Multilingualism played an important role in the development of Standard English, but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring late medieval institutional code-switching altogether. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, code-switched record-keeping was routine practice, from prestigious institutions to private individuals, although no history of English mentions it and very little of it is published. In this chapter, I firstly establish my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English by showing that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes that adopted both the written conventions of Anglo-Norman and much of its content-word stock when code-switching practices were reversed. What this means is that instead of a Medieval Latin grammatical matrix containing Anglo-Norman and English words, fifteenth century scribes switched to an English grammatical matrix containing code-switched Anglo-Norman and English words. Standard English was the eventual outcome of this reversal. I then track the “monolingual origin” story, still repeated in textbooks today – namely, the story that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the “East Midlands”, or “Central Midlands”, or “Chancery English”, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. I show that the “monolingual origin” story goes back to the early 1870s and consider the reasons for why the monolingual-source explanation prevailed for so long.

Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages remains a monumental achievement of postwar scholarship, whose vast scope – spanning a continent and more than a millennium – has kept it continuously relevant. However, its strangely atemporal view of literature, its treatment of medieval Latin as a medium (rather than a creative literature in its own right), and its peculiar structure have likewise been criticized since its publication. This essay argues that ELLMA’s virtues and faults are intertwined, and that both are inseparable from Curtius’s use of the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Adapting Jung’s theories of archetypes and the stratified collective unconscious to literary study, Curtius reimagined medieval Latin as the collective unconscious of modern European literature. This boldly creative decision allowed him to achieve his goal: a reparative vision of a Europe forever unified through classical education.

Chapter Three studies ‘the word’ by merging two fields of association: first, the agglomeration of human labours, social practices, cultural values, and codified grammatical systems that made possible and supported the acquisition of Latin; second, the inhuman order of the ‘verbum Dei’. Each of these fields of association has, as its ultimate aim, the transformation of individual lives. It is under the rubric of this shared objective that I bring them together here. The first half of the chapter explores aspects of the medieval Latin grammatical tradition and its early modern afterlives. My goal is to make some seventh-century wranglings on the subject of the Latin case system serve as a point of entry into later fashions of prose style, and into the pedagogical disciplines of systematic imitation that were developed to teach Ciceronian Latin to schoolboys. The second half of the chapter explores a range of texts associated with St Paul, St Augustine, and Martin Luther in order to characterize the linguistic and spiritual stakes of medieval and early modern Britain’s absorption into Rome.

Chapter One studies how Rome figures in the murky processes by which individuals settled their relation to the world. In the process, it establishes something of the range of conditions under which medieval and early modern writers negotiated their own absorption into the matter of Rome. The chapter pursues at length medieval and early modern habits of attending not so much to the wonders of Rome, but rather to all that is most ordinary, obvious (in the word’s etymological reference to that which is encountered ‘in the way’), and ubiquitous in what Rome left in its wake when it relinquished its formal, administrative hold on the provinces of Britannia. These preoccupations open onto a wide span of time: from the middle of the sixth to the middle of the seventeenth century. The texts and problems that dominate the chapter range from Gildas andBede to Sir Thomas Browne in the late seventeenth century.