I have a new article out in Medium Ævum 92.2, titled ‘What Tongue does Chaucer’s Custance Speak? “Latyn corrupt” Revisited’.
This article tackles the sense of a much-discussed phrase in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, when the heroine Custance washes up in early medieval Northumbria and has to make herself understood despite speaking ‘Latyn corrupt’ (Canterbury Tales, II.516–20).
In the same journal many years ago, J. A. Burrow gave these lines sustained attention, suggesting that the phrase revealed either historicising imagination of changed Latin on Chaucer’s part, or a distinct mercantile lingua franca known in Middle English as ‘Latyn corrupt’. This has served as a touchstone for critics addressing various topics in the decades since; I reference many of them in the article.
I show using newly-gathered evidence that by ‘Latyn corrupt’ Chaucer means neither historicised Latin, nor a particular lingua franca, one of the vernaculars of Italy, which were not in his lifetime united under one nation-state language designation as Italian. Latyn corrupt appears to have served as a standard way to label these vernaculars in Middle English. I bring a range of fresh-found examples of the phrase to the table, and recontextualise the analogues which Burrow provided.
I don’t think pinning down what this phrase meant impedes all the interesting scholarship which uses it to think about travel, multilingualism, othering et cetera, and at the article’s end I gesture at some fruitful directions in which this interpretation might take us! The whole article’s something of a fortunate by-product from my work editing the Man of Law’s Tale for the Cambridge Chaucer project.
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