The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language

By Katie Chenoweth

Of all the cultural "revolutions" brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the purported rise of European vernacular languages. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that has profoundly shaped modernity, and yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined.

In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and the vernacular as it took shape in sixteenth-century France and charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains, from typography, orthography, and grammar to politics, pedagogy, and poetics. Under François I, the king known in his own time as the "Father of Letters," both printing and vernacular language emerged as major cultural and political forces. Beginning in 1529, French underwent a remarkable transformation, as printers and writers began to reimagine their mother tongue as mechanically reproducible. The first accent marks appeared in French texts, the first French grammar books and dictionaries were published, phonetic spelling reforms were debated, modern Roman typefaces replaced gothic scripts, and French was codified as a legal idiom.

This was, Chenoweth argues, a veritable "new media" moment, in which the print medium served as the underlying material apparatus and conceptual framework for a revolutionary reinvention of the vernacular. Rather than tell the story of the origin of the modern French language, however, she seeks to destabilize this very notion of "origin" by situating the cultural formation of French in a scene of media technology and reproducibility. No less than the paper book issuing from sixteenth-century printing presses, the modern French language is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296358

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Originary Prints

Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction.

—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference

Of all the cultural revolutions brought about by the development of printing technology during the sixteenth century, perhaps the most remarkable but least understood is the rise of European vernacular languages. Walter Benjamin opens his essay on the technological reproducibility of the artwork by noting that the enormous changes brought about in literature by movable type, the technological reproduction of writing were, already in 1936, well known.¹ Historians today typically agree that movable type played an essential role in the formation and fixation of vernaculars like English, French, and Spanish, standardizing and codifying these languages according to new grammatical and orthographic norms. They recognize that printing gave rise to what Benedict Anderson calls print-languages, that is, mechanically reproducible idioms below Latin and above spoken vernaculars, which rose to power and allowed new proto-national communities to be imagined. It is generally accepted that the invention of printing constitutes an event in the history of language that profoundly shaped modernity. And yet the exact nature of this transformation—the mechanics of the event—has remained curiously unexamined. This book sets out to better understand the relationship between printing and vernacular language that takes shape in the sixteenth century by looking closely at the history of one language—French—over the course of two remarkable decades, roughly 1529 to 1550. What happens to the French language in the print shop? How is the langue maternelle redefined or reinvented typographically? How does printing technology come to imprint itself on the national tongue, at its very root? What are the cultural and political stakes of fashioning a mechanically reproducible vernacular? And what other mutations—in the relation between technics and language, in the definition of the human, in the history of life itself—does this vernacular rise announce?

The Prosthetic Tongue charts the technological reinvention of French across a range of domains—from typography, orthography, and grammar, to politics, pedagogy, and poetics—over the course of two transformative decades in the sixteenth century. A veritable new media moment, the period between 1529 and 1550 witnesses a proliferation of technological effects within the body of the French language: the introduction of accents and new characters, the development of phonetic spelling reforms and royal language policies, the publication of the first French grammars and dictionaries that make the mother tongue a textual and pedagogical object, among others. The key initiators of this movement are humanist printers (Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, and Étienne Dolet, to name a few) who set out to modernize the vernacular by deploying the materials, techniques, and underlying technological framework of the print shop. During this period, the French language comes to be increasingly mediated: mechanized, regulated, codified, and instrumentalized in unprecedented ways. And yet, as it is reinvented for the age of mechanical reproduction, the vernacular tongue will also come to appear more natural and alive, more native and maternal than ever. I will argue that this, too, is a technological effect: by extending the reach of the voice typographically, printing endows the vernacular with a new spectral presence and an augmented form of life. In this way, printing will at once intensify the technicity of the tongue and conceal that same technicity by producing new cultural fantasies of naturalness, nativeness, appropriation, and presence. Printing will introduce new effects of technological mediation while also instituting vernacular language as a privileged medium of self-presence, the idiom in which one hears oneself speak. In short, printing will operate as a prosthesis for the tongue that conceals its own prosthetic nature. Blindness to the prosthesis is the law.²

This book thus seeks to allow what is technological at the beginning of the modern French language to come into view. My privileged theoretical interlocutor in this project is Jacques Derrida, whose work—best known under the name deconstruction—ceaselessly interrogates that which presents itself as natural or living, as well as the originality of any origin. When asked in the 2002 documentary film Derrida to describe the origin of deconstruction, Derrida appears at first to evade the question by pausing to note the mediated and artificial character of the situation in which he and his interviewer find themselves—before observing that he has, in fact, already begun to answer the question by performing one of deconstruction’s quintessential gestures.

