Common Language and Common Profit

Abstract

A nineteenth-century missionary objects to the Bible being sold in an Indian marketplace; a fourteenth-century chronicler objects to its degradation at the hands of the common people. Both writers express anxiety over how the English Bible is to be valued, over its potential to be placed in an everyday nexus of exchange. Homi Bhabha has argued that it is the presence of the English book—particularly the English Bible—that creates the “agonistic colonial space” in nineteenth-century narrative, whether novels or missionary writings. Bhabha shows how the mystified power of the English book, while intended to “fix” colonial subjects in a Western scheme of representation, instead ultimately calls into question (through processes of differentiation and discrimination) its own twin discourses of linguistic and national authority. But how did the English book come to occupy this position of authority in the first place? How do we begin to account for the distance between the twelfth-century Middle English whose prestige was defined by the farmhands who spoke it, and present-day standard English, the international “default” language of global capitalism and, hence, translation? As the theoretical paradigm best equipped to situate the social, cultural, and political commitments of modern global English, postcolonial theory offers an appropriate position from which to analyze how English began to assert itself as a fit medium for intellectual work in late medieval Britain. This chapter argues that one of the ways the English book gained its presence was by laying claim to the public space through an alignment with the “common profit,” a term that was itself being redefined in relation to the marketplace at this time. To this end, I read controversy over vernacular translation against contemporary debate over trade, exploring how the same questions of authority and ambivalence that surrounded the reception of the English book in nineteenth-century India also marked its emergence in medieval Britain.

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