Thinking about language in a medieval French text

What is it about?

Walter de Bibbesworth's Tretiz, written in the mid-thirteenth century, is the earliest known French language-learning text. In this article I show that it is also a sophisticated exploration of multilingualism. Bibbesworth presents French's relationship with English as both codified and messy, with words shared by both languages troubling any sense of stable hierarchy. Where many medieval authors viewed multilingualism as God's punishment of humankind for building the Tower of Babel, the Tretiz offers a more upbeat account of linguistic diversity as an essential feature of all communication, one to be celebrated.

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Photo by Krisztina Papp on Unsplash

Photo by Krisztina Papp on Unsplash

Why is it important?

I show how the Tretiz shares surprising affinities with very recent ideas about language and translation: Emily Apter's notion of the 'in between zone' and Edouard Glissant's concept of linguistic diversity, which insists that no language is an island. My article highlights the relevance of medieval texts to current debates about language, and reveals that not all medieval authors subscribed to the much-studied Biblical model of multilingualism as a divinely-ordained punishment for the Tower of Babel.