Before responding to this question [on the origin of deconstruction], I would like to make a preliminary remark on the utterly artificial character of this situation. I don’t know who will watch what we are in the process of filming or recording. But I would like to underscore rather than efface the technical conditions and not feign naturality where it does not exist. I’ve already in a way started to respond to your question about deconstruction, because one of the gestures of deconstruction consists in particular in not naturalizing, in not acting as if what isn’t natural were natural, as if what is conditioned by history, technics, the institution, society were given as natural.³

Deconstruction entails, among other things, showing what is historical, technical, or institutional in that which might otherwise pass itself off as natural. There is no deconstruction, Derrida will write elsewhere, which … does not begin … by calling into question the dissociation between thought and technology … however secret, subtle, sublime or denied it may be.⁴ Deconstruction, as Arthur Bradley remarks, remains the most self-conscious philosophy of originary technicity inasmuch as it destroys any concept of a pure, natural, or nontechnical point of origin.⁵ Technics emerges in Derrida’s thought as the originary and irreducible condition of the entire sphere of the living.⁶ The central deconstructive gesture of this book will be to de-naturalize the modern French language—and, with it, the general category of the vernacular, the mother tongue, or the living language—by revealing how it has been historically constituted and conditioned by printing technology.

So-called vernacular language (the term comes from the Latin vernaculus, meaning native, domestic, indigenous) is particularly susceptible to fantasies and ideologies of naturality. The vernacular or the mother tongue has always seemed to produce itself, as a figure of pure physis, or nature, unaffected by the externality or technicity of grammar or writing, for example. During the late medieval period and throughout the sixteenth century, vernacular language was regularly regarded as natural, as opposed to Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the ancient textual languages characterized as artificial. The most influential articulation of this natural/artificial distinction is that of Dante in the early fourteenth century. In his De Vulgari Eloquentia (1302–1305; editio princeps 1529), Dante affirms the superior nobility of vernacular language, which all infants acquire from those around them when they first start to distinguish sounds, over the secondary technical artifact he calls gramatica, or grammatical language. While the vernacular is intimate and immediate, acquired from the breast with the nurse’s milk, gramatica with its rules and theory always remains at one remove from us, requiring lengthy study and resisting total appropriation. The vernacular lives in the mouth and the body, gramatica on the page and in school; the vernacular is essentially oral/aural, while gramatica is written and textual. The natural character of vernacular language is thus conceived within a (phonocentric, logocentric) hierarchy of speech over writing that valorizes speech as native, present, and living while repressing writing as secondary and distant, technological and dead. While vernaculars are subject to temporal and spatial flux, gramatica is possessed of the uncanny stillness of the dead letter, a certain immutable identity … in different times and places that allows it to survive across epochs.

Even as Dante seeks out a more illustrious literary Italian vernacular, the nobility of this idiom is rooted in its status as naturalis over and against the artificialis, in its originality and universality as speech, in its proximity to the human: "Of these two kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the human race [tum quia prima fuit humano generi usitata]; second, because the whole world employs it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third because it is natural to us, while the other is, in contrast, artificial."⁷ As Simone Marchesi suggests, for Dante artificial languages have been devised to supplement natural idioms, and not in any way to replace them. They are artificial tools, prosthetic limbs designed to carry out a function that natural languages can no longer perform.⁸ Dante notes that not every language has acquired the supplement of gramatica as Greek, Latin, and Hebrew have: not every mother tongue has grafted onto itself this prosthetic limb. One of the primary developments of the sixteenth century that will concern us here is what historian Sylvain Auroux calls the technological revolution of grammatization, that is, the widespread introduction of vernacular grammars and dictionaries that would amount to supplementing every mother tongue with the prosthesis of gramatica. For Auroux, this phenomenon constitutes the second major techno-linguistic revolution after the invention of writing. I suggest that the production of these linguistic instruments in the sixteenth century would be symptomatic of a more fundamental development or revolution, namely, a technological turn in vernacular language occasioned by printing, in which printing technology itself comes to act as a supplement for the mother tongue. As we will see further on, drawing on Derrida’s reading in Of Grammatology, this supplement never merely adds itself on to the plenitude of a fully natural or fully present language but rather always risks substituting for it and thereby reveals an originary défaut, a fault or defect in the presumed naturalness of the tongue it comes to supplement. Through the frame of print—a frame at once material and imaginary, technological and conceptual—the vernacular is reconceived as artificial and reinvented in the image of the dead or foreign languages to which it nevertheless continues to be opposed (as native, living, and so on). In print, the mother tongue becomes an object of technē in an unprecedented way, even as this technicity is disavowed or relegated to the status of mere supplement.

