The Review of English Studies

Jacob, Hobson,

2018 The Review of English Studies

doi: 10.1093/res/hgy056

ABSTRACT Ælfric’s Grammar offers the only theoretical treatment of emotions in Old English. According to Ælfric, it is the special property of interjections that they express emotion. This article explores what it meant for monastic students to learn to express their emotions using Latin interjections, considering their use in the classroom, the liturgy, scriptural study, and spontaneous speech. The use of interjections, as Ælfric and other medieval scholars of language understood them, raises larger theoretical questions: can the expression of emotion be translated across languages? Is it willed or unwilled? Is it a natural sign like facial expressions or a conventional sign like other words? How, in other words, can a monastic subject map his interior experience onto the Latin language and manage its expression in the monastery? To answer these questions, this article studies not only Ælfric’s late tenth-century Grammar but also the Continental tradition of grammatica that lay behind it, explaining a crucial stage in the formation of the monastic subject. It is a curious fact that the only theoretical discussion of emotions in any Old English text should occur in a linguistic treatise designed to teach young monks how to read Latin.1 This point is all the stranger in a language with no single word for the category of experience that we now call ‘emotion’. We do not find such a dissection of emotion in homilies or saints’ lives, although they commonly made emotional appeals to their audience;2 nor in philosophy, for Aristotle’s Rhetoric would not reach the Latin West for nearly two centuries;3 nor in vernacular medical texts, whose Latin sources privileged the brain but which did not themselves accord this organ particular importance for intellection or feeling.4 Even when the monastic scholar Ælfric does treat emotions in a brief passage of his Grammar, composed between 992 and 1002 while he was a monk and mass-priest at Cerne Abbas,5 he discusses them under the heading ‘interjections’.6 According to Ælfric, the interjection is that part of speech signifying ‘Þæs modes wilnung’7 (the desire of the mind) or ‘Þæs modes styrunge’8 (the motion of the mind).9 He follows earlier scholars of language in defining the category: ‘Interiectio est pars orationis significans mentis affectum uoce incondita’10 (The interjection is the part of speech signifying the condition of the mind with an inarticulate sound). But the relationship between emotion and its expression is not as simple as that. Leslie Lockett has shown that Anglo-Saxons believed in a ‘hydraulic’ mind that is embodied and cardiocentric, literally expanding when heated by emotions like anger and shrinking when cooled by emotions like sorrow.11 Such a psychology cannot easily account for the translation of the mind’s motions into language. The nature of affect in this model is also a far cry from the cognitive, even propositional nature that the philosopher Martha Nussbaum attributes to emotions,12 much less the unconscious structured like a language that we find in Lacan.13 At the same time, most medieval scholars of language believed that language—by which they almost uniformly meant Latin—was a rigid and fully explicable semiotic system. Ælfric applied for the first time the concepts of Latin grammatica, the medieval discipline encompassing linguistics and literary criticism, to his native Old English. In so doing, he had to analyse the expression of emotion in Old English as well as to consider how two languages, one native and the other secondary, could each express a speaker’s interior experience. Ælfric’s interjections thus offer our only view of an important chapter in the history of emotions, but they also confound our own categories of study. The operation of interjections, in Ælfric’s account, thwarts the distinction that medieval grammarians made between natural and conventional signs, and blurs the lines that modern theorists have often drawn between affect (felt bodily experience) and emotion (the social performance of affect).14 Even as Ælfric acknowledges the natural and unwilled character of affect, his pedagogy interpellates the young monk as a subject who must master the interior realm of his own experience and learn, to the degree possible, to regulate its expression in language. The monastic subject must, as he learns Latin, both consciously map his own affect onto a new vocabulary and gain linguistic control over its expression. The interjection became in monastic pedagogy a practice in which the young monk shaped his personal identity through language, fitting his inner self to the form of the monastic community. I. THE INTERJECTING MONK LEARNS LATIN Far from a matter of merely academic interest, the interjections that Ælfric describes are an integral aspect of the production of the monastic subject. As I will show, many of his examples of interjections are drawn from scripture, the liturgy, and his own classroom. They are, in other words, drawn from the daily monastic reality of Ælfric and his students. Becoming literate did not only allow a boy access to an otherwise inaccessible body of knowledge.15 Rather, teaching him Latin was a vital step in incorporating him into the monastic community. Whatever may have happened in practice, boys were expected to give up their vernacular upon entering the monastery and were encouraged to communicate with one another in Latin.16 Latinity was fundamental to the boy’s membership in the textual practice of his new community, especially to his participation in its liturgy. The boys to whom Ælfric taught Latin were likely oblates, children whose parents gave them to the monastery as a gift to God, and the monastic community replaced any secular one in their education and personal formation.17 As Rebecca Stephenson has argued, the elevated style of hermeneutic Latin was moreover an important element of the way English Benedictine reformers separated themselves from the world.18 Ælfric himself avoided this literary style,19 and his