“The Multilingual City, c. 1250–1800: Historical Approaches” was a celebration of multilingualism. Throughout the day, participants spoke of (and in some cases in) Armenian, Dutch, English, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Kipchak, Latin, Polish, Russian, and Utopian, many of which also appeared in the Zoom chat. Such a list was outnumbered only by the representation of cities where the participants were based, always a feature of online events, but in this case (where cities were center stage) a particularly relevant one. In the opening minutes, speakers identified themselves as zooming in from Brussels, Cambridge, Hamburg, Leicester, Leipzig, Lille, London, Manchester, New York, Newcastle, Norwich, Paris, Sheffield, Tallahassee, Trento, and Tübingen – and those were just the participants who wrote in and arrived early. It was, in sum, a conference that took it as fact that the early modern city was a multilingual place and challenged its participants to both expose the concomitant complexities of early modern urban life and experience for themselves the linguistic inundation such a world entails.

The conveners ULRIKE KRAMPL (Tours) and JOHN GALLAGHER (Leeds), experts on early modern language-learning in France and England, respectively, cast the participants into a multilingual mindset from the word go (or aller). The introductory remarks were delivered half in English and half in French, and I can only assume that had any papers been accepted in German, as invited by the Call for Papers, that too would have been given its due. Together, Krampl and Gallagher emphasized the pervasiveness of multilingual interaction in early modern European cities, presenting different stakes and challenges in a variety of contexts – intellectual, political, religious, social, and mercantile, to name just a few. Both Krampl and Gallagher are historians, and neither trust that the intricate problems of multilingualism are adequately acknowledged or addressed with sufficient sensitivity in today’s historiography. To the contrary, they suggest that modern historians can learn a great deal from how language is dealt with by neighboring disciplines such as literary studies and linguistics (particularly historical sociolinguistics and historical pragmatics), to which I might add scholarship stemming from area studies departments, as well. The bulk of attendees were also historians, with specializations in law, science, art, literature, and – naturally – the use, contact, and learning of languages in the premodern world. While there were a handful of linguists in the crowd, too, rather than characterizing the conference as interdisciplinary, it would be more accurate to consider it an opportunity for historians who share the slippery subject of language to compare notes on their methodological tactics. It was, as the organizers had hoped and the subtitle reads, a conference on “Historical Approaches,” and a wide range of them were on display.

The nine papers were organized into three thematic panels: “Spaces of knowledge and power”, “Law, order, and the multilingual city”, and “Multilingual communities and networks”. It speaks to the coherence of the program as a whole that the nine papers could probably have been scheduled in any number of ways, each with their own thematic foci. As it was, the panels parceled out those talks that shared a linguistic, chronological, or geographical focus. The two papers with an emphasis on England, for example, were divided between Panels 1 and 2, and two that centered on cities in France were split between Panels 2 and 3. The effect was to highlight certain homogeneities – namely that multilingualism was an active attribute of cities across Europe and called for educational, bureaucratic, and legal systems of accommodation – while also stressing the dissonance between each particular polyglot community. No two cities discussed had quite the same configurations of languages and peoples, let alone hierarchies of prestige or prejudice.

The first panel began with RICHARD CALIS (Cambridge), who introduced the eccentric humanist Martin Crusius (1526–1607) and his ardent manner of hosting visitors from Greece. Calis described Crusius as an avid and opportunistic language-learner, who milked his visitors of all the linguistic and cultural knowledge that time allowed as he toured them through his home and the city of Tübingen. VLADISLAV RJÉOUTSKI (Moscow) and TATIANA KOSTINA (St Petersburg) offered another version of language-learning, drawn not from the records of a private individual but from an extensive report on private schools in St Petersburg collected by the local police in 1780. Rjéoutski and Kostina compared the language curriculum of each school with the demographic profile of its students and teachers to produce a clearer picture of linguistic hierarchies between Russian, French, and German within various social and political groups. CHRISTOPHER JOBY (Poznan⁠) rounded out the panel with a study of the Dutch and French immigrants, or “Strangers”, living in early-seventeenth-century Norwich, who were numerous enough to compel English authorities to endow leaders of each speech community with special legal privileges. These political figures had the authority to adjudicate local disputes outside of English courts, creating a bifurcated legal system for linguistic convenience.

Marking the start of the second panel, MELISSA VISE (Lexington, VA) continued the subject of legal discrepancies within multilingual communities. Vise described how in fourteenth-century Lucca, insults hurled by the local Lucchese in the vernacular could be brought to trial and transcribed verbatim in notarial registers, while foreigners who blasphemed in their own, native languages seemed to have evaded prosecution. Multilingual clerks and notaries were also featured in the following talk by AMÉLIE MARINEAU-PELLETIER (Ottawa), whose focus was the fifteenth-century town of Metz, a multilingual community with a staunch commitment to French as the language of government. In the paper, delivered in French, Marineau-Pelletier described the role of municipal scribes, whose multilingualism facilitated the apparent monolingualism of those in power. CATHY SHRANK and PHIL WITHINGTON (Sheffield) closed the panel with a discussion of the multilingual cosmopolitanism in Book I of Thomas More’s Utopia, framed against the collaborative production of text and paratext, as well as its translation and publication histories. Shrank and Withington further contextualized the Utopian language as a fictitious phenomenon both celebrated and scorned throughout European literature, offering numerous examples that were expanded upon in the Q&A.

