Multilingual Early Modern London (1547-1714)

We know that early modern London was a multilingual city: in the law courts, in foreign-language churches, in markets and shops, at the Royal Exchange, in coffeeshops and clubs, workplaces, printers' shops, booksellers, and on the stage, Londoners would encounter a multitude of different languages. But what did that everyday encounter with multilingualism feel like for early modern Londoners? This project investigates the emotions of early modern multilingualism, reading a wide range of resources (journals, court records, church records, letters, plays, masques, linguistic handbooks, satire, diaries) for what they can tell us about the encounter with different languages. It aims to produce 1) new avenues of research for early modernists, historians of emotions, and modern linguists; 2) a research method that involves thinking creatively with our material; and 3) an understanding of early modern London that restores a forgotten history of multilingualism. The project's approach is collaborative. A multidisciplinary network of academics, an audio producer, and a software developer are working together using workshops, conferences, and archival work to produce three linked outputs: a collection of essays exploring the locations of multilingualism and the emotional responses of early modern Londoners; three immersive audio pieces that make these encounters audible for modern audiences; and an interactive online map plotting multilingual sites with embedded sound, visual, and text files. We aim to produce a collection of essays that expands the boundaries of our knowledge of multilingual interactions in the early modern city by focusing on the emotional responses of Londoners to everyday experiences of multilingualism, and thus provide an impetus for future work in this area. This work is breaking new ground in early modern studies as it combines for the first time the history of multilingualism with the history of emotions. We hope that a wider audience beyond the academy will also benefit from the project's explorations and public engagement outputs. By demonstrating the multilingual nature of very ordinary interactions in the early modern city, we aim to change attitudes about modern multilingualism. Historically, multilingualism has been the necessary condition of travelling and trading cultures, but this story has fallen out of the historical narrative. A 2021 survey found that 25% of English-speakers in the UK felt uncomfortable hearing foreign languages spoken around them, a discomfort that reflects the ubiquity of English in the modern world and the lost opportunities to hear other languages. But historically, monolingualism is the anomaly, and people in the early modern city would have been used to negotiating multilingual spaces as part of their everyday lives. This project seeks to restore a lost history of multilingualism to mono- and multi-linguists alike.