Old English writings may at times have been intended partly for monastic audiences despite the community’s focus on Latin readings.20 Learning Latin—being able to understand, to recite, and perhaps to speak it—nevertheless marked a basic and necessary step in a boy’s progress to monastic identity. The pedagogical status of Ælfric’s Grammar reflects the necessity of passing beyond the uncomprehending ritual repetition of Latin words and phrases in order to arrive as a literate subject who uses these words consciously. The Grammar is not, despite its focus on the parts of speech and their declension or conjugation, as basic a text as it may initially appear. A boy in a monastery first learned his alphabet, prayers like the Pater Noster, and chants like antiphons. He also became psalteratus before he was litteratus, memorizing every psalm in Latin before he learned the language that would enable him to understand the words that he was saying.21 The real work of learning Latin began after the boy mastered these basic elements of liturgy. He became acquainted with the eight parts of speech by reading Donatus’s elementary textbook Ars minor.22 Only at this point was he ready to engage with Ælfric’s own pedagogical texts: the Grammar, Glossary, and Colloquy. These texts help students move from passive Latin acquisition to understanding, and ideally producing, the language. Although they do not always travel together in manuscripts, they drill much of the same vocabulary and form a cohesive pedagogical unit.23 The Grammar thus represents an attempt to explain to monastic pupils the meaning of the words whose sounds and usages they have already begun to internalize. Ælfric’s Colloquy shows young monks trying to become natural producers of Latin as well as vessels for its recitation. Meant to introduce boys to Latin as a medium of daily communication, colloquies are often based on scenes of monastic life. They accordingly focus on Latin as a practical language more than as a language of scriptural hermeneutics or literary composition,24 and the fact that Ælfric wrote his own colloquy suggests that he expected his pupils not only to understand and recite Latin but also to speak it themselves. Ælfric produces in his Colloquy a fictional dialogue between a teacher and his students, best known now for its treatment of the occupations.25 When asked about his work in the monastery, the imagined student responds: ‘Professus sum monachus, et psallam omni die septem sinaxes cum fratribus, et occupatus sum lectionibus et cantu, sed tamen uellem interim discere sermonicari latina lingua’26 (I am professed a monk. I sing seven offices every day with the brothers. I am busied with readings and chant, but I want to learn to speak the Latin language in the meantime). Naming himself a monk, the student then defines his labour by two tasks: observing the liturgy and learning Latin. The first is the duty of all monks. The second falls specifically to monastic children so that they may attain to the first. Learning Latin through classroom instruction and immersion in monastic practices meant that the imagined student’s two tasks were virtually all-encompassing. They must, as Susan Boynton writes, ‘have occupied every free moment of the day’.27 The Colloquy represents Latin as proper to a monk just as driving sheep to pasture is proper to a shepherd or casting nets in the sea is proper to a fisherman. The monastic student must therefore learn to express his interior experience in the language proper to his station. After surveying these other professions, the Colloquy returns to a fuller description of the daily rhythm of the boys’ lives. The teacher admonishes his students during this recitation: ‘esto quod es’28 (be what you are). In this statement, monastic identity is a status both ascribed and achieved. As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe explains, the Colloquy figures ‘monastic identity as something at once punctually conferred (in the act of oblation) and acquired (in the performance of monastic habitus and the labour of the monastic schoolroom)’.29 The boys are monks simply because they are, but achieving this identity nevertheless requires them to forsake all other possible identities in favour of a life defined by daily and willing attention to Latin scripture and other texts, performance of Latin liturgy, and communication in Latin with the brothers of the monastery. Taming the self in order both to interject in Latin and to voice in liturgy the interjections of scriptural actors is an element of the student’s progress toward monastic identity. The interjection, more than any other element of language, bridges the gap between the individual’s private affective experience and the communal expression of emotion, but it is also frustrated by the ultimate impossibility of giving conventional, linguistic form to one’s interior self. II. LEARNING TO INTERJECT IN ÆLFRIC’S GRAMMAR Ælfric’s bilingual English-Latin Grammar marks a turning point in the history of monastic education, which had traditionally taken place in Latin only.30 His decision to write the Grammar required him to produce for the first time a parallel set of grammatical categories and examples in Old English in order to explicate Latin parts of speech.31 Nevertheless, his Grammar relies on an abridged version of Priscian’s classical Institutiones grammaticae that was produced on the Continent and known as the Excerptiones de Prisciano (Excerpts from Priscian).32 By adapting this text, Ælfric participated directly in, and to a large degree reproduced, the continental tradition before him. The major Carolingian grammarians show a jointly ecclesiastical and humanistic focus in their works, borrowing from both traditions to cite Roman poets, particularly Virgil and Lucan, as well as scripture.33 Ælfric knew this tradition of exemplary citations, but, by contrast, his section on interjections draws particularly from scripture, a pedagogical decision determined by the focus on the liturgy in the English Benedictine monastic reforms.34 As a translator and compiler, Ælfric has a tendency to