This book sets out to investigate the shape and the stakes of this technological turn, which will disrupt and reconfigure the partition between nature and artifice in a fundamental way. Like the telephone and other modern technologies after it, the reproductive machinery of the printing press will be conceived, in Elissa Marder’s words, as a fetishistic extension of the body of the mother.⁹ Printed vernacular text technologically (re)produces the mother tongue as a fantasy of full presence, life, and unending connection.¹⁰ In this sense, printing and the rise of the vernacular anticipate what Avital Ronell describes as the time bomb of the invention of condensed milk at the beginning of the modern concept of technology. Something like the history of positive technology is unthinkable, writes Ronell, without the extension of this maternal substance into its technological other: in other words, its precise mode of preservation and survival.¹¹ My suggestion here is that printing already enacts a radical extension of the maternal linguistic substance, mechanizing it and rendering it reproducible, canning it like condensed milk in the preservable form of typography. Printing, as I will argue, has everything to do with survival.

Of course, nature and artifice, or the mother and its other, were never opposed in any stable or legitimate way to begin with. Each already touched the other—otherwise, they would not be subject to disruption and reconfiguration with the arrival of print. Printing restructures and discloses, augments and accelerates a contamination of the natural by the artificial that was already at work. Likewise, a technological approach to vernacular language would necessarily predate printing: we need only think of medieval wordbooks or Occitan grammars to see that the production of vernacular language was actively technologized in all kinds of ways during the centuries before Gutenberg. What’s more, at the beginning of the sixteenth century the language called Francois, that is, the French language, was already an artificial tongue of sorts. As Jean-François Courouau suggests, French was developed empirically and progressively, from the twelfth century, by scribes, royal notaries, officers of the royal chancellery, clerks and authors of works of all kinds.¹² The French language of the medieval period was already "a complex artifact composed of traits originally belonging to various oïl dialects and augmented by forms copied from ancient languages, primarily Latin."¹³ Before printing, the French language was already an artifact of writing practices and technologies. The technological approach to vernacular language that emerges around 1530 would not, therefore, be something radically new; rather, the technicity of the vernacular will be reimagined, transformed, and intensified in a new medium.

Looking further back still, the invention of writing itself would, four millennia before it gets mechanized in Mainz, technologize language in fundamental ways by making it durable, repeatable, and so on. And yet even this seemingly inaugural event of technologization would, from a Derridean perspective, follow from a more originary technicity of language without which all subsequent moments of technologization would never have been possible in the first place. Under the heading arche-writing, Derrida encourages us to think of language and technics as indissociable. There would therefore be no historical moment at which language suddenly becomes technological: there is no language without technics. Nevertheless, I want to ask how a certain technicity of language is indeed opened—externalized, exposed, and extended, made possible in a different mode and within another horizon—by the development of movable type. This opening would mark a turn of technology that produces in the body of the French language an unparalleled proliferation of diacritics and orthographies, grammars and dictionaries, linguistic laws and institutions, technical treatises and theoretical innovations. Printing liberates a grammatological movement in the French language. And yet this turn would be no swerve, no arrival of technics or writing from the outside, but rather a cut in a prior cut, a re-marking of the mark, an overprinting of an originary imprint. Print is a prosthesis for a tongue that is always already prosthetic.

Any historical claim this book stakes out would necessarily be conditioned or contaminated by the always-already and by a certain noneventfulness of the event of printing. Indeed, it would be conditioned or contaminated by the very repetition that printing technology itself mechanizes and mobilizes. I will argue here that movable type does produce in language a specific series of technological effects (of regulation, externalization, estrangement, spectrality, and presence, among others), that are transformative for French culture and the French language during the early modern period. And yet the mechanical reproducibility that one so readily attributes to the printing press is not simply an alien force that suddenly happens upon language one fine day in the middle of the fifteenth century. If printing makes something happen to language and in language (and I contend that it does) this something was always already possible, always already at work in some form that printing puts to work and allows us to see differently. What happens in print was already happening, only according to a different structure and in a different form. The turn of printing would thus always repeat or reproduce a prior turn of technē.¹⁴ David Wills insists in his Prosthesis (an essential work for what I am attempting to think here, and for any deconstructive thinking of technics) on precisely such a repetition when he evokes the advent of printing. Even as it presents itself as an inaugural moment of technological modernity, printing would participate in a general logic and movement of technē that has always already begun. In what might be called this first cybernetic moment, writes Wills, the human hand is superseded by the machine; and yet this moment would be "no different of course from the first ‘moment’ of the technē in general—memory, the wheel, the pen, what you will."¹⁵ This and yet must be our refrain: with Wills and Derrida, we must see the revolution of printing as the repetition of a more general turning of technē. I propose to replace the conventional narrative of the rise of the vernacular—with its teleological, nationalist, and metaphysical implications of a national language coming into its own, and which I have retained in the title of this book if only to strike it through or overturn it—with this turn of the always already, which, like the turning of the wooden screw at the center of the press or the pull of the bar in the printer’s workshop, is an essentially repeatable gesture caught up in the dynamics of mechanical reproducibility and unable to rise above them.

