Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
- Author / Editor
- Davidson, Mary Catherine.
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
- Published
- New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
- Physical Description
- 211 p.
- Series
- The New Middle Ages.
- Description
- In late medieval England, "code-switching" among English, French, and Latin was linked to literacy and social prestige, not to aberrant or nonconformist behavior; code-switching was a means to articulate social identity. Chaucer distanced his projects from attitudes of alleged "masculine" Anglophone monolingualism. He viewed his Continental counterparts not as linguistic inferiors, but as writers to be emulated; English was linked strongly to orality and, thus, to dialectical "diversite." Multilingualism constituted power. Code-switching into Latin and French gave Chaucer's language an authority not available in English alone. Davidson refers to GP, NPT, PardT, WBT, SumT, FrT, and TC, along with works by Gower and Langland.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Language and Word Studies
- Canterbury Tales--General
- Troilus and Criseyde