Multilingualism and Knowledge Exchange in English Manuscripts, c.1215-c.1415
This thesis analyses the use of medieval languages in the context of manuscript production and circulation. A corpus of about 250 English volumes forms the basis of this investigation, and shows that multilingualism, and the interaction between different languages, was more common than previously suggested by scholars, functioning as a key accelerator in the transmission of knowledge across religious and lay audiences. The texts composed and read in late medieval England were linguistically diverse, calling for a range of codicological and historical approaches to examine this nexus of literary exchanges. To date, much attention has been dedicated to the study of individual languages in their social and cultural context, and to the use of multiple languages within single texts or manuscripts. The adoption of a quantitative methodology to analyse this varied corpus of late medieval books builds on these approaches, and demonstrates that languages did not correspond to specific taxonomies of knowledge. Multilingualism was a fluid concept that was not intended to make texts more accessible but rather created opportunities to encounter ideas, enabling intellectual connections to be made within the kingdom, into western Europe, and even the eastern Mediterranean. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the Council of Constance of 1414-1418 highlighted a transition from “desirable” to “dangerous” uses of language knowledge, but such transition is not evinced in the sources of my investigation. The manuscript matrix shows that it was knowledge that affected people’s ideas and social behaviour, not language choice. As a quantitative analysis of the corpus demonstrates that only 2% of manuscripts reflected genuine monolingual contexts of use, a qualitative examination of this evidence further confirms that multilingual skills were at the heart of the medieval reading experience. As most of the localisable volumes of the corpus were associated with religious houses, particular attention has been given to these literate environments, including a cross-examination of extant institutional booklists. Multilingual practices were neither defined nor influenced by notions of proficiency. The widespread presence of non-native languages such as Greek in English books revealed that scribes and readers were interested in this language despite lacking the tools to learn it systematically. Furthermore, male and female religious readers worked within bilingual, trilingual and occasionally quadrilingual systems of learning that were in dialogue with lay reading habits. This evidence suggests that language skills did not influence or define patterns of knowledge distribution: it was the interest of readers that drove demand. Ultimately, the thesis reaffirms that multilingualism was not an anomaly destined to yield to monolingualism, but an integral and fundamental part of England’s intellectual landscape.
multilingualism, palaeography, codicology, Middle Ages, 13th century, 14th century
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