The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization.
- Author/Editor
- Behrend, Megan.
- Title
- The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization.
- Published
- Behrend, Megan. "The Latinity of Middle English Literature: Form, Translation, and Vernacularization." Ph. D. Dissertation. University of Michigan, 2022. Restricted access; abstract available at https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/174649 (accessed January 27, 2023).
- Review
- From Behrend's abstract: "This dissertation examines the pervasive presence of Latin in later medieval English literature: the Latin glosses and quotations, the Latinate vocabulary, the code-switching between Latin and vernacular languages, and the translations between them that make up many Middle English literary works. I argue that, whereas the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are usually understood to mark a great surge in English-language literary production, this literature in fact imagines itself to be formed in relation to Latin rather than in place of or as distinct from it . . . . I show that Latin and vernacular fundamentally co-constitute several of the Middle English works most circulated by medieval readers and most studied by modern scholars, including John Gower's Confessio Amantis, William Langland's Piers Plowman, Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and John Lydgate's Life of Our Lady. . . . I argue that Gower, Langland, Love, and Lydgate turn to the form of translation because it promises ethical solutions to the animating problems of their respective projects. Following an opening consideration of Geoffrey Chaucer's fictional framing of Troilus and Criseyde as translatio studii, chapter one explores how the simultaneity of Latin and English 'versions' in Gower's Confessio contributes to a bilingual historiography that comprehends the contingency of historical change." Subsequent chapters treat works by Langland, Love, and Lydgate, identifying in them and in CA a "shared ambivalence toward institutional and purportedly unmediated languages alike--a bilingual ethics and aesthetics as relevant today, in view of anglophone hegemony and monolingual nationalism, as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Language and Word Studies
Confessio Amantis