simplify and epitomize his source texts, revising them for clarity and precision.35 In his discussion of interjections, this practice leads him to assume much of what earlier scholars argue, transmitting in explicit terms their results but only a small part of their method. I therefore draw widely upon the scholars who came before Ælfric for illustrations of the arguments and habits of thought that attended grammatica, especially as they underlie Ælfric’s treatment of interjections. Adapting his sources to English offered Ælfric the unique opportunity to tackle the verbal expression of affect in his native language, but it also raised fundamental questions: how can one understand interjections in another language? Is it even possible to do so? The Latin grammarians occasionally remark that these words may be untranslatable.36 Ælfric, for whom this point is not merely theoretical, explains: ‘ælc Þeod hæfð synderlice INTERIECTIONES, ac hi ne magon naht eaðe to oðrum gereorde beon awende’37 (each people has its own interjections, but they cannot be easily translated to another language). Nor, according to Ælfric, may all interjections be translated into English.38 While this fact might pose a problem for his monastic pupils, who need to be able to understand such words whenever they occur in scripture, it also offers the tantalizing possibility of entering into the emotional landscape of scriptural actors.39 If it is difficult, but not impossible, to understand the interjections of another language, learning to interject in Latin allows Ælfric’s students at least sometimes to access directly the language of biblical history.40 According to the description of interjections that he provides, spanning the gap between English and Latin may allow them to form a direct affective identification with that language. Such an identification becomes all the more important when a monk is not reading a text at all but reciting scripture in the liturgy. Indeed, Ælfric considered this kind of identification to be an important part of the liturgy. In his customary, the Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, he treats liturgical commemoration as ‘a kind of virtual participation’ in biblical history.41 When a monk repeats the words of scriptural actors, he gives voice once more to the experiences that they describe, and when he learns to speak the language of scripture, his own words are implicitly framed against its history. The possibility that interjections may be unique to a language thus positions Ælfric's students within the emotional dimension of scriptural history as they learn to understand the Latin they recite. Becoming capable in Latin is, for Ælfric’s students, a way to encounter historical experience that cannot be adequately conveyed in their native language. Ælfric tackles the problem of translating interjections head-on. He distinguishes among the interjections of three languages: English, Latin, and Hebrew. English interjections, of course, present no problem to Ælfric's students. Although Latin has interjections specific to it, Ælfric notes that it shares others with English: ‘haha and hehe getacnjað hlehter on leden and on englisc, forðan ðe hi beoð hlichende geclypode’42 (haha and hehe signify laughter in Latin and in English because they are called laughing). In this case, the interjections signifying laughter are not translated between languages; they are simply the same in each language. Their signification is therefore immediately available to the reading and speaking subject; at other times, the young monk will need simply to learn the specific Latin word. He will also need to understand Hebrew interjections, since the odd Hebrew word remains in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible: ‘uah getacnjað gebysmrunge, and racha getacnjað æbylignesse oððe yrre. uah and racha sind ebreisce INTERIECTIONES’43 (uah signifies scorn, and racha signifies indignation or anger. uah and racha are Hebrew interjections). In fact, neither of these interjections is actually Hebrew, although Christian grammarians customarily explain them to be such. Uah derives from Greek,44 and it appears twice in the New Testament, when passers-by mock Christ on the cross.45 For this reason, no young monk can fully understand the Mark and Matthew gospel accounts of the passion without also understanding the word uah. The Aramaic racha appears in the Gospel; Jesus warns in Matthew 5:22: ‘Qui autem dixerit fratri suo racha reus erit concilio’ (And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of council).46 There appears to be no Old English equivalent for either of these words. Ælfric, at least, recognizes none. However, Matthew 5:22 is part of the annual temporale cycle. Numerous lists of Roman Type 3 pericopes, which were particularly associated with the English Benedictine monastic reforms, name this verse as part of the reading for the mass on the seventh Sunday after Pentecost.47 Ælfric’s students would therefore have heard this word, and perhaps a homily interpreting it, every year. They would also have learned that this word was proscribed. Learning to understand certain Latin and Hebrew interjections gives the young monk one necessary tool for understanding scripture as both a written text and a script that he regularly voiced, or heard voiced, during the rites of the office and the mass. It is essential to the Grammar’s treatment of interjections that students learn to understand such words regardless of whether they can be intuitively grasped by an English speaker or must be learned afresh. In either case, understanding a specific interjection relies on an act of interpretation. Interpretation is particularly important because the relationship between any one interjection and the interior experience that it signifies is inexact, and it is often unclear what affect(s) might correspond to a particular interjection. Ælfric tells us that haha and hehe signify laughter, but what does laughter signify? It might equally signal surprise, humour, awkwardness, happiness, or scorn. An interjection’s signification in any one passage can be established