ABSTRACT
In a multilingual world like that of the English Middle Ages, when languages easily coexisted with one another and many speakers commanded more than one, John Gower evidently took great pride in his own multilingual skills. Manuscript studies similarly reveal patterns behind the sometimes apparently random interplay of languages late in the Middle Ages. Across medieval Europe code switching and language mixing occurred within identifiable linguistic and generic constraints, that is, sometimes in ways that were so unobtrusive that speakers took no notice of them. Gower's languages thereby cease to be rule-governed codes that semantically and socially embed meaning in grammatical structure and become instead symbols or even metonymies of various kinds of social activity. Sian Echard similarly addresses the tension between Gower's evident political conservatism and his desire not only to use English but to frame what might be called the people's language with the prestige of Latin.