How are we, then, to think of the specificity of printing technology or the print medium—and to what extent can we think of such a specificity at all? This is one of the driving questions, both methodological and philosophical, of this book. Derrida himself will pose a version of this question in a televised interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler from the early 1990s, published as Echographies of Television. Referring to the television cameras that surround him and the general technological apparatus that makes the televised interview possible, Derrida asks: What, in terms of the general history of teletechnology or of teletechnological writing, is the specificity of our moment, with devices like those that surround us here? This is an enormous and difficult question.¹⁶ Derrida affirms that there does indeed seem to be something especially vivid about what is happening or asserting itself technologically "today (meaning, in the late twentieth century).¹⁷ Yet whatever this specificity may be, it does not all of a sudden substitute the prosthesis, teletechnology, etc. for immediate or natural speech.¹⁸ Indeed, what Derrida encourages us to think, as a counter-gesture to the dominant tendency to perceive new technologies as arriving from the outside, befalling an otherwise natural state—the tendency, in short, to perceive them as somehow radically new—is the fact that such machines have always been there, they are always there, even when we wrote by hand, even during so-called live conversation.¹⁹ Here and elsewhere, Derrida evokes the possibility of a certain media technological specificity while simultaneously insisting on the always-already that undercuts any linear narrative of technological or media historical development, and always underscoring (sometimes rather elliptically) the enormity or difficulty of this very question. What we are able to say is new about new media thus remains something of an open question within Derridean deconstruction, a question always interrupted by what Derrida will describe in a late essay as a certain impossible possibility of saying the event.²⁰ Without pretending to overcome such difficulties—without pretending, that is, to overcome the impossibility of saying such an event—this book attempts to pick up where Derrida left us, as it were, in writing a deconstructive history of printing as a new" medium that would take account of both the always-already of writing or technics and the novelty of printing. In short, I attempt here to think printing as both repetition and event, following Derrida in understanding these not as mutually exclusive but as in fact mutually constitutive. In this respect, I also share certain methodological sympathies with the still emerging field of media archaeology, which seeks traces of old media within the new, and which, according to Jussi Parikka, sees media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew.²¹ The Prosthetic Tongue would perhaps then be a media archaeology of the modern French language but one which, following Derrida, questions the value of the arche as origin, and which locates at the beginning of this language—as its opening—an arche-prosthesis.

The prosthetic tongue of my title is the conceptual figure I offer, borrowed and grafted onto this book from Derrida and Wills, for navigating this both/and of the printing revolution and the vernacular rise. This prosthetic tongue necessarily escapes more proper modes of historicization or periodization. Where would such a thing, a prosthesis, have to start in order to have started? How would it begin? asks Wills.²² As with Derrida’s generalized concept of writing—which confounds the classical conception of writing as secondary and external, as artificial technique—the prosthesis of this prosthetic tongue must no longer be thought of as something that is merely added on from the outside to a preexisting langue (as intact language or integral body). Instead, the prosthetic tongue affirms the originariness of technics within la langue and recognizes the structural necessity of prosthetic supplementarity to any natural language.²³ My titular prosthetic tongue names, then, at least three things. To start, it is my name for printing technology as it comes into contact with vernacular language. Printing engages the French language in an intensified movement of technological supplementarity; it mobilizes effects of technicity and mechanical reproducibility in the vernacular, giving rise to a proliferation of new technological effects: diacritical marks, grammars, dictionaries, technical treatises, and so on, but also more pronounced phonocentric fantasies of immediacy and presence, nativeness and naturalness, voice and life. Prosthetic tongue thus also names the French langue itself as it comes to be touched and technologized by printing. As we shall see, the French language becomes more discernibly prosthetic in print: it gets repeated, reproduced, regulated, and ordered; extended in time and space; externalized and estranged; pasted and cut; spectralized and reanimated. Yet what my prosthetic tongue ultimately names is the originary technicity of the tongue that printing uncannily discloses. The tongue, as we are coming to see, has always been technological and mechanical, external and estranged: this is what printing allows us to perceive in an unprecedented way. The prosthetic, as Wills argues, does not simply introduce artifice where there was none but rather allows the unnatural within the natural to become perceptible.²⁴ Printing reveals that the language called maternal is never purely natural, as Derrida suggests in his Monolingualism of the Other (a book the often-neglected subtitle of which is The Prosthesis of Origin).²⁵ The period explored in this book, 1529–1550, thus operates as a heuristic opening onto both the technological formation of the modern French language and an underlying technicity of language, both of which have tended to be obscured as they become naturalized or nationalized, humanized, and ideologically effaced. In this opening, something of the artifice at work in the mother tongue is rendered palpable; the sutures of a national language are laid bare. Caught up in the mechanism of a new writing technology, the tongue will—if only for a moment—allow its prosthetic nature to be glimpsed. This prosthetic tongue points to an articulation of speech and writing, body and trace, biology and technology, living and nonliving—their suturing, their mutual imprinting—that would be not generated by printing but rather mutated by it. This is also to say that printing (re)produces a new species of tongue.