only by careful textual analysis, a practice that Ælfric models in this section of the Grammar. He shows that one can infer an interjection’s meaning from context, even if it can sometimes be clearly defined and translated. Ælfric finds, for example, that the Latin uae expresses multiple emotions: ‘uae getacnað hwilon wanunge, hwilon ðeowracan, hwilon wyrigunge’48 (uae sometimes signifies lamentation, sometimes threat, and at other times a curse). He supports the first two interpretations with exemplary citations from scripture. In addition to Isaiah 6:5, in which the prophet laments his impurity, and Luke 22:42, in which Christ says ‘uae’ to that man who will betray him, Ælfric cites the anaphoric verses of Luke 11:42–52, a roll call of unbelievers. Like Matthew 5:22 above, this interjection would have been familiar to reformed Benedictine monks, since it formed part of the reading for the temporale mass of the Friday ten weeks after Pentecost.49 Ælfric constructs a simple example for his third definition: ‘uae tibi sit’50 (woe be to you). Despite his protestation that interjections cannot be easily translated, Ælfric renders ‘uae’ as ‘wa’ in his Old English version of each of these examples. Finally, says Ælfric, it signifies woe, as when the prophet Ezechiel describes a book that he sees in a vision: ‘et scriptae erant in eo lamentationes et carmen et uae’51 (and there were written in it lamentations, and canticles, and woe). Ælfric here gives ‘uae’ as ‘wawa’, an Old English noun meaning ‘woe’ or ‘misery’.52 Uniquely among his interjections (and probably because it actually is not one), Ælfric provides an interpretation of this word that is exegetical rather than semantic, saying that it signifies the eternal sorrows that those who abandon God and his commandments will experience in hell.53 The single word uae, then, not only expresses multiple emotions but is also, according to Ælfric, capable of being explicated in its anagogical sense. Any interjection read, recited, or used spontaneously is by implication open to this same process of interpretation. Despite the precision that Ælfric brings to the analysis of these words, his treatment of the relationship between the interjection as a signifier and an affective state as a referent is often looser than the tone of his discussion suggests. This issue comes to the fore especially when Ælfric treats interjections as spoken language rather than scriptural quotation. He writes of the interjection ‘o’ that it ‘getacnað æbylignesse and sarnysse and wundrunge and is ADUERBIUM UOCANDI: o magister eala ðu lareow, and he is eac an stæf. a and o sindon INTERIECTIONES and PRAEPOSITIONES and eac stafas’54 (signifies anger, grief, and wonder, and it is an adverb of address: o magister, oh teacher! And it is also a letter. A and o are interjections, prepositions, and letters). The word o may then be used in circumstances no less disparate than those of haha and hehe. O may also be used to address someone rather than to express emotion, but this usage is still an interjection in Ælfric’s account. Rather than citing scripture as he did before, he exemplifies the meaning of o through the practical suggestion that his students use it to address him. This moment presents evidence that his English students should learn to interject in Latin, and it shows them mastering the vocative through performative, formalized use in the classroom. Students would also have used such ‘adverbs of address’ in the liturgy. They sang such words in the hymns of the office,55 and they would have used them in responses like the O antiphons. In fact, Ælfric treats at least one of his interjections, hui(g), only for its value as an adverb of address. Ælfric defines the word only by its use: ‘hui man cweÞ on leden and ealswa on englisc: huig, hu færst ðu’56 (one says hui in Latin and also in English: hi, how are you?). The editors of the Dictionary of Old English suggest that it is an ‘exclamation of surprise or admiration’, which they illustrate with two interjections of their own: ‘ha! oh!’57 In addition to these meanings, Hans Sauer suggests the sense of ‘astonishment’ and notes Ælfric's use of this word as a greeting.58 The difficulties that Ælfric faces describing interjections point to the larger problems that medieval scholars of language faced when treating this part of speech. In failing to correspond precisely to any single emotion, interjections show the seams of the grammarians’ attempts to define them. Within the paradigm of early medieval grammatica, the slippage between any one interjection and the affective state(s) that it signifies helps to sidestep this problem by obscuring it. So too does the question of whether interjections can be translated, since difficulties understanding a particular word can ultimately be ascribed to the linguistic confusion after Babel. In practice, Ælfric does find Old English equivalents for many Latin interjections, and when he does not, he nevertheless shows how they can be understood in context. The interjection can then typically be pinned down in its actual use. In order for the monastic reader to understand scripture correctly, an interjection’s meaning must be pinned down. However, even when its meaning can be established, its interpretation hinges on, and is inscribed within, a host of unresolved theoretical questions about its use and nature as a sign. Fundamental to these questions is the paradoxical nature of the monastic subject, whose communal life was precisely regulated but whose interior experience was difficult even to understand consistently, much less to prescribe. III. THE SUBJECT OF INTERJECTION The young monk studying interjections thus found himself at something of an impasse. While the interjection resists the medieval grammarians’ drive to classify language, it also plays an irreducible role in a boy’s studies and his subject formation. Moreover, its referent—the young monk's inner state—is necessarily opaque to anyone other than the young monk himself. The words themselves were hardly less opaque. As Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter note, ‘[i]n order to accommodate these words […] their very irregularity is made into a rule’.59 The grammarians were well aware of this fact themselves. As the late antique grammarian Donatus explains, this part of speech is historically something of a leftover. It takes the place previously held by the adverb in Greek grammar, a distinction that Latin scholars drew because these words behave differently in the two languages.60 Ælfric arrives at the interjection only after defining and explicating each of Latin’s seven other parts of speech: the noun (a category that includes what we now call adjectives), the pronoun, the verb, the adverb, the participle, the conjunction, and the preposition. The order of this sequence is not coincidental. Many of Ælfric’s Carolingian forebears show irritation at the interjection’s linguistic irregularity. Smaragdus puns that the interjection might as well be called the ‘underjection’ (‘subteriectio’): ‘Inferior enim subteriorque ceteris inuenitur partibus’61 (For it is found lower and beneath the other parts of speech). In a poetic preface to his discussion of this part of speech, he expounds: Partibus inferior iacet interiectio cunctis; ultima namque sedet et sine laude manet.62 (The interjection lies below all parts of speech; for it sits last and remains without praise.) Remigius of Auxerre agrees that the interjection ‘ultimo loco constituitur, quoniam inferior est omnibus’63 (is positioned in the last place because it is lower than all [the parts of speech]), and the commentary traditionally attributed to Hrabanus Maurus skips the class altogether.64 The Irish scholar Murethach, whose attitude on the matter is somewhat contrarian, defends the interjection against such deprecations, writing that the interjection is a part of Latin and that the language would be lacking without it.65 Medieval grammarians thus account for this part of speech largely by taking its unaccountability as its defining trait and, at least in Murethach’s case, by insisting that it is necessary to Latin’s integrity as a language. The process of understanding interjections is complicated by the fact that interjections prove to be irregular in both their pronunciation and their relationship to other words. Like most grammarians before him, Ælfric remarks that interjections are phonologically irregular.66 He provides a definition of the term ultimately drawn from Donatus: ‘INTERIECTIO is an dæl ledenspræce getacnjende Þæs modes gewilnunge mid ungesceapenre stemne’67 (An ‘interjection’ is a part of speech in Latin signifying the desire of the mind with unshaped speech). As unformed speech, the interjection cannot be declined or conjugated like the other parts of speech because it is not regular, ‘shaped’, like they are. Some grammarians, especially those Continental scholars like Sedulius Scottus and Smaragdus who wrote long, detailed, and frequently penetrating treatises, give several examples of interjections whose vowel length varies. For such scholars, the interjection’s phonological variability is important because, lacking regularly long or short vowels, these words cannot be scanned metrically. Ælfric leaves such considerations up to the reader, remarking only that ‘heora sweg byð hwilon gescyrt and hwilon gelencged be ðæs modes styrunge’68 (their sound is sometimes shortened and sometimes lengthened according to the motion of the mind). He departs from the standard explanation of earlier scholars by attributing vowel length to the speaker’s emotional state rather than to the conventional nature of a language itself. If it were possible to correlate vowel length with the degree or intensity of a given emotion—though, to my knowledge, no grammarian suggests explicitly that it is—this explanation would also leave open the possibility that a poet might use an interjection’s metrical position as a clue to the speaker’s inner state. Ælfric nevertheless shifts the focus of his sources here to the speaking subject. In addition to their phonological irregularity, interjections do not enter into syntactic relations with other words: ‘INTERIECTIO mæg beon gecweden betwuxalegednys on englisc, forÞan ðe he lið betwux wordum and geopenað Þæs modes styrunge mid behyddre stemne’69 (An interjection may be called ‘something laid between’ in English, because it lies between words and reveals the motion of the mind with an inarticulate voice). This etymological explanation is a commonplace. An ‘interjection’ is so called because it is ‘thrown’ (iectio, from iactare, ‘to throw’) ‘between’ (inter) other words. Rather than helping to construct a sentence, the interjection is simply cast into it, spoken suddenly rather than in an orderly syntactical sequence.70 In revealing a speaker’s inner state, this part of speech is apparently not beholden to those rules that normally comprise the grammar of Latin. Its length is unpredictable, and it occurs when required not by a sentence’s grammar but rather the speaker’s inner state. Beyond these grammatical difficulties, the monastic student trying to express emotion finds himself caught between the interjection’s nature as a spontaneous expression, probably in English, and its conventional use in liturgy or as a means of communication with the brothers, certainly in Latin. Ought the boy’s expressive words, according to medieval grammarians, be considered a normal part of the community’s language like any other part of speech, or are they somehow a direct expression of his affective experience? If the latter, they may lie beyond the control of both language and self that was the goal of monastic education. The interjection’s status as inarticulate or unformed speech should in theory hold the key to this question. Donatus divides all speech into two types: articulate and confused. ‘Articulata’, he says, ‘est quae litteris conprehendi; confusa, quae scribi non potest’71 (Articulate sound is what can be expressed by letters; confused sound, what cannot be written). The interjection is clearly articulate speech by these standards, whatever trouble one might have placing it within higher-order grammatical conventions. However, Ælfric’s