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Reading Across Languages in Medieval Britain presents historical, textual, and codicological evidence to situate thirteenth- and fourteenth-century vernacular-to-vernacular translations in a reading milieu characterized by code-switching and "reading across languages." This study presents the need for--and develops and uses--a new methodological approach that reconsiders the function of translation in this multilingual, multi-directional reading context. A large corpus of late thirteenth- through early fourteenth-century vernacular literature in Britain, in both English and Welsh, was derived from French language originals from previous centuries. These texts include mainly romances and chansons de geste, and evidence suggests that they were produced at the same time, and for the same audience, as later redactions of the texts in the original language. This evidence gives rise to the main question that drives this dissertation: what was the function of translation in a reading milieu in which translations and originals shared the same audience? Because a large number of the earliest or sole surviving translations into English from French language originals appear in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS 19.2.1 (the Auchinleck Manuscript), my study focuses on the translations preserved in this manuscript. Although it is known for being the earliest virtually monolingual anthology of Middle English texts, I illuminate the multilingual milieu in which the Auchinleck Manuscript circulated and argue that an audience of multilingual readers who were familiar with the original French language sources of the texts enabled an extratextual discourse for reading in translation. The practice of reading across languages gave rise to a particular mode of discourse in which translative revisions could generate an intertextual dialogue with source texts. In many cases, this dialogue was both subversive and interrogative, in that it prompted an extratextual discussion that revised values expressed in the source texts and, in so doing, commented on ideological issues that were important to an early fourteenth-century audience. Moreover, the act of moving into the English language texts which had been read in French for approximately a hundred years mimetically effected a revision of another sort by urging the cultural reorientation of the Anglo-Norman reader and generating a significant dialogue about vernacular literary production in England. The Auchinleck translations represent a method of inscribing significance and receiving information that alters the way we think about the transmission of ideas and the use of the English language, which invites new questions regarding the role of English as its use increased and developed through the fourteenth century. In chapter one I argue that Middle English translations were produced with the knowledge that readers would put them in dialogue with their French language source texts, and I contextualize the Auchinleck Manuscript in particular within this multilingual milieu. I further describe the historical and cultural context that made this manuscript a rich site for the subversive interrogation of traditional values, an important context for my discussion, in later chapters, of the translative revisions in the Auchinleck texts. Chapter two considers the Auchinleck Guy of Warwick and Reinbroun, which, taken together, translate the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic. I provide new evidence to argue that these were original translations composed in conjunction with the production of the Auchinleck Manuscript, a theory first proposed by Laura Hibbard Loomis, but which has been summarily dismissed in recent scholarship. Chapter three reexamines the same texts in light of the arguments presented in chapters one and two. I consider how the multilingual cross-reader may have interpreted translative revisions as rhetorical gestures, and I identify what I call an interrogative translative pattern that questions some of the values depicted in the source text, thereby generating an extratextual dialogue about the fourteenth-century cultural and political issues I described in chapter one. Chapter four steps back in time to consider the small handful of French-to-English translations that clearly pre-date those discussed in chapters two and three, including King Horn, Floris and Blauncheflour, and Havelok. Manuscript evidence shows that these texts also circulated in a multilingual reading milieu, but they did not operate in a discursive mode that generated an intertextual dialogue with their source texts. A description of the translative methodology exhibited in these texts helps us understand how later examples of French-to-English translation developed in interesting ways. Chapter five considers four other translations that appear in the Auchinleck Manuscript, all of which preserve evidence to suggest that they, too, may have been translated in conjunction with the production of this manuscript. A study of Lay le Freine, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, Amis and Amiloun, and Beves of Hampton gives rise to the main argument of this dissertation, discussed above, and shows that the Auchinleck translations represent an important development in the function of translation and the use of the English language in medieval England. Chapter six considers Welsh translations of several of the same texts that appear in translation in the Auchinleck Manuscript and contextualizes them within a discussion of English-Welsh political and cultural relations. The Welsh texts that tell the stories of Beves of Hampton (Bown o Hamtoun), Otinel (Rhamant Otuel), and Amis and Amiloun (Kymdeithas Amlyn ac Amic) were probably translated from French and Latin at the same time that they were translated into Middle English, and cultural and historical evidence suggests that the producers of the English and Welsh translations should have been aware of one another's work. A study of these parallel translation projects reveals interesting differences in the methods of translation that reflect the cultural concerns of the Welsh after Edward I's conquest and that also point to the genuinely innovative rhetorical function of translation in the Auchinleck Manuscript.
