LITMIR.BIZ

      2

      The Value of the Mother Tongue

      Vernacular Translations

      of Monastic Rules for Women

       Shifting Boundaries: Translations and Social Relations in Later Medieval England

      The entry for “translaten” in the Middle English Dictionary includes six definitions: to relocate a person or thing (including a cleric, a saint’s relics, knowledge and culture, an episcopal see, or allegiance); to take away a kingdom or duchy from its ruler or people; to take into the afterlife without death; to change the nature, condition, or appearance of someone or something; to replace, turn, or move; and—finally—to render into another language.¹ These definitions reveal that translation is an operation performed on both bodies (dead and alive) and words. The far-reaching implications of the textual exchanges of monastic profession and visitation call attention to the intimate connections between bodies and words in later medieval culture, connections that heighten the dramatic social significance of translation.² Corporeal and textual translation share more than a common sense of change in location or form; they are linked by their socially transformative ability to change existing boundaries.³

      In later medieval versions of monastic rules for women the process of translation from Latin to the vernacular is, like the religious identities these rules help shape, Janus-faced; it is ambiguous in its socially transformative functions. Translation works to shift boundaries and to shore them up. The vernacular acts both as servant of orthodoxy and as agent of subversion, serving to empower as well as to constrain, and sometimes doing both at once.

      The ambiguous status of the vernacular and the problematic nature of translation in Middle English monastic rules for women are intimately connected to social changes involving literacy; particularly significant are the facts that in the fifteenth century, literate culture expanded among non-noble women, and nuns were in one of the best situations available to women for gaining literacy skills.⁴ The Latin literacy of later medieval nuns has been generally considered lacking; vernacular literacy, however, was another story altogether. Financial accounts and court records, for instance, manifest nuns’ active participation in business affairs, involvement which would have required significant literacy skills.⁵ As women religious achieved levels of pragmatic and professional literacy, “their social visibility and power” increased;⁶ presumably, from a clerical point of view, their potential as a source of disruption also increased accordingly.

      Further enhancing the potentially advantageous and potentially threatening position of women religious was the dearth of textual production and engagement in fifteenth-century male monasteries. In his analysis of the libraries of nuns, David Bell finds that “the interest of the nuns in fifteenth-century books and literature stands in marked contrast to the unimpressive record of their male counterparts”—interest to which the vibrant textual cultures at the Benedictine house of Barking and the Brigittine house of Syon bear witness.⁷ He posits that as a result of “what most men would have seen as their limitations,” nuns may have enjoyed a “richer, fuller, and, one might say, more up to date” spiritual life than male monastics, who for the most part “were still mired in the consequences of a conservative and traditional education.”⁸

      Burgeoning vernacular literacy among women religious was clearly not the only vernacular literacy that posed a problem in the eyes of some clerical authorities. In fact, the vernacular literacy of nuns may have been somewhat less a source of ecclesiastical anxiety than the vernacular literacy of secular women (as in the case of Lollard women) and of rebellious lay men. Women religious were, after all, at least theoretically cloistered and less able to make trouble. The Church’s already conflicted attitude toward female spirituality, though, made ecclesiastical authorities ever vigilant.

      Vigilance likely seemed particularly necessary since the boundary-shifting, socially transformative properties of translation, as well as the connections between bodies and words, were well understood by the clerics opposed to vernacular translation of scripture in the early fifteenth century. The antitranslation faction argued that “translation into the mother tongue will allow any old women (vetula) to usurp the office of teacher, which is forbidden to them (since all heresies, according to Jerome, come from women); it will bring about a world in which the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women (mulierculae) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men.”⁹ This is a dire vision of a “translated” world turned upside down in which the nature, condition, and appearance of society itself are dramatically altered as all “proper” boundaries are breached. The passage makes clear the negative associations of the vernacular with women, creatures of inferior bodies and minds who introduce discord and disorder.

      The hysterical, even apocalyptic, tone of the antitranslation passage highlights as well the conservative clerics’ anxieties about the threats posed by the vernacular to their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, which they had historically enjoyed, thanks to their virtually exclusive access to Latin learning and sacred texts.¹⁰ By undermining the foundations of clerical authority—that is, the clergy’s position as sole possessors and interpreters of these sacred texts—translation shifted boundaries demarcating hierarchies. As a result, the clergy’s privileged access to cultural and material resources, which followed from their monopoly on spiritual knowledge, was threatened. The socially transformative properties of translation put the English clergy who opposed it in the position of having to, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, “save the market.”¹¹ Translation appeared, from a clerical perspective, as the source of diverse dangers, and so the struggle to preserve all the conditions of the social field which afforded the clergy the greatest access to symbolic and material capital

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