In Chapter 1 (The Artificial Tongue: Beginnings), I explore these methodological questions further while fleshing out the titular figure of the prosthetic tongue as both theoretical trope and historical artifact. The subsequent chapters of this book are each similarly organized around a central term or figure (e.g., phonography, monolingualism, survival) that articulates history with theory, language with technology, media with philosophy, past with present. Although these chapters proceed in a roughly chronological order—from the European invention of printing in Chapter 2 through Joachim Du Bellay’s 1549 manifesto defending and illustrating the vernacular in Chapter 7—such articulations will necessarily destabilize any straightforward sense of chronology or linear historicity. Before turning to the vernacular language revolution in France, I look back in Chapter 2 (Hand of Brass: From Manuscript to Print) to the moment when printing was first introduced in Europe, the incunabular period, to reveal how the first generation of printers imagined their new writing machines as metallic prostheses for the scribal hand—a hand conceived, at least since Aristotle, as an originary prosthesis for the human turned toward technē. Chapter 3 (Teleprinting: Geoffroy Tory and the Gallic Hercules) launches the book’s investigation of the French vernacular movement by turning to that movement’s seminal text—Geoffroy Tory’s 1529 typographical treatise Champ fleury—in order to understand how print typography comes to be imagined as a powerful amplifier for what Derrida refers to as the teletechnological effects of language. In Chapter 4 (Phonography: Accents, Orthography, Typography), I examine the ways in which printing technology radically extends but also disrupts phonography—the writing of sound or the voice—through the introduction of new accents, characters, typefaces, and orthographic systems in French writing. Chapter 5 (Grammatization: Pedagogies of the Mother Tongue) explores the cultural stakes of the project—one first undertaken by humanist printers—to make the French langue maternelle an object of grammar and pedagogy, as well as what this project owes to the materials and the technological approach of the printer’s workshop. Chapter 6 (Prosthetic Sovereignty: François I and the Ear of the People) turns to the legal and political scene, asking how the 1539 Edict of Villers-Cotterêts—a landmark act codifying the French vernacular as the official idiom of French administration and justice—and even the very name of the king, François, participate in the prosthetic logic of printing. In Chapter 7 (Survival: Du Bellay and the Life of Language), I conclude by looking to the most enduring text of the French vernacular movement, La Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse, asking how it mobilizes the horticultural figure to the graft—a figure echoed in a printer’s vine-leaf ornament that spreads across the first edition of the book—to engineer the technological survival of the French tongue in a way that redefines the life of language.

CHAPTER 1

The Artificial Tongue

Beginnings

Beginning (I)

The sixteenth century occupies an uneasy place in traditional histories of the French language, hovering uncertainly between what linguists call Middle French (le français moyen) and Modern French (le français moderne). As Peter Rickard writes in his History of the French Language, The dates and duration of the Middle French period are as arbitrary as the term ‘Middle French’ itself.¹ While the beginning of Middle French is typically dated to the early fourteenth century, its end is a subject of debate, ranging from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth—putting the beginning of Modern French on one side or the other of the sixteenth century, depending on whom one asks.² When I speak of the beginning of a modern French in this book, I do not intend to make a historical demarcation on linguistic grounds, even if the period studied here is indeed one of profound linguistic change. Instead, I use the term modern as a concept and a construct, as much imagined as real, taking my cue from sixteenth-century writers themselves who use it to distinguish vernacular languages from ancient ones and to designate their own post-classical, post-medieval period—and their own printed tongue.

