The vulgar tongue : medieval and postmedieval vernacularity / edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Somerset, Fiona.

Watson, Nicholas.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Colloquial language.

Language and languages.

History.

Europe--Languages--History.

Europe.

Physical Description:

xvi, 277 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Deeply embedded in the history of Latin Europe, the vernacular ("the language of slaves") still draws us toward urgent issues of affiliation, identity, and cultural struggle. Vernacular politics in medieval Latin Europe were richly complex and the structures of thought and feeling they left behind permanently affected Western culture. The Vulgar Tongue explores the history of European vernacularity through more than a dozen studies of language situations from twelfth-century England and France to twentieth-century India and North America, and from the building of nations, empires, or ethnic communities to the politics of gender, class, or religion.

The essays in The Vulgar Tongue offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull's thirteenth-century prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the humanist struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Latin, the "common tongue" of European intellectuals, is sometimes just another vernacular, Sanskrit and Hindi stake their claims as the languages of Shakespeare, African-American poetry is discovered in conversation with Middle English, and fourteenth-century Florence becomes the city not of Dante and Boccaccio but of the artisan poet Pucci.

Delicate political messages are carried by nuances of French dialect, while the status of French and German as feminine "mother tongues" is fiercely refuted and as fiercely embraced. Clerics treat dialect, idiom, and gesture -- not language itself -- as the hallmarks of "vulgar" preaching or else argue the case for Bible translation mainly in pursuit of their own academic freedom. Endlessly fluid in meaning and reference, the term "vernacular" emerges from this book as a builder of bridges between the myriad phenomena it can describe, as a focus of reflection both on the history of Western culture and on the responsibilities of those who would analyze it.

Contents:

Introduction: King Solomon's Tablets / Nicholas Watson 1

Part I 1100-1300: The Evangelical Vernacular 15

Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity / Meg Worley 19

Talking the Talk: Access to the Vernacular in Medieval Preaching / Claire M. Waters 31

The Language of Conversion: Ramon Llull's Art as a Vernacular / Harvey Hames 43

Mechthild von Magdeburg: Gender and the "Unlearned Tongue" / Sara S. Poor 57

Part II 1300-1500: Vernacular Textualities 81

Creating a Masculine Vernacular: The Strategy of Misogyny in Late Medieval French Texts / Gretchen V. Angelo 85

Teaching Philosophy at School and Court: Vulgarization and Translation / Charles F. Briggs 99

Vernacular Textualities in Fourteenth-Century Florence / William Robins 112

"Moult Bien Parloit et Lisoit le Franchois," or Did Richard II Read with a Picard Accent? / Andrew Taylor 132

Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston's Determinacio, Arundel's Constitutiones / Fiona Somerset 145

Part III 1500-2000: Making the Mother Tongues 159

Purity and the Language of the Court in the Late-Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands / Jeroen Jansen 166

The Politics of ABCs: "Language Wars" and Literary Vernacularization Among the Serbs and Romanians of Austria-Hungary, 1780-1870 / Jack Fairey 177

"Indian Shakespeare" and the Politics of Language in Colonial India / Nandi Bhatia 198

Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer, and Langston Hughes / Larry Scanlon 220.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-259) and index.

ISBN:

0271023104

OCLC:

52197477