Medieval English vernacularity and “the desire of text to be made voice”

English culture c. 1300 might best be compared with Pushkin's Russia: the socially privileged, those who were literate, or at any rate with access to texts, spoke, wrote, and for the most part seem to have thought in their sociolect of French; the majority vernacular was the province of the peasantry and urban proletariat. Within two hundred years, following regime change and regicide, but without social convulsion on the Russian scale, the English language found itself promoted to the position formerly held by French, both as the language of secular state institutions and as a standard status language for literary composition. This is the change that all literary histories of medieval English culture would address.

The Russian parallel may be instructive. We need to reconceptualize, in more comparative and transhistorical ways, the relationship such accounts mostly assume between the vernacular and the national. Do writers see their choice of language as a sign of social identity, and, if so, broadly (nation) or more narrowly (kinship group, region, class)? Not only are vernacularities plural in both cultures (with minority vernaculars in both empires, such as Welsh or Ukrainian), but also in both cultures it is impossible to separate “vernacular” from “popular”: Russian and English are associated primarily with the governed, French with the governors. So in Middle English, by the early fourteenth century, works use formulas that mark them as popular by destination, aimed at “lewed” folk (those who cannot read French or, if the subject is ecclesiastical, Latin).