To Be ‘Languaged’

What did it mean to be able to speak another language in early modern England? Linguistic competence was more complicated than a simple binary between fluent and not. Just as historians have argued for the existence of multiple literacies in early modern England, so too were there multiple linguistic competences, depending on the speaker’s status, age, gender, origin, and occupation. Male and female language-learners had to master different ways of expressing superiority or deference and of managing ritualised interactions. Immigrants to England had to learn a new vernacular while accommodating themselves to new customs and rules of conversation. Reading the corpus of conversation manuals alongside broader discourses of gender, civility, speech, and behaviour, this chapter uncovers the dynamics of multilingual speech and silence in an age of encounter. More broadly, it offers a new framework for thinking historically about linguistic competence.

Extracurricular Economy

This chapter looks at the vibrant economy of language teaching and learning in early modern England. The period witnessed a boom in both autodidacticism and private educational provision. Language teaching was central to a vibrant urban ‘extracurricular economy’. New spaces, schools, and teachers reshaped the educational landscape. Working within an economy of reputation, skill, and prestige, language teachers advertised their services and attracted students through a mixture of their presence in print, networks of contacts, and claims of pedagogical skill and linguistic prestige. In doing so, these teachers—particularly teachers of French—contributed to new ways of thinking about the English language itself. New perspectives on the places, people, and practices of this extracurricular economy ultimately demand that we rethink the concept of an early modern ‘educational revolution’.

‘A Conversable Knowledge’

This chapter considers language-learning in educational travel. Early modern English elites placed great emphasis on the educational value of travel, and saw the study and practice of vernacular languages—most commonly French and Italian—as central to educational travel. This chapter uses a rich set of manuscript source materials (including travellers’ polyglot diaries, letters, and notebooks) to show how travellers learnt foreign languages while abroad. It aims to put the education back into educational travel, showing the importance of everyday pedagogies to early modern travel practices. It argues that linguistic concerns helped to shape everything from the routes that travellers followed to the company they kept and the notes they wrote. While the focus of this chapter is on the unusually well-documented travels of mostly male and mostly wealthy English-speakers, it offers reflections on language-learning practices that are relevant to other kinds of traveller, from merchants to servants.

Speaking Books

If you wanted to learn a foreign language in early modern England, the cheapest and most useful tool available was a multilingual conversation manual. Working from a corpus of over 300 editions, this chapter charts the changing place of these texts in the early modern print market: price, authorship, what languages they offered, and how they developed as a physical object. Using these books, readers engaged with the multilingual oral and aural worlds of early modern Europe. Changes in the form of these manuals over time were closely tied to developments in pedagogy and reading. The kind of reading advocated by these manuals was rarely silent or abstract. In teaching skills from correct pronunciation to social interaction, these manuals demanded that readers confer the text with the oral, sociable world beyond. This chapter offers a new way of understanding linguistic education, multilingual reading, and shifting ideals of linguistic competence.

Introduction

The introduction argues for the importance of language-learning and multilingualism in the history of early modern England. English-speakers who ventured beyond Dover could not rely on English and had to become language-learners, while even at home English urban life was often multilingual. It brings together early modern concepts of linguistic ability with approaches from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and the social history of language in order to show how we can think about linguistic competence in a historical perspective. It demonstrates the importance of ‘questions of language’ to the social, cultural, religious, and political histories of early modern England, and to the question of England’s place in a rapidly expanding world. After an overview of the book’s structure, aims, and parameters, it closes by asking how taking a polyglot perspective might shift our understandings of early modern English history.

Conclusion

The conclusion brings together the arguments made in the book’s four central chapters, in order to show the unique contribution the book makes. As the first full-length book on the topic, it opens up a number of questions for future research, and the conclusion points towards rich areas of work which can build on the findings of the book and further enrich our understanding of a multilingual English history. It asks how the polyglot perspective might enrich and challenge areas of English history in this period: given the pervasiveness of multilingualism in the urban, diplomatic, religious, and mercantile spheres—and considering the existence of many individuals whose multilingualism left little written record—how can we write a history of this transformative period that is alive to the polyglot forces that shaped both England and English?