immediate source divides these categories further, introducing another distinction made by Priscian, who writes: ‘Uocis autem differentie sunt quatuor: articulata, inarticulata, litterata, inlitterata’72 (There are four kinds of speech: articulate, inarticulate, literate, illiterate). The last two categories correspond to Donatus’s ‘articulate’ and ‘confused’. The first two are Priscian’s, relating to syntax and the speaker’s intention: ‘Articulata enim est que coartata, id est copulata cum aliquo sensu mentis eius qui loquitur […] Inarticulata est contraria, que a nullo affectu proficiscitur mentis, ut sibilus hominum et gemitus, que scribi non possunt. Intelliguntur tamen’73 (Articulate speech is that which is fit together, joined with some sense of the mind of the one who speaks […] Inarticulate speech is the contrary, which is uttered without any influence of the mind, such as men’s whistling or groans, which cannot be written. However, they can be understood). Interjections might remind us of a whistling or a groan, lacking propositional content but capable of being understood. Like these sounds, they do not fit together syntactically with other words. Intention, whether interjections are uttered with the influence of the mind or simply emerge as a result of its motion, is also a problem for the grammarians. Although Ælfric’s source says that inarticulate speech is uttered without such influence, he himself tells us somewhat opaquely in his definition of interjections that they reveal or signify the motion of the mind. He refers also to the ‘modes wilnung’ (desire of the mind), a phrase that, unlike ‘modes styrung’ (motion of the mind), implies intention. If Ælfric was confused or uncertain about this point, he was not alone. Remigius both performs this elision more bluntly than the English writer and clouds further the relationship of interior experience and its linguistic signification, writing that interjections are like ‘interius iacens oratio, dum uox impraemeditata exterius emergit’74 (speech lying within, when an unplanned sound escapes outwardly). For Remigius, affect is always already language waiting to be externalized, and neither he nor Ælfric distinguishes clearly between a speaker’s interior experience and the way it is expressed. The entire part of speech settles somewhere between that articulate speech explicable by grammatica and that inarticulate speech that humans share with animals, meaningful but not truly language. Already inhabiting a space at the border of language and mere sound, interjections raise a larger question about the boundary between natural and conventional signs. In his rhetorical treatise De doctrina christiana, Augustine offers a classic formulation of this distinction.75 Anything that signifies something else, he says, is a sign. Some signs are natural, and some are conventional: Naturalia sunt quae sine uoluntate atque ullo appetitu significandi praeter se aliquid aliud ex se cognosci faciunt, sicuti est fumus significans ignem […] Sed et uestigium transeuntis animantis ad hoc genus pertinet; et uultus irati seu tristis affectionem animi significat, etiam nulla eius uoluntate qui aut iratus aut tristis est.76 (Those are natural which, without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of something beyond themselves, like smoke which signifies fire […] The track of a passing animal belongs to this class, and the face of one who is wrathful or sad signifies his emotion even when he does not wish to show that he is wrathful or sad.)77 According to Augustine, facial expressions are unwilled signs of emotion no different from smoke signifying a fire. Like Ælfric and other late antique and medieval scholars, Augustine uses a circumlocution for ‘emotion’: ‘affectionem animi’ (literally, ‘the disposition of the mind’). This Latin idiom (and others like it) is likely the source of Ælfric’s ‘modes styrung’ (motion of the mind),78 and indeed, the semiotic function of facial expressions is identical to that which the grammarians accord interjections. Although one might be tempted at this point to classify the young monk’s interjection as a natural sign that simply expresses his inner state, this part of speech also hews closely to the conventional signs of fraternal communication. Conventional signs, writes Augustine, may be visual, auditory, or otherwise sensual, and unlike natural signs, they exist specifically and solely to communicate the ‘motus animi’ (motion of the mind), by which he means more than only emotion: Data uero signa sunt quae sibi quaeque uiuentia inuicem dant ad demonstrandos quantum possunt motus animi sui, uel sensa aut intellecta quaelibet. Nec ulla causa est nobis significandi, id est signi dandi, nisi ad depromendum et traiciendum in alterius animum id quod animo gerit qui signum dat.79 (Conventional signs are those which living creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying, in so far as they are able, the motion of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood. Nor is there any other reason for signifying, or for giving signs, except for bringing forth and transferring to another mind the action of the mind in the person who makes the sign.)80 Ælfric’s interjections are certainly signs made by living creatures that communicate their thoughts and emotions. However, conventional signs require purpose (a sense conveyed by Augustine’s ‘ad demonstrandos’), and they must communicate from one mind to another. While interjections might be said to communicate a state of mind, their lack of propositional content is at odds with Augustine’s idea that conventional signs signify ‘sensa aut intellecta’ (something sensed or understood). Their linguistic singularity and irregularity also resists conventionality. The early ninth-century scholar Erchanberht of Freising puts the problem succinctly: ‘Sunt ergo aliquae uoces inconditae quae, si aliquid significent, faciunt interiectiones’81 (There are therefore some inarticulate sounds, which, if they signify anything, produce interjections). If such sounds signify anything, it is emotion, and they are