The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition ed. by Ian Johnson, Allan F. Westphall (review) (original) (raw)

2016, JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Book Reviews 269 vocabulary, Hsy finds traces of Caxton's "lingering alienation from his own language across space and across time" (p. 124) along with "a powerful assertion of Caxtonian authority" (p. 127) in the literary and linguistic marketplace. Chapter 4 reads Margery Kempe's autobiography as a form of travel writing, and indeed, given its theme, the chapter might have been more effectively placed after Chapter 2, particularly since no pressing argument is offered for its placement here. Kempe's "perpetual orbit through polylingual environments," Hsy convincingly argues, renders her book a "textual participant in a translingual network" that "pursues non-anglocentric, transnational, and multidirectional trajectories" (pp. 133-34). this refreshingly international take on Kempe's Book situates it first within the Anglo-Hanseatic commercial relations of Lynn, whose "busy multilingual character" and international connections Hsy finds reflected within the work's own "layered polyvocality" (p. 144), especially Margery's interactions with non-English speakers in the course of her travels. the chapter then turns to a close examination of Margery's highly Francophone prayers while at sea, revealing the way they "strategically adopt the French-inflected register of business correspondence" (p. 151). Chapter 5 moves back to London (and through in time) with a wonderful exploration of the literary compilations of three tudor men deeply familiar with such registers: the draper Robert Fabyan, the grocer Richard Hill, and the mercer John Colyns, each of whose collections Hsy describes as "its own dynamic contact zone, a textual space where languages meet, inform, and transform each other" (p. 159). In Fabyan's Concordance of Storyes (a history of England and France), we find a merchant-historian using multiple craft metaphors to represent his literary, translingual labor; in Hill's anthology, we can traverse not just a polylingual but also a "polychronic assemblage" of texts assembled into a kind of narrative reckoning of a life (p. 177); finally, in Colyns' book, we observe an investment in the layout as well as the language(s) of literary making. this tripartite chapter thus becomes in Hsy's hands its own compilation, one that neatly enacts the very mode it analyzes as it shows how "each book creates an idiosyncratic material space where languages can coexist and transform one another" (p. 193). In its illuminating juxtapositions and analyses of multiple texts and the spaces and languages that they and their authors occupied, traveled into, and made their own, Trading Tongues is likewise idiosyncratic and transforming in the best of ways.