Indeed, according to a humanist commonplace of the early sixteenth century, it is the art of printing itself that demarcates this modern period. Along with artillery, its diabolical counterpart, printing marks an epochal difference with respect to both antiquity—since the ancient Greeks and Romans had no such technology—and the more recent medieval, manuscript past. To begin, printing supplies evidence that les modernes are not destined to be culturally inferior to les anciens, an anxiety and ambivalence at the heart of humanist practices of imitatio. In Joachim Du Bellay’s landmark defense of the French vernacular, the poet will call upon printing to serve as a witness testifying to the potential—a specifically modern, technological potential—for our language (nostre La[n]gue) to one day acquire ornament and artifice as elaborate as in Greek and Latin (recevoir quelquefoy cest ornement, & artifice aussi curieux, qu’il est aux Grecz, est [sic] Romains): I call forth as witnesses of what I say only printing, the sister of the Muses and the tenth of them, and that no less admirable than pernicious thunderbolt of artillery, with so many other nonancient inventions, which truly show that through the long passage of the ages the minds of men have not been as debased as some would claim. (Je ne produiray pour temoings de ce, que je dy l’imprimerie, Seur des Muses, & dixieme d’elles: & ceste non moins admirable, que pernicieuse foudre d’Artillerie: auecques tant d’autres non antiques inuentions, qui montrent veritablement, que par le long cour des Siecles, les Espris des ho[m]mes ne sont point si abatardiz, qu’on voudroit bien dire.)³ But printing appears not only as a witness or symptom of modernity: it also functions symbolically as an engine of that modernity itself—modernity understood above all as a posthumous and even uncanny restoration of antiquity, that is, a repetition or reproduction of ancient tongues and letters. As Rabelais’s Gargantua writes in the famous letter to his fictional son in Pantagruel (1532), Now all disciplines have been brought back; languages have been restored: Greek, … Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin; elegant and accurate books are now in use, printing having been invented in my lifetime through divine inspiration just as artillery, on the contrary, was invented through the prompting of the devil. (Maintenant toutes disciplines sont restituees, les langues instaurees. Grecque, … Hebraicque, Caldeicque, Latine. Les impressions tant elegantes et correctes en usance, qui ont este inventees de mon aage par inspiration divine, comme a contrefil lartillerie par suggestion diabolicque.) The technological novelty of printing (re)produces a new age—a rupture cast by Rabelais as a generational divide, printing having been invented in the father’s lifetime (aage). Insofar as it has the power to restore the languages that constitute the foundation of a humanist education—granting these languages what Neil Kenny calls a posthumous presence—printing is seen to open an epoch in which the whole world is now full of erudite persons, full of learned teachers and of the most ample libraries (tout le monde est plain de gens scavans, de precepteurs tresdoctes, de librairies tresamples).⁴

Almost from the moment of its introduction in the fifteenth century, printing promised new modalities of survival and new forms of linguistic life, not only for its archival potential but also, even primarily, for this perceived ability to restore authors, languages, and disciplines. In the media culture of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, printing reanimates; it reproduces and regenerates. With the introduction of the new medium comes a new—unanticipated and miraculous, untimely and decidedly unnatural—phase of life for Greek and Latin. This topos of resuscitation or resurrection through printing will take hold in French humanist discourse of the early sixteenth century and will become a central motif of the French vernacular movement from Geoffroy Tory to Joachim Du Bellay. It is also attested by Guillaume Budé, France’s preeminent humanist philologist, the royal librarian at Fontainebleau under François I, and the adviser who encouraged the king to found the College of lecteurs royaulx (the future Collège de France) to teach humanistic disciplines not offered at the Sorbonne. In his De Philologia (1532), a fictionalized Latin dialogue between humanist and king, Budé observes that Latin and Greek letters have been dead (intermortuae), buried, and embalmed (conditae) for more than a thousand years. The humanist praises François for supporting the development of philology in France as the discipline uniquely capable of delivering the Greek and Latin languages in their ancient, authentic, and pure form.⁵ François, in turn, praises printing, which has the miraculous power to make letters that were inanimate and lifeless for so long thrive again in France. Budé agrees with the king, affirming that the new technology will give the Greek and Latin languages the last helping hand to restore their lives. Movable type operates for both humanist and king as a prosthetic extension of linguistic life, a technological helping hand prolonging the natural term of Greek and Latin and offering these languages a new form of survival after and beyond their ordained historical epochs. The other restorer in this scene, appearing as a sovereign double of the printing press, is the king himself, whose moniker as patron of humanistic study was not just Père des Lettres, Father of Letters, but indeed Restaurateur des Lettres, Restorer of Letters. As we shall see, this sovereign-mechanical restoration of ancient languages during the early years of François’s reign will soon extend—more forcefully and also more enduringly—to the vernacular language that shares his name. If printing can bring inanimate languages back to life, why would it not similarly be able to restore the vernacular, or even give birth to a new tongue—especially one bearing the sovereign name of the king?

