How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences.
- Author/Editor
- Downes, Stephanie.
- Title
- How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences.
- Published
- Downes, Stephanie. How to Be "Both": Bilingual and Gendered Emotions in Late Medieval English Balade Sequences. In Susan Broomhall, ed. Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 51-65.
- Review
- Downes' subject is the "relationship between bilingualism--whether individual or cultural--and the expression of emotion in literature" (51). She proposes to approach this problem psycho-sociologically, along lines suggested by Anna Wierzbicka: "Different languages are linked with different ways of thinking as well as different ways of feeling; they are linked with different attitudes, different ways of relating to people, different ways of expressing one's feelings" [quoting Wierzbicka] (52). Downes asks "How true might these observations be for those who read, thought, wrote, and spoke in more than one language in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England?" (52). She takes for her case-study Gower's "Cinkante Balades" and "Traitié pour les amantz marietz" and Charles d'Orleans' "Fortunes Stabilnes," seeing them as works written in "L2" languages--i.e., acquired tongues--by speakers fluent in both French and English. She selects balade sequences as her material, since in general these are written from a first-person perspective ("je/jeo/I"), more easily quarried for emotional connection. Downes' working hypothesis is that writing about feeling in French is different from writing about it in English ("Psycholinguists tend to describe an emotional detachment from additional languages as related to an individual's sense of their own inadequacy in that language" [54]). Ultimately, however, she suggests that, for Gower at least, it is the nature of the love described that matters, not the language used to describe it (58-59). [RFY. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2]
- Date
- 2015
- Gower Subjects
- Cinkante Balades
Traitié pour Essampler les Amants Marietz
Language and Word Studies