New Medieval Literatures

The polysemy of the word translatio, which means both spatial displacement and transfer from one language to the other, was exploited by medieval scholars to articulate their thought about the relationship between their own culture and its Greco-Latin and Christian heritage. The term translatio studii was first used to justify the exclusive right of the University of Paris to the diffusion of knowledge. Inspired by the example of the Bible which was transmitted through three sacred languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, medieval scholars also borrowed the translatio studii to extend to the vernacular language Saint Jerome’s thinking about translation. Thus they justified the claim that French be considered a language of lettered culture like Latin, that is, a language for conveying knowledge.

Ten lines of summary verse capitula precede each book of Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis in many surviving manuscripts. But a substantial number carry as well a competing set of prose argumenta that convey a markedly different sense of the work’s structure. This article explores the richly varied mise-en-page of this alternative summary. It is argued that such details of layout often attenuate a clear sense of the authoritative status of one apparatus over the other, and that this instability impinges in turn upon key issues for the interpretation of the poem as a whole.

In the fifteenth-century prose version of La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, written by Jehan Wauquelin for Philip of Burgundy as he planned a crusade that never took place, Rome is besieged by pagan armies and only saved by the intervention of the Emperor of Constantinople and the King of England. Wauquelin’s investment in the idea of crusade, however, proves ideologically inconsistent throughout the text; whatever unifying fantasies the narrative may project (of crusade, of dynasty, of empire), it also subverts that unity by repeatedly linking the body of Helayne, subject to the most outrageous cruelty and mutilation, to the integrity of the city of Rome, the seat of both spiritual and imperial authority.

‘Boistous’, along with ‘rude’, is a common descriptor for Middle English writings, and has often been understood to point to writers’ anxieties over the inferiority of English as a literary medium. However, ‘boistous’ can also refer to the exemplary, the natural, and the bodily, and so simultaneously points to writers’ understandings of the didactic and rhetorical potency of English. By looking to John Trevisa’s translations of De regimine principum and De proprietatibus rerum, as well as the writings of Thomas Usk and Nicholas Love, this essay contends that ‘boistous’ demarcates a form of vernacular writing that claims a mode of reading for the lay and unlearned that is predicated on the senses of taste and touch, and that is understood to be fundamentally good-for thinking with, for ethical life in the world, and for salvation.

This article explores the different interpretations of the phrase ‘Brevis oratio penetrat celum’, ‘A short prayer pierces heaven’, that circulated in late medieval England. It argues that the phrase was often used to think about the efficacy of laypeople’s prayer in a context where laypeople were increasingly able to access traditionally clerical knowledge. The article considers texts that identify the phrase as a ‘comoun prouerbe’, texts that link it to the Paternoster, and texts that explain it with reference to academic discourse about atomism, before turning to Piers Plowman, where the phrase provokes some complex reflections on the way that different forms of knowledge might be internalized and articulated as devotion.

The language of Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love is profoundly influenced by his professional linguistic environments, notably his work for John Northampton’s political party and as scribe for the Goldsmiths’ guild. Usk uses technical terms and stylistic features which are typically relegated to political and bureaucratic Anglo-Norman French texts. Gathering these examples and contextualizing them within the Goldsmiths’ Minute Books and Usk’s Appeal Against John Northampton, this essay shows that Usk’s creative use of language is an important strategy for his aims in writing the Testament, and that it is a provocative tool for the construction of identity and authority in London at the end of the fourteenth century. That the ‘vernacular’ language of the Testament includes the Anglo-French terminology of Usk’s professional background should prompt us to reconsider the significance of technical bureaucratic and political registers for the communication of experience.