Trilingualism in Early Middle English Miscellanies: Languages and Literature

Abstract

The role of miscellanies in the making of Middle English literature deserves some attention, for it is no coincidence that they preserve the bulk of Early Middle English verse, thus serving to increase dramatically the presence of English in the manuscript record between the middle of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth. Indeed, miscellanies containing English were trilingual until the end of this period, when the appearance of the nearly monolingual Auchinleck manuscript (Nat. Lib. Scot. MS Adv. 19.2.1) marks the appearance of a public whose literacy is essentially confined to English. It is the developments of the century or so preceding the Auchinleck MS, from the first appearance of miscellanies containing English, that I am concerned with here. 1 A 'miscellany', as the term is used here, is more than simply a repository for a variety of items, even if they are, for example, in a single hand. A miscellany has cohesion of some kind, which may either be external-directed towards some function-or internal, in which the relationship of texts with each other and the shaping of the whole are factors. 2 Even in trilingual miscellanies that can be explained functionally, structural patterns appear that arise precisely from the combination of languages; and in those that are less obviously functional, language can be a factor not only in the choice of texts, but also in their organization, producing 1 Where nothing is stated to the contrary, the manuscripts discussed here can be dated from a little after the middle of the thirteenth century to early in the fourteenth. The scholarship cited in connection with each manuscript includes discussion of the generally unsettled question of dating; to this may be added two articles by Neil Cartlidge: '

Anthologies and Miscellanies

“…What seems to be emerging in newer research is attention to a combined approach to miscellanies in particular: intensive study of the texts, codicology, and paleography, alongside theoretical considerations of the kinds of manuscripts that transmit medieval texts, those concerns that have been the mainstay of scholarly work in this area over the past decades. Attitudes to miscellanies more often than not acknowledge that "cohesion of some kind" is at play and that cohesion may be "external -directed towards some function -or internal, in which the relationship of texts with each other and the shaping of the whole are factors" (Scahill 2003, 18, after Corrie 2000. The "blended approach" advocated by Bahr (2015) -a combination of speculative and descriptive approaches to miscellanies and anthologies -seems to be one that is currently favored by scholarship, even if it is mostly implicitly at play.…”