Description: In The Prosthetic Tongue, Katie Chenoweth explores the relationship between printing and vernacular language 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.
Review Quotes: "Much has been written about the role of print technologies in the early history of national languages in Europe. Benedict Anderson's line of thinking about nation states as imaginary communities, both delimited and created by the rise of local vernacular languages made into preservable idioms by print, however, is probably the one that continues to generate the most engaging scholarship across the disciplines. Katie Chenoweth's book is one example of such authoritative contributions. The Prosthetic Tongue is a beautifully written and engaging text."-- "Language In Society"