The complex history of language in England was never more complex, or more absorbing, than in the fourteenth century, when the currents of literate trilingualism mixed bewilderingly with those of regionalism, societal exigencies and genre to challenge the luckless linguistic, literary and cultural historian with a veritable whirlpool of uncertainty; how much calmer the waters of the fifteenth century seem, where the beginnings of standardization proper are conventionally placed. This book represents the results of a colloquium, held in Dresden in 2004 (part of a continuing project on the "Institutionalization of the Vernacular"), which was built around the boldly stated proposition that the beginnings of this standardization should in fact be placed, not in the fifteenth century, but the fourteenth; after all, the use of the vernacular in writing, the prerequisite for standardization, was already firmly established during that century.
In her polemical and stimulating introduction to the volume, "The Beginnings of Standardization: The Communicative Space in Fourteenth-Century England," Ursula Schaefer, while acknowledging the necessity of specialisation in linguistic, literary and cultural studies, makes a special plea for the interdisciplinary approach--or, at the very least, an acknowledgement of the problem of "data alienation," whereby data are retrieved from machine-based corpora without heed to the context of their collection. Schaefer spends the rest of her introduction laying out what the calls the "heuristic foundations" which should enable a more comprehensive view of the context of multilingual literacy in which English developed. Much is made of the "communicative space" in which speakers and writers move, a space in which English, French and Latin coexist and interact, and whose infinitely variable architecture is structured along territorial, social and stylistic lines.
Nine papers are then given in three groups, to be followed by an "epilogue" by two of the participants.
The first group of papers bears the label, "The Literary Scenario." In his "Before-Chaucer Evidences of an English Literary Vernacular with a Standardizing Tendency," Derek Pearsall re-examines the story of Chaucer as the "saviour," in the late fourteenth century, of the English language, looking at evidence for an alternative story of continuity, but noting among other things the lack of evidence for a London literary culture in what he calls the "crucial years" from 1340 to 1370. Alastair Minnis, in his "Standardizing Lay Culture: Secularity in French and English Literature of the Fourteenth Century," looks at the standardisation of certain aspects of literature during the later fourteenth century, in particular the assertion of secular values in poems written in France and England, the elucidation of which has suffered from critical neglect in favour of religious readings; new understandings of the poems may be possible when secularity is given "its own space and special valence" (58). In her "Forms of Standardization in Terms for Middle English Lyrics in the Fourteenth Century," Julia Boffey shows that many and varied words were used, in French, Latin and English, to label what we now call simply the Middle English "lyrics," but sees evidence by the late fourteenth century of a certain formalizing of titles, probably under the influence of Gower and Chaucer, along with the increasing use of "function" titles, such as complaint.
Two papers are grouped under the heading "Multilingualism." In the first, "Language Contact, Multilingualism, and the Evidence Problem," David Trotter discusses the lexicographic problems of shipbuilding terms and concludes that even everyday words must be explored within a multilingual perspective if their meanings are fully to be understood. In the second paper, "Poets, Preachers, and Friars Revisited: Fourteenth-Century Multilingual Franciscan manuscripts," Annette Kehnel goes beyond the apparently obvious connection between the preaching imperative of the Franciscan friars and use of the vernacular (with an expected influence on the process of standardization) and detects a far deeper engagement by the friars with local communities, along with an active interest in language and culture consequent on their adopted role in extending the boundaries of Latin Christendom.
The third group of papers is labelled "Shaping the Vernacular" and deals with range of historico-linguistic issues. Terttu Nevalainen, in "Fourteenth-Century English in a Diachronic Perspective," finds firms evidence of supralocal levelling in various grammatical areas, including the replacement of genitive s by the of construction and the formation of comparative/superlative adjectives and of adverbs, but stops short of calling this standardization proper. Matti Rissanen, in his "On the Development of Borrowed Connectives in Fourteenth-Century English: Evidence from Corpora," shows that the introduction and establishment of certain connectives borrowed from French or from Latin through French--such as because, in case, save and except--were dependent on their occurrence in official documents, though they were not exclusive to them (as evidenced in their use by Chaucer and others). In the first of two contributions exploring the phonological input to standardization, "Randomness or Design in the Formation of a Standardized Phonemic Inventory," Donka Minkova tackles the question of how random the eventual choice of standard phonemic features in English was, and concludes that, in the evolution of the inventory of standard consonants, "in the overwhelming majority of cases the variants selected by the standard were no phonetic mavericks; they are straightforward results of functionalist forces in spite of the pressure of literacy" (170). Finally, in "The Status of Late Middle English ei Spellings as early Evidence of the English Vowel Shift," Robert P. Stockwell discovers spellings which indicate early diphthongisation, which is in turn evidence of an early vowel- shift.
The extra chapter which rounds off the volume, by Andrew James Johnston and Claudia Lange ("The Beginnings of Standardization--An Epilogue"), is a wide-ranging discussion which draws both on the ideas presented by in their papers by member of the symposium and on the discussion which followed. The authors stress the multivalent complexity of the standardization question in the fourteenth century but at the same time downplay its randomness, and they see Chaucer's role as both a knowing catalyst of development and a product of the process. Summarising the papers but also looking forward, they end by defining what other scholars have called the "orderly heterogeneity" of the language situation in fourteenth-century England in terms of five interrelated strands: multilingualism (simply inescapable in all the linguistic and literary disciplines represented here); standardization itself (which begins with textualization of the vernacular and imposes its own architecture on the variational space in which English, French and Latin operate); the orality/literacy relationship (in which textualization inevitably increases the complexity of the vernacular); language and culture (with European vernaculars and literary cultures, especially those of Italy, providing models for England); and discourse traditions (which cut across the boundaries of individual languages and ensure that standardization cannot mean uniformity).
Read straight through, the nine main chapters make for a rather uneven book, but that it inevitable for a subject--the history of English in the fourteenth century--which is a loose conglomeration of dozens of subjects, many of them elusive or simply opaque, but all of them important and worth every effort at pinning down and elucidation. What these essays show above all is the encouraging possibilities of such effort. Answers (as yet, at least) are few, but what each of the writers does in her or his way is to establish the new questions which need asking or to show how the old ones may be usefully re-formulated.