5 - English and International? Kyng Alisaunder, Of Arthour and of Merlin, and The Seege or Batayle of Troye

Summary

The title of this chapter is a conscious invocation of Elizabeth Salter's work English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England. In that work, Salter provocatively calls Chaucer's decision to write in English ‘the triumph of internationalism’, suggesting that his writing is an indication of a context that is ‘essentially European, not narrowly insular’. After the analysis of the RTC in chapter 4, this attitude should not be a surprise, nor especially provocative. However, in terms of critical context Salter's observation remains unusual. The increasing dominance of English in the insular literature of the later Middle Ages has naturally led to a scholarly focus on the local resonances of texts because of the limited geographical range of the language, and therefore the related idea that English-language material is interested in issues of identity that are local and/or peculiar to the English has been particularly to the fore in scholarship. Thorlac Turville-Petre's 1996 book England the Nation, which analyzes the period 1290–1340, is often cited as a key moment in crystallizing this approach. Although the final chapter, ‘Three Languages’, argues against ‘nationalist polemics’ regarding English, French, and Latin and for ‘a tradition of languages existing in harmonious and complementary relationship’, the book's main emphasis is firmly upon the construction of a single culture based upon national identity, ‘one culture in three voices’. This perspective incorporates Latin and French with English into a unified cultural and political narrative, but crucially in doing so it elides the possibility of difference, whether linguistic or in terms of function: all three languages have effectively become, or have been subsumed into, English, culturally and politically. Geraldine Heng sums up the prevailing critical view of the coterminous relationship between the English language (or languages) and insular culture succinctly:

The choice of English was a choice in favor of exclusivity, since English ensured that the romances addressed only an insular audience, eschewing the outside, and all possibility of international reception.

This ‘exclusivity’ makes English romance actively insular, ‘eschewing … international reception’. From this perspective, Salter's observation about Chaucer's internationalism seems remote, applicable perhaps only to a poet composing in multilingual and cosmopolitan court circles for elite patrons rather than to the more widely consumed popular romances that the same author parodies in The Canterbury Tales.