The New Middle Ages
Mary Catherine Davidson
Palgrave Macmillan, December 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60297-7, ISBN10: 0-230-60297-5,
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches, 224 pages
Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer
examines multilingual identity in the writing of Gower, Langland, and
Chaucer. Mary Catherine Davidson traces monolingual habits of inquiry
to nineteenth-century attitudes toward French, which had first
influenced popular constructions of medieval English in such historical
novels as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. In re-reading medieval
traditions in the origins of English from Geoffrey of Monmouth, this
book describes how multilingual practices reflected attitudes toward
English in the age of Chaucer.
Table of contents
- Introduction: Monolingualism and Middle English
- Traditions of Contact and Conflict in the History of English
- Medievalism and Monolingualism
- Hengist’s Tongue: A Medieval History of Middle English
- “And in Latyn . . . a wordes fewe”: Contact and Medieval Conformity
- Multilingual Writing and William Langland
- Chaucer’s “Diversite”
- Afterword: Postcolonialism and Chaucer’s English