The essays in this volume form a new cultural history focused round, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of francophone speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the 11th to the later 15th century.
This book examines the development of English as a written vernacular and identifies that development as a process of community building that occurred in a multilingual context. Moving through the eighth century to the thirteenth century, and finally to the sixteenth-century antiquarians who collected medieval manuscripts, it suggests that this important period in the history of English can only be understood if we loosen our insistence on a sharp divide between Old and Middle English and place the textuality of this period in the framework of a multilingual matrix. The book examines a wide range of materials, including the works of Bede, the Alfredian circle, and Wulfstan, as well as the mid-eleventh-century Encomium Emmae Reginae, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, the Ancrene Wisse, and Matthew Parker’s study of Old English manuscripts. Engaging foundational theories of textual community and intellectual community, this book provides a crucial link with linguistic distance. Perceptions of distance, whether between English and other languages or between different forms of English, are fundamental to the formation of textual community, since the awareness of shared language that can shape or reinforce a sense of communal identity only has meaning by contrast with other languages or varieties. The book argues that the precocious rise of English as a written vernacular has its basis in precisely these communal negotiations of linguistic distance, the effects of which were still playing out in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the book argues that the tension of linguistic distance provides the necessary energy for the community-building activities of annotation and glossing, translation, compilation, and other uses of texts and manuscripts. This will be an important volume for literary scholars of the medieval period, and those working on the early modern period, both on literary topics and on historical studies of English nationalism. It will also appeal to those with interests in sociolinguistics, history of the English language, and medieval religious history.
In Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, Mary Kate Hurley reinterprets a well-recognized and central feature of medieval textual production: translation. Medieval texts often leave conspicuous evidence of the translation process. These translation effects are observable traces that show how medieval writers reimagined the nature of the political, cultural, and linguistic communities within which their texts were consumed. Examining translation effects closely, Hurley argues, provides a means of better understanding not only how medieval translations imagine community but also how they help create communities. Through fresh readings of texts such as the Old English Orosius, Ælfric's Lives of the Saints, Ælfric's Homilies, Chaucer, Trevet, Gower, and Beowulf, Translation Effects adds a new dimension to medieval literary history, connecting translation to community in a careful and rigorous way and tracing the lingering outcomes of translation effects through the whole of the medieval period.
Argues that the adaptation of habitus for a universal audience supported the development of a vernacular reading public.
Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
Silent reading is now universally accepted as normal; indeed reading aloud to oneself may be interpreted as showing a lack of ability or understanding. Yet reading aloud was usual, indeed unavoidable, throughout antiquity and most of the middle ages. Saenger investigates the origins of the gradual separation of words within a continuous written text and the consequent development of silent reading. He then explores the spread of these practices throughout western Europe, and the eventual domination of silent reading in the late medieval period. A detailed work with substantial notes and appendices for reference.
In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman's songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. Harris's own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.
The abundant evidence from medieval England suggests a deep interest among devotional writers in documenting, teaching and circumscribing devotional reading, given the importance of careful reading practices for salvation. This volume therefore draws together a wide range of interests in and approaches to studying the reading and reception of devotional texts in medieval England, from representations of readers and reading in devotional texts, to literary production and reception of devotional texts and images, to manuscripts and early books as devotional objects, to individual readers and patrons of devotional texts.