interjections. If they do not, they are just sounds and not signs at all. The distinction between them perhaps lies then in the meaning made of them by individual speakers and listeners (or readers) rather than in a universalizing, formal definition. These definitional problems, which might at first appear to be a quirk of reading the interjection through the lens of Augustine’s semiotics, are part of the deep structure of grammatica and Latin language instruction. In fact, the contradictions discussed above map onto later linguistic thought with some precision. Smaragdus illustrates the interjection’s liminal status between the natural and the conventional, the intentional and accidental. He offers this discussion of the interjection’s semiotic nature: ‘Interiectio’ proprie dicitur uox confusa de mentis archano prolata, quae tantum ad hoc profertur in publicum, ut interioris hominis lucide demonstret affectum. Et aut laetantis uultu aut in ridentis cacinno aut in plausu manuum aut interiectione pedum aut in nutu oculorum aut in gutturis sono aut in capitis motu aut in digitorum motu aut in indignantis uultu aut in dispicientis affectu aut in deterrentis sono aut in amantis affectu aut in plorantis luctu aut in mutato articulatae uocis intellectu aperte demonstrat interioris animi motum, quoniam internae mentis occulta non sine uoce aut signo aliquo alteri, sed tantum Deo sunt cognita; attamen per apertam prolationis uocem alter alterius occulta cognoscit.82 (A confused sound pronounced from the secret of the mind is properly called an ‘interjection’, which is brought forward into public for this reason, that it may clearly reveal a person’s interior disposition. By an expression of joy, by the guffaw of a person laughing, by the clapping of hands, by the stamping of feet, in the movement of the eyes, in the sound of the throat, in the motion of the head or the fingers, in an expression of scorn, in the impulse to look about, in the sound of fright, or in the changed understanding of articulate sound, [the interjection] reveals the motion of the inner spirit because the secrets of the internal mind are not understood without sound or some other sign, except by God. Nevertheless, one understands the secrets of another through the public sound of pronunciation.) Like Augustine, Smaragdus thinks that the purpose of visual and auditory signs is to communicate one person’s thoughts and feelings, which are otherwise known only by the one who experiences them (and, of course, by God). However, he makes no clear distinction between natural and conventional signs. On the contrary, he lists examples of each alongside the interjection. Any of these signs, from facial expressions to laughs to gestures, communicates the motion of the mind just as an interjection does. His juxtaposition of classic natural signs like facial expressions with linguistic signs suggests that he is not fully certain of the distinction between the interior experience of emotion and its outward expression by an interjection or some other sign. This muddled treatment of natural and conventional signs also underlies much of the rest of Smaragdus’s treatment of the interjection. He opens this section by explaining that interjections are ‘uox confusa’ (confused speech), but unlike Donatus’s confused speech, they can certainly be written. Smaragdus in fact gives a long list of interjections. Like all grammarians, he uses textual citations from scripture or Roman poetry to illustrate the meanings of different interjections, but he also takes the rare step of citing living, spoken Latin: ‘Solet enim homo post cibi potusque refectionem hanc facere interiectionem dicens hoc modo: “Euax! Satiatus sum”’83 (After a refreshment of food and drink, one is accustomed to make this interjection, speaking in this way: ‘Euax! I’m full’). Even if euax might prove to be phonologically or otherwise irregular, it can be used predictably and written. However, it is unclear whether Smaragdus thinks that the refreshed monk’s interjection is willed or unwilled and thus whether he thinks that it is conventional or natural. The question of whether a monk’s use of an interjection is an intentional speech act depends partly upon one’s understanding of how mental and emotional processes work. Ælfric espouses both an embodied, hydraulic model of the mind and an incorporeal, unitary soul in his writings. His pastorally oriented work, such as homilies or saints’ lives, imagines the mind as hydraulic, but when he writes more specifically about psychology, he imagines an incorporeal soul.84 His statement that the interjection signifies both the ‘wilnung’ (desire) and the ‘styrung’ (motion) of the mind may also speak to this dissonance.85 Ælfric inherits this problem from his source tradition. Sedulius, for example, equivocates between treating the interjection as willed and unwilled largely because he cannot quite decide where to locate intention in the speaking subject. At one moment, he writes: ‘Quotienscumque in prosperis uel aduersis animi nostri affectum ostendere cupimus, hanc partem proferimus’86 (Whenever we desire to show the condition of our mind in good times or bad ones, we bring forward this part of speech). Sedulius appears in this sentence to attribute intention to the use of interjections, suggesting that we use them when we desire to make our emotions known. But shortly after this statement, he remarks: ‘Quicquid animus noster uelit siue erumpere gaudio siue dolore, interiectione ostendit incondita (id est informata) uoce’87 (Whatever our mind wishes to burst forth in either joy or sorrow, it shows by an interjection in an inarticulate [i.e., an unformed] sound). At this moment, Sedulius still uses the terminology of volition, but he locates the act of willing specifically in the mind. This mind is moreover a hydraulic one. Excessive affect causes it to swell, and when it swells too much, it bursts forth with an interjection. Sedulius subscribes here to a psychological model that stands at odds with a conception of a rational, willing mind.88 Moreover, it stands at odds with his own vocabulary for describing