Latin, French, and vernacular English in late medieval England
« previous post |
Scholarly paper:
Timothy Glover, "The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae", Mediaeval Studies, 85 (August 29, 2025), érudit, 163-238.
Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:
Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller: The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).
As an adulatory devotee of Geoffrey Chaucer, naturally I was transfixed by this news.
The only surviving original version of Richard Rolle’s Emending of Life, has been identified at Shrewsbury School, founded in 1552.
The 14th-century manuscript features unique elements, shedding new light on the work of a writer far more widely circulated than Geoffrey Chaucer.
The first detail that caught my attention is that this priceless manuscript was preserved in the rare book holdings of a private school dating back to Saxon times, Shrewsbury School’s Ancient "Taylor" Library (founded in 1606).
In a paper published in Mediaeval Studies, Timothy Glover, a medieval literature researcher, demonstrates that manuscript "MS 25" in the Taylor Library contains the only complete surviving copy of Richard Rolle’s original draft of Emendatio vitae (The Emending of Life). In his study, Glover explains how the hermit Rolle became "England’s most widely-read author in a period sandwiched between the Great Famine and the Wars of the Roses."
Richard Rolle (c.1300–1349) is one of the four or five authors known as the Middle English Mystics. Today, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are widely published and celebrated. By comparison, Rolle has been neglected.
And yet, Rolle was the most widely circulated English writer of the late medieval period, making him one of the best known authors of his day. His work survives in more copies than for any other writer from the period in England. Over 650 manuscripts containing his work survive today, compared to roughly 144 for Chaucer.
I find it particularly intriguing that Rolle wrote both in Latin and in English:
Rolle mostly wrote in Latin but was among the earliest authors to write about advanced Christian teachings in English after the Norman Conquest. The best known of these English works is The Form of Living.
Rolle’s sophisticated religious texts gained a growing readership in the decades after his death. He was prayed to and developed a local following as a saint, despite not quite becoming one.
In contrast, Chaucer
…did not write his literary works in Latin; he wrote primarily in Middle English. While Latin and French were the standard languages for literature and the church in 14th-century England, Chaucer chose to write in the vernacular (common tongue), becoming the first court poet to do so.
Primary Language: Chaucer’s masterpieces, such as The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, were written in Middle English.
Translation Work: Although he did not compose his original works in Latin, Chaucer was fluent in it and translated Latin texts into English, including Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris.
Influences: He drew heavily from Latin, French, and Italian sources, incorporating many of these words into his English writing.
By choosing English, Chaucer is often credited with legitimizing the language for literature. (AIO)
Back to Rolle, Glover found dozens of "literary fingerprints" left by him in MS 25 indicating that it was he who wrote this version of the text. One of his favorites is "melliphono", which makes it a "sweet-sounding" smoking gun that it was Rolle who was the author of MS 25.
Rolle invented the word ‘melliphono’ to mean sweet-sounding and the word appears in several of his texts. The odds that a scribe would have come up with this made-up word as well are, Glover says, “vanishingly small”.
“Melliphono is a very Rolle word, he's all about this idea of spiritual song and experience of angelic heavenly music being the highest experience of God. He had an enormous Latin vocabulary and creatively deployed a huge range of very specific terms for music to explain his ultimate experience of God.”
“He’s using music as a metaphor for an inner experience. Like Augustine, he was sceptical of audible music and singing. Rolle talks of praying and having this experience of hearing music as if from above but also welling up inside him, and he says his meditation becomes song. He’s describing a free-flowing experience of divine love.”
This is a wonderful way for a mystic-hermit to look at language and music.
Selected readings
- "Memes, typos, and vernacular English in a 12th-century Latin homily" (7/20/25)
- "Richard Rolle" — WP
[Thanks to Mark Swofford and Mark Metcalf]
JMGN said,
January 27, 2026 @ 1:14 pm
Tangentially:
Manuscript is /ˈmæn.jəskɹɪpt/, with a compulsory /j/. At first I thought it was related to its hyphenation (man‧u‧script). I was not aware of the algorithm or rules used for written hyphenation, but all sources seem to coincide. However, I realized in "vol·un·tar·y" the -u- is always /ə/.
Therefore, maybe the etymologically related term manual /ˈmænjuəl/ exerts its influence on manuscript?
BTW, I've come across another examples: genuflect /ˈdʒEnjəflEkt/.
Conversely, we have cornucopia /ˌkɔːrnəˈkoʊpiə/ and corrugate /ˈkɔːrəɡeɪt/
Philip Taylor said,
January 27, 2026 @ 1:27 pm
Your topolect is presumably different from mine, JMGN — I have a schwa in none of "manuscript", "genuflect" nor "cornucopia" : /ˈmæn ju skrɪpt/, /ˈdʒen ju flekt/ and /ˌkɔːn ju ˈkəʊp i‿ə/ respectively. Also perhaps worth noting that the hyphenation rules for British English (primarily etymological) differ very significantly from American English (primarily syllabic). We (Britons) do, however, generally draw the line at "helico-pter".