The projects to modernize the French language undertaken by the printers and reformers studied in this book (Geoffroy Tory, Robert Estienne, Étienne Dolet, Louis Meigret, Jacques Peletier, Joachim Du Bellay, and others) will rely on printing—explicitly but also implicitly, conceptually but also technically and materially—as an epochal force of reanimation and reinvention. The ars that brings ancient tongues back to life also opens another techno-future for the vernacular. Geoffroy Tory, a typographical innovator and the first French royal printer, conceives of his own Champ fleury, a treatise on the art and science of letters, as announcing a new beginning for the French language. Before explaining how to fashion (faconner) letters using a ruler and compass, Tory sets out a historical trajectory for a new and technologically improved French tongue that begins with his own book: All things have had a beginning. When one person treats letters, and another words, a third will come to declare expressions, and then another still will arrive who will order beautiful oration. In this way we will find that little by little we will make our way, such that we will come to the great Poetic and Rhetorical Fields full of beautiful, good, and sweet-smelling flowers of speech. (Toutes choses ont eu commancement. Quant l’ung traictera des Lettres, & l’aultre des Vocales, ung Tiers viendra / qui declarera les Dictions. & puis encores ung aultre surviendra qui ordonnera la belle Oraison. Par ainsi on trouvera que peu a peu on passera le chemin, si bien qu’on viendra aux grans Champs Poetiques et Rhetoriques plains de belles / bonnes / & odoriferentes fleurs de parler.)⁶ The future that awaits the French language is a field of full speech and full presence, an end to mediation where we will be able to say honestly and easily everything we wish (dire honnestement & facillement tout ce qu’on vouldra). As we shall see further in Chapter 3, it is printing that opens this horizon for Tory. To modernize the French language in this context means to break self-consciously from the recent past by reviving Greek and Latin antiquity, while simultaneously displacing those revered ancient languages in a new time and a new technological medium. In this sense, the beginning of French already takes place as a repetition.⁷

The iterability of this beginning becomes evident when Tory repeats precisely the same phrase, all things have had a beginning, further on in his book, this time in reference to the past trajectories of Greek and Latin: If it is true that all things had a beginning, it is certain that the Greek tongue, and likewise the Latin tongue, were at one time uncultivated and without Rule of Grammar, as our tongue is presently; but the good Ancients who were virtuous and studious took pain and diligence to reduce and set them to certain Rule, in order to use them properly to write and record good knowledge in memory. (S’il est vray que toutes choses ont eu commancement, il est certain que la langue Grecque, semblablement la Latine ont este quelque temps incultes & sans Reigle de Grammaire, comme est de present la nostre, mais les bons Anciens vertueux & studieux ont prins peine, & mis diligence a les reduyre & mettre a certaine Reigle, pour en user honnestement a escripre & rediger les bonnes Sciences en memoire.)⁸ The beginning of a new French takes place—in a highly performative, self-conscious, self-programming mode—as a modern copy or reproduction of these other beginnings; French begins by reproducing the dead languages that the printing machine brought back to life. Such would be the technological birth of modern French in 1529. In his classic study The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene observes that, despite the indisputable continuities that exist in fact between the periods we call the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there is nevertheless a striking will of Renaissance cultures to distinguish themselves diacritically from their immediate past as they look to resurrect and resuscitate a remote past that has been lost.⁹ However mythical the supposed rupture of Renaissance modernity may in fact be with respect to preceding centuries, this narrative must nevertheless be recognized as a mobilizing idea for Renaissance writers themselves, including those who are at the center of this book who look to distinguish themselves, as Greene suggests, diacritically—often quite literally, in the form of typography and diacritics—from their immediate past.

The project to reinvent French that begins in the printer’s workshop around 1530 will rely not only on the imagined and material functions of printing technology but also on an underlying philological understanding of linguistic historicity—that is, the idea that languages come into being and change over time. This idea first emerged in the fifteenth century in the work of Italian humanists like Leonardo Bruni and Lorenzo Valla, who observed through a diachronic analysis of classical texts that the Latin language had undergone important grammatical and stylistic developments. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, Adriano Castellesi proposed a narrative of progress and decline that would become one of the dominant models for thinking about linguistic historicity in the sixteenth century. In his De Sermone Latino (1513; first published in France in 1517), Castellesi breaks down the chronology of Latin development into distinct ages (tempora): his most ancient (antiquissimum) period goes up to Livius Andronicus; the ancient (antiquum) runs from Livius Andronicus to Cicero; his perfect (perfectum) age is that of Cicero and Caesar; and his imperfect (imperfectum) age—the moment of decline—includes Seneca, Statius, Quintilian, Tacitus, Pliny, and Apuleius.¹⁰ Perfection in this schema implies both a stylistic standard to be imitated (as Ann Moss observes, only the authors of the ‘Age of Perfection’ can provide moderns with safe models of Roman language and its elegance) and a cultural zenith, a state of culmination or completion.¹¹ In this way, the historical unfolding of language comes to be understood teleologically, as a movement toward perfection—even as any such perfection is haunted by another, ineluctable movement toward decline and degradation.

