Short Essay

Unspeakable words: Translating linguistic taboo into medieval h i s t o r i c a l fic t i o n

M ar y C . F l a n n e r y Department of English, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2016) 7, 300–303. doi:10.1057/pmed.2016.7

When characters utter profanity in medieval historical fiction, they are speaking an unspeakable language. Profanity – blasphemy, obscenity, oaths and other proscribed language – is what one is not supposed to say, although fluent profanity is often taken as a marker of one’s ability to speak a given dialect. A cursory search on Amazon.com yields a plethora of titles such as Russian Swear Words: A Systematic Guide to Fluent Russian Swearing, the Dirty Spanish Workbook: 101 Fun Exercises Filled with Slang, Sex and Swearing and (for the truly ambitious) Curse and Berate in 69+ Languages, all of which promise to familiarize readers with different languages’ more colorful idioms. But how can an author of historical fiction depict medieval swearing fluently, accurately and in a manner that will be understood by modern readers? Is it even possible to offer a fictional rendering of medieval profanity that both remains faithful to medieval linguistic taboos and conveys equal shock to a contemporary reader? As the work of Mohr (2013), Hughes (1991, 2015) and others has shown, swearing, obscenity and profanity were conceived of very differently in the Middle Ages than they are today. Blasphemy would have been perceived as more shocking then than now (although it seems to have been just as frequently used); contemporary profanity’s frequent invocation of fornication and feces, less so. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/

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In one of the more memorable exempla concerning blasphemy in Robert Mannyng’s fourteenth-century treatise Handlyng Synne, a rich man dreams that he is confronted by the Virgin Mary carrying the bloody body of her infant son, whose wounds resulted directly from the rich man’s blasphemous oaths. In this instance, Mannyng is employing a conventional idea of blasphemy as wounding God’s body, but the horrific image of the child Jesus with his guts ‘[a]l to-drawe,’ the flesh of his hands and feet ‘of drawyn,’ and his mouth, eyes and nose ‘toknawyn’ (Mannyng, 1901, 26) powerfully conveys not only the impact such blasphemy was believed to have on Christ’s body, but also the impact it might have had on medieval ears. In contrast with blasphemy, Hughes maintains, sexual swearing is ‘hardly apparent’ in Middle English literature (Hughes, 1991, 55), and Mohr notes that street names such as ‘Gropecuntlane’ and ‘Schetewellwey’ were descriptive rather than derogatory in medieval England (Mohr, 2013, 93). An author of medieval historical fiction has to negotiate this linguistic and cultural gap, to know what words or phrases were offensive, and to what degree, and how to use them. But even if an author is well versed in the conventions of medieval profanity, most readers of medieval historical fiction almost certainly are not in the same position (although their familiarity with the genre's conventions may shape their opinions concerning whether or not profanity is appropriate to it). Cultural convention and context direct both the production and interpretation of profanity. In an article on the poetics of cursing, Brown and Kushner explore the distinctions and overlaps between the involuntary cursing known as coprolalia (often associated with Tourette Syndrome) and the volitional cursing so frequently taken as a marker of linguistic or cultural authenticity. They point out that coprolalics ‘invoke the most inappropriate curses of their eras and cultures, and their vocal eruptions are contextually relevant in their inappropriateness’ (Brown and Kushner, 2001, 543). This evidence of discrimination in apparently ‘automatic’ outbursts suggests that ‘a brain cannot curse without knowledge about what a culture views as a linguistic taboo’ (Brown and Kushner, 2001, 543). And if we accept this argument, then by the same token a brain also cannot recognize cursing without that knowledge. Profanity in fictional medieval dialogue risks placing an insurmountable obstacle not only between past and present, but also between author and reader, since however authentic an author might try to be in his or her representation of medieval profanity, the reader could never be certain of whether it was authentic (or even intended to be authentic) in the first place, and would probably not be equipped to recognize it as such. When Brother Cadfael overhears a menacing anonymous figure exclaim, ‘For God’s love, woman, will you not hush, and let me be!’ in Dead Man’s Ransom (Peters, [1984] 2000, 70), should we be more struck by the brusqueness of the character’s speech and its anti-feminist implications, or by the fact that he has just taken God’s name in vain? Is ‘for God’s love’ intended to be an equivalent to the kind of blasphemy that might have shocked the medieval ear, or is it simply meant to function as a gentler archaism in place of © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960

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a more contemporary phrase like ‘for fuck’s sake’? To aim for clarity by using more up-to-date bad language may run the risk of disrupting the flow and believability of the narrative; as one author has observed on his blog, ‘21stcentury [sic] American cuss words sound particularly stupid coming out of the mouths of what are ostensibly medieval European characters’ (Iden, 2012). One can’t help wondering if a knight – or any medieval individual – would really say, ‘You bastard, I’ll see you in Hell,’ as Sir Guy threatens his time-travelling opponent after a joust in Michael Crichton’s Timeline (Crichton, 1999, 231). On the other hand, neither the twentieth-century time-traveller nor a twenty-first-century reader would be at a loss to comprehend the full force of those words. Misgivings about the risk of inauthenticity have by no means stamped out profanity altogether in medieval historical fiction (or, for that matter, medievalist fantasy such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire). But no matter how authentic or comprehensible this genre’s profanity may be, it cannot help but expose an impassable gap between medieval languages and our own, as well the ways different periods have perceived and negotiated that gap. Shifts in the inclusion or avoidance of profanity in medieval historical fiction reflect not only changes in literary fashion, but also changes in how readers and writers perceive the Middle Ages (as puritanical and repressive, as bawdy and violent, or as something in between). Ultimately, fictional medieval profanity can never be a silent translation: profanity’s status as a conventional eruption within linguistic convention and proprieties means that it always stands out, and one’s decision regarding how (or whether) to represent it is always exposed and exposing. The challenge posed by medieval profanity in historical fiction inevitably reminds us that the past is a foreign country: they swear differently there.

A b o ut th e A u t ho r Mary C. Flannery is maître assistante in medieval English at the University of Lausanne. Her publications include John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame (Boydell & Brewer, 2012), The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England (Westfield Medieval Studies, 2013) and Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), as well as a number of articles on medieval English literature and on the history of emotions (E-mail: mary .fl[email protected]).

Re fe re nc es Brown, K.E. and H.I. Kushner. 2001. Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing. New Literary History 32(3): 537–562. 302

© 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies

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Crichton, M. 1999. Timeline. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hughes, G. 1991. Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English. Oxford: Blackwell. Hughes, G. 2015. An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World. London: Routledge. Iden, M. 2012. Advice from the Pros: Three Rules On How To %#@%ing Swear. 2 October, http://matthew-iden.com/2012/10/02/advice-from-the-pros-three-rules-on-how-to-ing-swear/. Mannyng, R. 1901. Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. Mohr, M. 2013. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Peters, E. [1984] 2000. Dead Man’s Ransom. London: Warner Books.

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