Fiona Somerset

Excitative Speech: Theories of Emotive Response from Richard Fitzralph to Margery Kempe

Judith Butlers recent book Excitable Speech examines our society’s attitudes to how public utterances on the most sensitive of controversial topics may provoke intense emotion, or even incite violent reactions: What are the possible consequences of such speaking, and to what extent are the speakers responsible for them?1 These kinds of concerns are, as it turns out, nothing new. In 1357, when required to defend himself at the papal court against accusations by friars provoked by his views on voluntary mendicancy—one of the hottest topics of the day, and the main bone of contention between friars and their rivals—Richard Fitzralph wrote the Defensio curatorum, which became one of the most widely disseminated polemical statements of the later medieval period on the church’s contested role in lay education.2 Frequendy copied and disseminated with the Defensio was a further reply to the friars’ questions on mendicancy that has previously been overlooked by scholars, in which Fitzralph develops a theory of “excitative speech,” whose importance among late medieval views about the dangers and benefits of emotionally provocative language has never been recognized. Nor, at the other end of the line I want to spin, has Margery Kempe’s interest, as a vernacular theorist, in using some of the same tools to assess the consequences of excitative expression. Tracing these developments can give us new insight into the perceived consequences, and responsibilities, associated with late medieval vernacular publication.

Masculinity and its metonyms

The author responds to the articles in this issue by demonstrating how a twentieth-century poem might provide us with a fresh perspective on the situated historical understandings of bodies gendered as male provided here. Amichai uses the literary figure of metonymy to show how ‘a man’ has no time for history: he allows a part to speak for the whole, and a specific cultural moment to stand for any time. Historians and literary scholars alike would benefit from attending to our own metonyms, and the historical continuities we assume or assert as we seek to investigate cultural difference.

The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature on "Latinitas"

This volume, among all its other virtues, provides a sort of snapshot of Medieval English literary studies at the turn of the century, and indeed of the millennium. It is therefore unsurprising that it gives so much attention, more or less throughout, to the development of the cultural authority of the English vernacular Middle English: this is, after all, a widespread preoccupation in the field today. While some among future generations might choose to dismiss this preponderance of attention as modish or trendy, it seems to me that by focusing on vernacularity the volume records some of this generation of scholars’ most important insights: an understanding of how the perceived importance of Middle English rose and fell; how the language took up different relationships, in particular circumstances, to other languages widely used in Britain; and how its status was exploited to a variety of ends in the prologue-posturings of a whole range of authors. My concern here, however, will be with another, related issue: not vernacularity, but ‘‘Latinitas.’’ While scholarship is admirably attentive, nowadays, to the registers and institutional affiliations in particular varieties and usages of Middle English, it seems to me that Latin is often something of a blind spot: scholars often fail to take account of the variations in register and institutional affiliation in contemporary usages of Latin. Does this volume also reflect this general inattention to Latin’s variety? ‘‘Latinitas’’ certainly figures as a more or less undifferentiated hegemonic force in the short prefaces and introductions by David Wallace that give signposts for the volume’s overall narrative structure. Along with forming the topic of a whole chapter in part 1, ‘‘Latinitas, as hegemonic force and as discrete acts of practice, makes itself felt in every chapter’’ of this first section (p. 5). In part 3, on ‘‘Institutional Produc-