: xix, xxiii–xxv, 15, 17, 18, 22–23, 25, 30, 32, 36, 41–45, 56, 85, 92, 161, 212, 215, 217, 364 ‘marker model’: xvi–xxiii, 5–6, 9, 24–26, 51, 53, 55, 57, 66, 96, 101, 152, 164, 180, 182, 190, 215, 253–54, 262, 285, 315, 332, 338, 359, 374 ‘power model’: xvi–xviii, xxi, xxii, 5, 23, 26, 51, 71 multiliteracy: xix–xx, 149, 153 multimodal: xv–xvi, xx, xxi, 4–5, 10, 14, 26, 58, 88, 100, 126, 128, 372 triliteracy, triliterate:186 see also Multilingualism Literal sense (sensus literalis): 186, 209, 210, 213 and allegorical reading: 205, 226, 231 as heretical reading: 283 in Jewish exegsis: 183–85 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: 203, 221, 244 in Victorine exegesis: 89–90, 176–78, 180–81, 207, 221

London; see St Paul’s school Multilingualism and Italian grammar schools: 56–59 and Latin: 6 (Curtius), 48, 50–56, 285–87 and Victorine exegesis: 182, 190 as norm in medieval speech situations: xv, xx, xxii, 18, 30, 48–51, 258, 276, 282, 370–71 code switching, language mixing: xv, xxii–xxiii, xv, 49, 50, 60–65, 90, 153, 189, 274, 276–77, 282, 284, 290, 298–99, 301, 360, 369–75 calque: 61 intersentential: 61–62 intrasentential: 61–62 diglossia: xvii, xxiv, 49–50, 51, 78, 275, 373–74 heteroglossia (Bakhtin): 373 in medieval Jewish society: 152–53, 158, 164, 170, 182–83, 190 triglossia: xvii, 49 parergon (Derrida) as writing: 92–93, 95, 98, 100, 273–75, 282, 285 reading and eroticism: 15, 128, 133, 135–38, 143–47, 201–02, 246, 247, 250, 269 as deformance: 9–10 collaborative: 2, 14, 42, 130, 267–68, 368–69 medieval modes of discontinuous (skipping): 22–23, 24, 37, 91, 93–94, 98, 117, 118, 124, 128–29, 133, 147, 207, 219, 225, 257, 284 and concordances: 208 reading aloud: xv, 9, 14–15, 21, 23, 51, 34, 108, 112, 123, 129, 136, 263, 271, 277, 296, 310, 320–21 silent reading: 3, 5, 9, 14–15, 24, 34, 102, 104, 109–10, 117–19, 130, 135, 149–50, 272, 275, 279, 281, 314 and reading Ovid: 197, 241 at St Paul’s school: 323 Augustine and Quintilian on: 106–09

Index rerum

in Ancrene Wisse: 111, 112 in Dante: 146 in Romance of Flamenca: 144–45 Saenger on: 118 representation of reading and Christine de Pizan: 119 (Fig. 1), 120 (Fig. 2), 121, 122, 128–29 in Annunciation scenes: 121, 143, 280–81 by Robert Campin: 123–25 in books of hours: 121–22, 123, 125 (Fig. 3), 126–27 in Wife of Bath’s Prologue: 91, 99, 129, 138 ruminatio: 108, 117, 119, 170, 184, 187–88, 272 and Jewish literacy: 159, 161, 170, 183–84 ‘skipping reading’: 87, 110, 117–18, 124–25, 130, 219, 226 see also Affective Literacy ‘retext’, ‘retexting’ definition of: xxiii–xxiv see also Literacies Sator Square: 273 St Paul’s school, London and Boy Jesus: 349–51, 354 and foundational discourse: 359–62 and Mercers Company: 308, 315, 316, 344–45 (Pepys and nationalism: 319, 321–22, 353–54 architecture: 312–14 Boy Bishop festival: 320–21, 344–59 Concio sermon for festival: 353–58 critics of: 306–07, 316–17 curriculum: 310, 323–42 foundation of school: 303–04, 308–10 image of childhood: 317, 326–28, 342–44, 349–55 Latinity and chastity: 327–29, 334 textbooks Colet: 333–34 Erasmus: 334–35, 337–41, 348–49 Lily: 310, 324, 333–34, 361 Standard English: xvii, 6, 65 Standard Latin: xvii, 8, 77, 196, 320, 329–30, 334, 342

421

Textual practices Bonaventure on composition: 39–40, 43, 100 ‘deterritorialization’, ‘reterritorialization’ (Deleuze and Guattari): 32–33, 47–48, 106, 152, 215, 289 in Hebrew: 152, 162, 180–81 in Latin: 55, 59, 78, 80, 83–84, 155, 253, 279, 284–85, 291, 300–01, 316, 349 ‘dividing practice’ (Foucault): xxii, xxiii, 12, 23, 51, 55, 56, 58, 82, 158, 174, 210, 211, 258, 335, 373 glossing: xxi, xxiv, 4, 5, 30, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 48, 51 manuscript markup and hypertextuality: 33, 39, 42–43, 65, 88, 97–98, 106n, 208 ordo as composition: 39, 295 see also Discourse Titivillus (Tutivillus, Recording Demon): 64, 296–98 Wounds of Christ arma Christi: 136, 294 side wound: 133, 136–37, 138, 350 writing and vulgaria: 268–69, 334 collaborative: 14, 24, 42, 130, 368–69, 375 and Book of Margery Kempe: 262–70 genres drama (Mankynde): 282–301 letters: 2–3, 12–14, 22, 28, 63, 76, 115–16, 143, 151, 156, 167, 179, 256, 317, 318, 321–22 by Laura Cereta: 364–67 by Margaret Paston: 367–68 lyrics: 275–82 multilingual charms: 270–75 narrative; see also Book of Margery Kempe, Chaucer – Legend of Philomela, Discourse – commentary discourse

late medieval and early modern studies All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to History, ed. by Albert H. Tricomi (1999) Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its Afterlife; Essays in Honor of John Freccero, ed. by Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (2000) Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (2001) Ian Robertson, Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna (2002) Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (2005) Rituals, Images, and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F. W. Kent and Charles Zika (2006) Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy (2006) Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s ‘Lives of the Popes’ in the Sixteenth Century (2006) Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, The Renaissance Pulpit: Art and Preaching in Tuscany, 1400– 1550 (2007)

Fabrizio Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (2007) Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Megan CassidyWelch and Peter Sherlock (2008) Kate Cregan, The Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London (2009) Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf ’ to ‘Othello’ (2009) Old Worlds, New Worlds: European Cultural Encounters, c. 1000 – c. 1750, ed. by Lisa Bailey, Lindsay Diggelmann, and Kim M. Phillips (2009) Francesco Benigno, Mirrors of Revolution: Conflict and Political Identity in Early Modern Europe (2010) Gunnar W. Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons: The Spanish Inquisition’s Trials for Superstition, Valencia and Barcelona, 1478–1700 (2010)

In Preparation Richard Rowlands Verstegan: A Versatile Man in an Age of Turmoil, ed. by Romana Zacchi and Massimiliano Morini Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations, ed. by Nicole R. Rice E. J. Kent, Cases of Male Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1592–1692