In the work of vernacular philologists in Italy, this historical model will take on a vitalist inflection as the rise and fall of language comes to be conceived according to a natural life cycle—itself derived from Aristotelian natural philosophy—of generation, growth, and corruption.¹² In this organic model, languages are born and grow; like plants, they blossom and flower. If our vulgar language was not born in the time of Latin flowering, when and how was it born? (Se la nostra volgar lingua non era a que’ tempi nata, ne’ quali latina fiori, quando e in che modo nacque ella?) asks one of the interlocutors in Pietro Bembo’s dialogue on vernacular poetry, Prose della vulgar lingua (composed 1506–1512, published in 1525). The answer to this question, provided by another interlocutor: the vernacular grew and came into being (crescesse e venisse in istato) with the arrival of the Barbarians in Italy, when the Roman and Barbarian tongues mixed and from them a new one was born (nascessene una nuova).¹³ This notion of a birth of the vernacular that is at once historical and biological will become one of the linchpins of the vernacular movement in France.

Accompanying this birth is an emergent conception of the vernacular as a living tongue. One of the earliest formulations of the modern distinction between living and dead languages appears in 1540, in Alessandro Citolini’s defense of Italian (Lettera in difesa de la lingua volgare), which valorizes the vernacular precisely in the name of life. Citolini attacks those who speak of Latin and the vernacular as if they existed in the same time, and they do not see that the Latin language is dead and buried in books; and that the vernacular language is alive and now holds in Italy that same place which Latin had when it lived (come s’elle fossero in un medesimo termine e non s’avvaggono che la latina e morta e sepolta ne’ libri; e che la volgare è viva e tiene ora in Italia quel medesimo luogo che tenne la latina mentre visse).¹⁴ In this reconfiguration of Dante’s vernacular/gramatica divide, Latin and vernacular are no longer two different species of language but rather comparable tongues belonging to different historical epochs. The idea that Latin was once itself a mother tongue in fact predates this period: Nicole Oresme, for example, had already affirmed in the introduction to his 1369 translation of Aristotle’s Ethics that Latin was the common and maternal language (le langage commun et maternel) of the Romans, and that Greek occupied the same place for them as Latin does now with respect to French for us (comme est maintenant latin en resgart du francois quant a nous). The determinate shift in the sixteenth century—one that will have major consequences for the discourse on the vernacular and its relation to printing technology—is the recasting of this translatio according to a metaphysics of life and death. Maternal, native, natural, spoken, domestic, interior, present, proper, pure, living: these terms and values appear together in vernacular discourse, often in the very same texts, as part of a cohesive metaphysical and ideological constellation. Their opposites will be consistently associated with Greek and Latin: foreign, artificial, acquired, written, mute, past, absent, exterior, other, dead. As Citolini affirms, Latin is a language that used to be alive but is now dead—buried in books—while the vernacular lives in the present: It is alive, and as living it grows, generates, creates, produces, gives birth, and always makes itself rich and abundant (Elle e viva, e come viva, cresce, genera, crea, produce, partorisce e sempre si fa pui ricca e piu abbondante).¹⁵ Yet, as we shall see, this living vernacular is already a dead language in the making—not only in the future, after its time has passed (as have the times of Latin and Greek), but already, right now, in the present, since the survival of the vernacular tongue will entail burying it alive.

Viewing languages as historical beings brings about a fundamental change in their ontology: languages as historical entities no longer are, that is, they no longer possess a static or an essential mode of being that would transcend history; rather, they become over time, growing and declining, invested with a form of cultural and historical life. For the humanist philologist, languages are essentially dynamic and malleable, material and mortal. Languages can perish or thrive. Each language has a beginning and, with proper care, can survive. French vernacular writers of the sixteenth century, who followed the Italian questione della lingua closely and appropriated much of its discourse, took an active interest in the techniques that produce linguistic flourishing and survival. They looked to Latin and Greek (but also Italian, often implicitly