J.W. Brewer said,
January 27, 2026 @ 1:34 pm
There's also a /j/ in "manumit"/"manumission," and (here for some but not all Anglophones) in "manure." "Manure" turns out to be etymologically connected with the same Latin etymon as the others, although by a more circuitous path.
But the broader issue is when American English (for most speakers) drops the historical yod after /n/ ("new") and when it doesn't ("manuscript"). I don't think the answer has that much to do with etymology or semantics.
JMGN said,
January 27, 2026 @ 2:37 pm
I mean that in "voluntary" there is never a /j/, although the unstressed -u- is followed by two consonants too, like that in "manuscript". Conversely, "corrugate" never shows a /j/ even though the -u- is followed by a consonant plus a vowel —which is "full" (a diphthong)—.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 27, 2026 @ 2:47 pm
Isn't it the case that the "u" in "manuscript" counts as "long" due to the cluster "skr" being assigned to the next syllable? And therefore /juː/ plus reduction in an unstressed syllable? While the "un" of "voluntary" counts as "short", due to the "n" closing that syllable (because it can't go to the right); therefore /ʌ/ plus reduction.
JMGN said,
January 27, 2026 @ 3:26 pm
@Jarek Weckwerth
I am following the main AmE pronunciation from the Longman Pronunciation Dict.
Regarding the LPD syllabification, check this: http://web.archive.org/web/20210411041256/https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/syllabif.htm
ardj said,
January 27, 2026 @ 4:14 pm
Dear Professor Mair
Leaving aside the (learned) chattering of the intrusive jays, I would like to thank you for this post, and I look forward to reading the Glover paper – and to re-reading Chaucer.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
January 27, 2026 @ 4:38 pm
@ JMGN Wells's syllabification is famously contentious. That's why he has that big section in the introduction, where BTW he admits that it's contentious (if memory serves). His main argument is that it allows to predict some phonetic processes, such as pre-fortis clipping (and it does!) but I don't think it's in agreement with other syllabification approaches. Even Roach et al.'s Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary has a more mainstream syllabification.
And I refer to those traditional and widespread methods.
All the same, even for Wells, it's man.u.script and vol.unt.ar.y.
David Marjanović said,
January 27, 2026 @ 4:48 pm
Well, the cluster /lj/ is rare to absent in most Englishes. There isn't any in illusion…
Andrew Usher said,
January 27, 2026 @ 5:22 pm
But there is in the common volume, showing that it is allowed if split between syllables, as it would be in voluntary – the real reason there isn't a yod in the latter is that the 'u' is in a closed syllable and historically short.
On the other hand cornucopia should have one, I would guess the pronunciation without one comes from syllabifying cor-nu- and applying yod-dropping after /n/, not from ignoring the morpheme boundary cornu-copia.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
JMGN said,
January 27, 2026 @ 5:35 pm
-u- is /jə/ in several words where it is the penultimate vowel grapheme and unstressed, and separated from the next vowel letter by a single consonant letter, and main stress is on the preceding syllable, and also in the two words "copulation", "population", where it is the antepenultimate vowel grapheme (and unstressed) and main stress is on the following syllable.
Dictionary of the British English Spelling System, by Greg Brooks.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 27, 2026 @ 7:09 pm
Although the undropped yod of "volume" is dropped (in AmEng) in "voluminous," perhaps because the "l" has switched its syllabic loyalties.
Peter Cyrus said,
January 28, 2026 @ 4:31 am
Doesn't the existence of minimal pairs like fool/fuel or moot/mute imply that the "yod-dropping" has little to do with context? That they're just different phonemes?
I always assumed the /ju/ phoneme was just the English reflex of /y/ as in Dutch Utrecht or High German Übel.
JMGN said,
January 28, 2026 @ 4:43 am
@Peter Cyrus
"The only pairs in non-final syllables are beauty/booty, bootie and pewter/Pooter – none has -u- as the relevant spelling.
Similarly, no minimal pairs separated only by/j/ in the final syllables of polysyllables, and only a few such pairs/sets among monosyllables: beaut (Australian slang), butte/boot; cue(d/s), queue(d/s), Kew/coo(ed/s); cute/coot; dew, due /djuː// do; ewe, yew, you/Oo(h)!; feud/food; few/phoo; hew(s), hue(s), Hugh(es/’s)/ who(se); hewn/Hoon; Home /hjuːm/, Hu(l)me/whom; lewd/ looed; lieu/loo; mew/moo; mewed/mood; mews, muse/moos; mute/moot; pew(s), Pugh(s)/poo(s), Pooh(’s); pseud/sued (for many); puke/Pook; pule/pool; use (verb)/ooze.
Some Welsh accents distinguish threw vs through as /θrjuː / vs /θruː/. Again, none of these has -u- as the relevant spelling, though some have -ue, u.e-."
Dictionary of the British English Spelling (Greg Brooks)