Linda C. Mitchell, Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield
in 17th – and 18th – Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. viii +
218pp. ISBN 0754602729
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented
attempts to describe and codify English grammar, yet this development
has not received sufficient critical attention. Encompassing more than
300 individual works of the period, Linda C. Mitchell’s panoramic survey
of grammar texts is a timely consideration of how scholars conceived of
and defined the development of the vernacular in early modern England.
Mitchell figures grammar as a site of intellectual and social debate,
dividing the subject into five categories: contemporary efforts to
standardize grammar, pedagogy, writing instruction, the search for a
universal language (often encoded), and grammar in relation to social
status. Her study focuses on individual theorists of English grammar,
ranging from literary figures (Jonson, Milton, Swift) to university
teachers (John Wallis, John Eachard), from cultivated women such as
Bathsua Makin to educational reformers such as the Czech Johann Amos
Comenius (Komensky) and Samuel Hartlib.
Mitchell sets these
individuals within the context of larger cultural shifts, particularly the
gradual erosion of Latin as a pedagogical lingua franca. Her book frames
a central debate between ‘prescriptive’ grammarians, who aimed to fix
the language, and their ‘descriptive’ adversaries, who claimed that
language changes, custom and habit should create a more elastic
vernacular (p. 17). Within this structuring dichotomy, she makes the case
for a movement away from the programmatic rigours of the scholastic
and humanistic trivium towards concertedly vocational and belletristic
uses of the English language.
To illustrate this shift which gathered momentum during the last
years of the seventeenth and first years of the eighteenth centuries,
Mitchell refers to the humanist origins of vernacular grammar study, and
places later grammarians in a continuum with sixteenth-century teachers
such as William Lily and Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus). As well as
considering the history of pedagogy in early modern England, Mitchell
also discusses the theological and philosophical weight accorded to
grammar during this period. In “Repairing Babel,” her fourth chapter
(pp.108-132), for example, she charts the conception of would-be
‘Adamic’ or pre-Babel language systems during the seventeenth century,
and details how epistemological principles such as Cartesian innatism and
Locke’s notion of the mind as a tabula rasa informed contemporary
grammar theory. Grammar Wars concentrates particularly on England,
but other countries, particularly France, are used for comparison: for
instance, Mitchell argues that the establishment of the Académie
Française in 1635 caused some anxiety among English intellectuals and
hastened efforts to standardize the vernacular (pp. 41-42). She uses the
“putatively boring” subject of grammar (p. 5) to show how crucial
debates over diction and syntax became as use of English as a
pedagogical, scientific and commercial language increased.
Sarah Knight
University of Warwick