Medieval Multilingualism and Gower's Literary Practice

Review

Machan—-one of the most interesting and profound speculators about late medieval English sociolinguistics now writing—-argues for “the strategic character of [Gower’s] multilingualism, the way in which, within the grammatical and pragmatic constraints of a language, purpose can determine usage? (p. 19). Taking as his starting-point Gower’s apologies for the quality of his French and Latin (e.g., Mirour de l’Omme, l. 21775), and his silence about his English, Machan asks “what would it mean, medievally, for speakers to reveal their non-nativeness through the variations in their language?? (p. 8). Gower, he argues, was well aware of “the sociolinguistic significance of a language—the social status it affords its speakers, the economic opportunities it provides or forecloses, the cultural history it co-opts or precludes, and the discursive traditions it supports?; and hence for Gower, “this significance was not fixed but dynamic, not absolute but contingent, and above all not intrinsic, but strategic? (p.9). Gower exploited his multilingualism purposefully, with a notable awareness of “the integrity of Latin, French, and English—-the distinction between languages? in order to “create specific rhetorical effects both by drawing on each language’s discursive traditions and by virtue of the distinction itself? (p. 22). Gower’s ‘focus . . . was local rather than . . . global? (p.23)—-it was his countrymen whom he sought to influence—-and in consequence his “idiolect appears as one that distinguishes languages but grants their grammatical commonality; one that capitalizes on this commonality but reserves certain usage for some languages and not others; one that grants pragmatic differences among languages but uses these differences through the juxtaposition of texts? (p. 24). Such a position is “sociolinguistically conservative? (and thus resembles Langland’s and Chaucer’s). It can be viewed “as an epitome of late-medieval England’s language ecology, which itself produced few creoles or other interlanguages but generally sustained the linguistic repertoire of the past several centuries? (p. 24).] [RFY. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 25.1]