interjections and their role in expressing emotion. This same contradiction is apparent in Remigius’s treatment, mentioned above, of affect as internal language that emerges suddenly into expression. If affect is linguistic in nature, one ought to be able to control its expression, but if it can escape from the mind unintentionally, that mind ought be a hydraulic one. That none of these scholars had a clear, consistent view of the mind’s nature suggests the trouble they had describing the relationship between the motion of the mind and its expression in language. This confusion about the interjection’s status extends to the place of emotion in language, erasing particularly the distinction between the felt experience of affect and its spontaneous expression in language. Ælfric’s own failure to draw that distinction registers not an insignificant omission, something that he has merely overlooked or taken for granted, but a symptom of grammatica’s aporia about a subject whose language is at once his own and the property of the community to which he belongs. Unwilled, individual, and natural even as it is bound by the conventional norms of a linguistic community, the interjection reflects the status of the monk who speaks it. While Ælfric is hardly the first medieval scholar of language to confront this problem, he faces the additional complication of writing and teaching in two languages. It is, as grammarians realized, possible to express emotion in sentences formed solely by the other seven parts of speech.89 These parts of speech are conventional signs and therefore easily grasped by the logic of grammatica. The interjection, on the other hand, is both an essential part of language and not one that a person necessarily chooses to use. The English boy beginning his reformed monastic education must memorize elements of the Latin liturgy without knowing what he is saying, and he is surrounded by a language he cannot yet understand. His interior experience must, at this point, be at odds with the monastic community’s forms of expression, something that he feels individually even as he uses and absorbs the communal language of emotion. As he learns to understand the Latin words he says and hears, and perhaps learns to communicate spontaneously with them, he participates ever more fully in the language and practices of Benedictine life. For the student of Ælfric’s Grammar, learning Latin is thus not only a process of acquiring a second language but also of shaping his inner self in the particular ways demanded by his community. As he masters the conventions of Latin expression, he brings his natural and unwilled affects into harmony with the regulated life of the brothers. Carrying a speaker’s interior experience directly into language, spontaneous emotional expression is modulated and regulated by which language a speaker uses. The young English monk’s mind moved as it did and burst forth into language when it did, but he had to learn to express this motion in language that befit his identity as a monastic subject. I wish to thank Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Benjamin A. Saltzman, Daniel Wakelin, Evan Wilson, and my anonymous peer reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this essay. Footnotes 1 This point has drawn little attention except from Hans Sauer: ‘Ælfric and Emotion’, Poetica, 66 (2006), 37–52; and ‘How the Anglo-Saxons Expressed their Emotions with the Help of Interjections’, Brno Studies in English, 35 (2009), 167–83. 2 Alice Jorgensen, ‘“It Shames Me to Say It”: Ælfric and the Vocabulary and Concept of Shame’, Anglo-Saxon England, 41 (2012), 249–76; and Helen Foxhall Forbes, ‘Affective Piety and the Practice of Penance in Late-Eleventh-Century Worcester: The Address to the Penitent in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 121’, Anglo-Saxon England, 44 (2015), 309–45. 3 Rita Copeland, ‘Pathos and Pastoralism: Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Medieval England’, Speculum, 89 (2014), 96–127. 4 James T. McIlwain, ‘Brain and Mind in Anglo-Saxon Medicine’, Viator, 37 (2006), 103–12; and Leslie Lockett, ‘The Limited Role of the Brain in Mental and Emotional Activity According to Anglo-Saxon Medical Learning’, in Alice Jorgensen, Frances McCormack, and Jonathan Wilcox (eds), Anglo-Saxon Emotions: Reading the Heart in Old English Language, Literature and Culture (Farnham, Surrey, 2015), 35–51. 5 On dating, see Peter Clemoes, ‘The Chronology of Ælfric’s Works’, in Peter Clemoes (ed.), The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of their History and Culture Presented to Bruce Dickins (London, 1959), 212–47, at 244, reprinted as Old English Newsletter Subsidia, vol. 5 (Binghamton, NY, 1980). On the texts, see Joyce Hill, ‘Ælfric’s Grammatical Triad’, in Patrizia Lendinara, Loredana Lazzari, and Maria D’Aronco (eds), Form and Content of Instruction in Anglo-Saxon England in Light of Contemporary Manuscript Evidence (Turnhout, 2007), 285–307; and Hill, ‘Ælfric: His Life and Works’, in Hugh Magennis and Mary Swan (eds), A Companion to Ælfric (Leiden, 2009), 35–65, at 36–38 and 57. 6 On the Grammar, see Helmut Gneuss, ‘Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar: Sprachwissenschaft um die Jahrtausendwende in England’, in Heilige und profane Sprachen: Die Anfänge des Fremdsprachenunterrichts im westlichen Europa (Wiesbaden, 2002), 77–92; Thomas N. Hall, ‘Ælfric as Pedagogue’, in Magennis and Swan (eds), Companion to Ælfric, 193–216, at 195–203; and Vivien Law, ‘Ælfric’s Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice’, in her Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages (New York, NY, 1997), 200–23. On language learning more broadly, see Donald A. Bullough, ‘The Educational Tradition in England from Alfred to Ælfric: Teaching utriusque linguae’, in his Carolingian Renewal: Sources and Heritage (Manchester, 1991), 297–334; and Gneuss, ‘The Study of Language in Anglo-Saxon England’, in Donald Scragg (ed.), Textual and Material Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Thomas Northcote Toller and the Toller Memorial Lectures (Cambridge, 2003