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Bede's Liberation Philology: Releasing the English Tongue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Irina A. Dumitrescu
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Abstract

In his tale of the miraculous healing of a mute youth in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (bk. 5, ch. 2), Bede figures language pedagogy as poetic emancipation. The tongue's loosening is an escape from physical disability and a figurative deliverance from the bonds of pagan sin through baptismal gesture. It also signifies liberation from the desolation of being trapped in one's own consciousness, a freeing into communion with other people. Bede uses the figure of a linguistically disabled youth to explore the grammatical underpinnings of all language, spoken or written. While he depicts the sacramental aspects of Latinate language learning, he also makes a startling move, hinting that English, a tongue ideologically and geographically peripheral, can adopt the pedagogies of Latin for its own secular uses. The story is an interpretative capstone to Bede's accounts of Cædmon, Imma, and Gregory I's encounter with English slaves in a Roman marketplace.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 40 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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