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.
