Translatable histories: multilingualism, verse translation and identity in medieval England

Thesis

This thesis argues that translation fundamentally reshaped the construction of English identity in history-writing between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. The translation of English history between Old English, Latin, Old French, and Middle English transformed whom it was meant to address – and what kind of Englishness could emerge from it. This is demonstrated through a focus on the translation of historiographical poetry, whose stylised, culturally specific forms reveal which aspects of history and identity were considered translatable, or untranslatable, across languages. Accordingly, this thesis combines translation theory with formalist analysis and manuscript studies, developing new approaches to medieval translation and its impact on identity-construction within multilingual societies.

What emerges is a profound shift across the Norman Conquest. The first chapter argues that the Old English alliterative poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle create an ‘effect of untranslatability’, positioning themselves as emblematic of ancestral English history and posing evident difficulties for the Chronicle’s Latin translations. Conversely, the second chapter identifies an ‘effect of translatability’ in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman verse chronicles, marked by new verse forms that visibly participate in multilingual textuality. In Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, translation thus becomes the basis of a multiethnic English identity. The third chapter traces the ‘prismatic translation’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s De gestis Britonum in Wace’s Roman de Brut and Laȝamon’s Brut, through which English history and identity are refracted for increasingly broader yet overlapping multilingual audiences. Finally, the fourth chapter identifies a new fragmentation of history-writing in the early fourteenth-century chronicles of Peter Langtoft and Robert Mannyng, which allows some forms of English poetry to be reimagined as ‘untranslatable’ and emblematic of an ethnically English history.

This thesis thus provides a large-scale re-evaluation of complex interactions between language and identity and charts new ways of approaching the multilingual processes that shaped medieval conceptions of Englishness.

Authors: Angerer, ML

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ngqrne2ze
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: historiography; Old English; national identity; Latin; translation; Middle English; multilingualism; Old French