International Medieval Society, Paris • Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2010 - Traditio

Common Tongues: Eustache Deschamps, John Gower, and Barking Dogs

Jonathan Hsy, George Washington University

A surprisingly common motif in medieval accounts of cross-linguistic communication is the barking of dogs. When Wace depicts the Conquest, he claims the Normans perceive the English as barking dogs, and neither group understands the other’s language; in other Continental French texts, English travelers misunderstand each others’ words and resort to animal sounds to communicate. In the fourteenth century, Eustache Deschamps writes French ballades incorporating snippets of English vernacular; in these poems English and French horsemen harass each other, characterizing the other party as dogs. This paper examines how the literary motif of dog barking informs the interplay between languages in John Gower’s trilingual oeuvre. Gower’s Latin Vox Clamantis allegorizes rebels as barking dogs (among other beasts) and dog imagery informs the text's Latin/English wordplay. Cross-linguistic interaction shapes his French ballades as well; the lyric speaker believes tender “paroles” can change the “visage” of a mute beast – but the lover’s inhuman “dame” merely barks her responses in monosyllabic English. If we attend more carefully to bilingual communication in Gower's work, we gain a fuller sense of how Latin/vernacular and inter-vernacular exchanges are encoded in literary form. Not only can we see animal utterances as more than superficial markers of social difference, but we can also discern how polyglot poets delineated the common features of human vocalization and tested the very boundaries of their own vernaculars.