The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization

Abstract

This dissertation examines the pervasive presence of Latin in later medieval English literature: the Latin glosses and quotations, the Latinate vocabulary, the code-switching between Latin and vernacular languages, and the translations between them that make up many Middle English literary works. I argue that, whereas the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are usually understood to mark a great surge in English-language literary production, this literature in fact imagines itself to be formed in relation to Latin rather than in place of or as distinct from it. Indeed, despite its uptake for modern disciplinary formations allied to nationalist and imperialist language ideologies, Middle English writing can more accurately be seen to divert the development of monolingual English frameworks. In particular, I show that Latin and vernacular fundamentally co-constitute several of the Middle English works most circulated by medieval readers and most studied by modern scholars, including John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. My study thus develops an account of Middle English literature as constitutively bilingual, one which follows from my approach to translation as a multilingual literary form. Established conceptions of translation between Latin and vernacular languages in the period, especially in scholarship mining intellectual history and late-medieval debates surrounding Bible translation, reinforce the prevailing template for medieval literary-linguistic history, vernacularization, and its (sometimes inadvertent) identification of monolingualism as the telos of English literature. By contrast, I recognize and analyze in my texts an understanding of translation as a suspension between languages—in the poetic line, on the manuscript page, and/or within a work’s own theory of literary formation—rather than a progression or conversion into the target language. I argue that Gower, Langland, Love, and Lydgate turn to the form of translation because it promises ethical solutions to the animating problems of their respective projects. Following an opening consideration of Geoffrey Chaucer’s fictional framing of Troilus and Criseyde as translatio studii, chapter one explores how the simultaneity of Latin and English “versions” in Gower’s Confessio contributes to a bilingual historiography that comprehends the contingency of historical change. Chapter two considers the horizontal coordination of these same languages in Langland’s alliterating, macaronic verse as a response to the epistemological challenges of salvation. Chapter three analyzes how the multiple and markedly provisional form of Love’s Middle English Gospel meditations, in contrast to translation projects hereticized by ecclesiastical legislation such as the Wycliffite Bible, embraces untranslatability as a premise that sustains rather than impedes devotional reading. Chapter four examines the enmeshing of Latin and English in Lydgate’s “aureate” lexis as an intervention in the ethically inflected rivalry between literary surfaces and their depths. Ultimately, I identify across these works a shared ambivalence toward institutional and purportedly unmediated languages alike—a bilingual ethics and aesthetics as relevant today, in view of anglophone hegemony and monolingual nationalism, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, as I propose in a brief afterword, the profoundly cooperative relationships between Latin and vernacular developed by medieval writers in response to historically specific questions might also suggest alternative ways of writing, reading, theorizing, and telling the history of literature to the monolingual norms that have organized literary study in modernity.