The last panel began with LISA DEMETS (Utrecht), who spoke on the networks of demand and production of Latin, French, Dutch, and polyglot manuscripts in fifteenth-century Bruges, based on the over 2000 manuscripts examined as part of the ongoing “Multilingual Literary Dynamics” project at Utrecht University. JÜRGEN HEYDE (Leipzig) presented the complex interplay between Latin, Polish, Armenian, and Kipchak in seventeenth-century L’viv, demonstrating how multilingualism, vernacularization, and translation of legal documents became tools of agency and empowerment among minority groups. The final paper was that of PAUL COHEN (Toronto), whose focus was on French ports of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, sites of constant language contact that was formally mediated by the French state. Cohen traced the ongoing efforts of the government to establish institutions, regulations, and translation services of various sorts to manage multilingual encounters, and the response and opposition that such authoritative intervention provoked.

The day ended with an energizing discussion on the relevance of early modern multilingualism to broader historiographical conversations concerning politics, law, trade, society, and self-representation. Gallagher synthesized the range of methodologies on display by pointing out the productive union of case studies alongside data-driven analysis and mapped visualizations, while Calis challenged the room to consider the extent to which the nine papers presented throughout the day represented the exception or the norm: to what degree was multilingualism a fact of life in early modern Europe, and to what degree was it contained within certain circles or urban spaces?

There was, of course, no obvious answer to this question, but I would point out that multilingual encounters can take many forms, with mutual intelligibility being only one. When it comes to linguistic interaction, not knowing a language can be as relevant to sociolinguistic history as knowing one. One need only think of the lay attendees accustomed to sitting through religious rituals in non-vernacular languages like Latin, Old Church Slavonic, or Koine Greek without understanding a word. Or the translation of the Bible into European vernaculars during the Reformation – the translators were multilingual, to be sure, but they were working in the service of largely monolingual communities. Or one might consider the Christian missionaries in Asia and the New World, tasked with conveying abstract religious doctrine across patchily traversed language barriers, whose study of the indigenous languages so often reveals a rigid adherence to Indo-European language features. “Multilingualism” is a viable lens for understanding the linguistic dimensions at play in complex linguistic situations, but it need not be the only one. As the conveners suggested in their opening comments, there are technical, methodological, and conceptual frameworks of language that can and should be borrowed from non-historical disciplines and brought to bear on historical questions. When it comes to terminological subtlety, for instance, historians of language may find it helpful to draw from the sociolinguists’ glossary, where classic concepts such as strata (sub-, super-, and ad-), the difference between “bilingual” versus “diglossic” communities, or even “Communication Accommodation Theory” may inspire more fine-lined distinctions.

I hope that the particular dimensions and scope of multilingualism will be the subject of future investigations, but the thesis of the day was that in urban spaces across Europe multilingual encounter was an everyday happenstance. The spirit of the conference took this as a positive, and it is certainly a positive that historians now are giving this linguistic reality its due.

But it is also worth pointing out that linguistic diversity does not have a history of being celebrated through and through. A selection of nine case studies from colonial contexts in Europe, the British Isles, and around the world would perhaps offer a different perspective, one in which minority languages and substrates have been actively targeted for cultural erasure. Likewise, an intellectual history may not paint such a positive picture. As admirable as a polyglot may have been then and now, early modern scholars widely understood themselves to be in a state of postlapsarian Babel, the languages of the world representing divine retribution for humankind’s arrogance, a measure taken by God to limit peoples’ ability to cooperate as a united whole. The implications of this shared origin story unfold across theological, scholarly, and literary activity of early modern Europe. They can be seen in efforts to identify the Adamic language of Eden; in projects to construct artificial languages that mirror, rather than represent, nature; and in utopian literature like More’s, in which imagined communities share a common language, often a language that in one way or another improves upon those known throughout Europe. Cervantes wrote that reading a text in translation is like looking at a tapestry from the back. John Webster, in contrast, said that knowing 100 languages is simply knowing 100 names for the same thing – it gets the polyglot no closer to knowing the true nature of things themselves. In other words, early modern thinkers recognized that there is enough danger of imprecision or miscommunication in a monolingual setting; throw in a multilingual dimension and the risk only grows, for a “Rabble of Words’” gets one no closer to “Real knowledge.”

Here are two more approaches that recommend themselves to a study of the multilingual city: colonial history and the history of linguistic thought. Taken alongside the nine already wide-ranging papers showcased throughout the day, a second thesis emerges: as language touches essentially every aspect of life, its history can be accessed through a multiplicity of lenses. This day offered nine, each of exceptional interest, and I hope that there will be future occasions to showcase even more.

Conference overview:

Panel 1: Spaces of knowledge and power / Espaces du savoir et du pouvoir

Richard Calis (Trinity College, Cambridge): Multilingual encounters in early modern Germany

Vladislav Rjéoutski (Deutsches Historisches Institut, Moscow) / Tatiana Kostina, (St. Petersburg Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences): Boarding schools and language communities of St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century

Christopher Joby (UAM Poznan, currently visiting scholar Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan): Governing the multilingual city

Panel 2: Law, order, and the multilingual city / Les rouages plurilingues de l’ordre urbain

Melissa Vise (Washington and Lee): From Speaking to Writing Crime: Patterns of Prosecution in the Late Medieval Italian City

Amélie Marineau-Pelletier (Ottawa / EHESS): Authentifier, rédiger et traduire: les clercs d’officialités et notaires jurés au service de la ville de Metz au XVe siècle

Cathy Shrank / Phil Withington (Sheffield): Utopia and polyglot cities

Panel 3: Multilingual communities and networks / Réseaux plurilingues

Lisa Demets (Utrecht): Bruges as a multilingual contact zone: book production and multilingual literary networks in fifteenth-century Bruges

Jürgen Heyde (GWZO, Leipzig): ‘The Armenians of Lvov do not speak Armenian’: multilingualism and vernacularization in an early modern migration society

Paul Cohen (Toronto): Translation on the waterfront: mediating linguistic difference in French port cities, 16th-18th centuries