Table of Contents

Contents

Preface: On "Vernacular"

Acknowledgments

Introduction: King Solomon’s Tablets

Nicholas Watson

Part I: 1100–1300: The Evangelical Vernacular

1. Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity

Meg Worley

2. Talking the Talk: Access to the Vernacular in Medieval Preaching

Claire M. Waters

3. The Language of Conversion: Ramon Llull’s Art as a Vernacular

Harvey Hames

4. Mechthild von Magdeburg: Gender and the "Unlearned Tongue"

Sara S. Poor

Part II: 1300–1500: Vernacular Textualities

5. Creating a Masculine Vernacular: The Strategy of Misogyny in Late Medieval French Texts

Gretchen V. Angelo

6. Teaching Philosophy at School and Court: Vulgarization and Translation

Charles F. Briggs

7. Vernacular Textualities in Fourteenth-Century Florence

William Robins

8. "Moult Bien Parloit et Lisoit le Franchois," or Did Richard II Read with a Picard Accent?

Andrew Taylor

9. Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston’s Determinacio, Arundel’s Constitutiones

Fiona Somerset

Part III: 1500–2000: Making the Mother Tongues

10. Purity and the Language of the Court in the Late-Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Jeroen Jansen

11. The Politics of ABCs: "Language Wars” and Literary Vernacularization Among the Serbs and Romanians of Austria-Hungary, 1780–1870

Jack Fairey

12. "Indian Shakespeare" and the Politics of Language in Colonial India

Nandi Bhatia

13. Poets Laureate and the Language of Slaves: Petrarch, Chaucer, and Langston Hughes

Larry Scanlon

Further Reading

About the Contributors

Index

About the Author

Nicholas Watson is a Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He is the author of Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991) and co-editor of The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (Penn State, 1999).

Fiona Somerset is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (1998).

Reviews

“The Vulgar Tongue uses the theme of vernacularity in imaginative ways to generate dialogues between medievalists and those working in other disciplines. The essays are brought together by two outstanding medievalists who rank among the scholarly leaders in their field.”—Wendy Scase, University of Birmingham

“The collection’s breadth of information and the expertise of its contributors ensure the ongoing usefulness of The Vulgar Tongue.”—Rick McDonald Rocky Mountain Review

“This is a rich, ambitious, and provocative book. It should interest any reader concerned with the ways in which intellectuals, past and present, help shape both definitions and social evaluations of the vernacular.”—Helmut Muller-Sievers Modern Philology