The Multilingual Dynamics of Medieval Literature in Western Europe, c. 1200–c. 1600, ed. Bart Besamusca, Lisa Demets, and Jelmar Hugen. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe 40. Turnhout: Brepols, 2025, 250 pp., 25 color ill., 4 tables.

Contrary to modern assumptions, the medieval world was rather global and many more people spoke several languages than we might have assumed. Multilingualism was a simple necessity for the merchant class since trading required at least some basic knowledge of other languages (see the Hanseatic League, the trading routes from England to Flanders to the Rhinelands, then to the southern German imperial cities, across the Alps to Venice, from there to Constantinople, the Black Sea, the Golden Horde, and the Silk Road). Of course, the peasant class was mostly excluded from that and could not even understand their priests’ use of Latin, but the phenomenon of multilingualism was present after all, as much recent scholarship has demonstrated. The present volume, based on papers delivered at a conference at Ghent University on Sept. 21–23, 2022, explores this topic further by especially focusing on a major contact zone – a key term utilized by all authors – in Flanders and the neighboring regions, but neither the editors nor the contributors make any particular effort to engage with previous findings because they engage with a very specific corpus of texts where the phenomenon surfaces specifically. The introduction contains a few fleeting references, but otherwise, we are primarily informed about the meaning of a ‘contact zone.’ Multilingualism could be a societal phenomenon relevant for a vast section of the population, such as in Flanders or an individual feature, such as in the case of a king or bishop.