Medieval English In A Multilingual Context

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

Imagining Medieval English is concerned with how we think about language, and simply through the process of thinking about it, give substance to an array of phenomena, including grammar, usage, variation, change, regional dialects, sociolects, registers, periodization, and even language itself. Leading scholars in the field explore conventional conceptualisations of medieval English, and consider possible alternatives and their implications for cultural as well as linguistic history. They explore not only the language's structural traits, but also the sociolinguistic and theoretical expectations that frame them and make them real. Spanning the period from 500 to 1500 and drawing on a wide range of examples, the chapters discuss topics such as medieval multilingualism, colloquial medieval English, standard and regional varieties, and the post-medieval reception of Old and Middle English. Together, they argue that what medieval English is, depends, in part, on who's looking at it, how, when and why.

This volume contains essays on various aspects of multilingualism in medieval France, Italy, England, and the Low Countries. The fifteen contributions discuss the use of the different vernaculars and Latin in both literary and non-literary contexts, showing how cultural and social factors determined the choice of language for a particular purpose or type of text. The role of French in non-French contexts is a major theme of these essays: in the British Isles after the Norman Conquest, in Italy as a response to the need for mainly secular types of literature which did not exist in Italian, and in the Low Countries by virtue of geographic contiguity and change of rulers. Special attention is paid in the French context to the use of French and Occitan in areas of the South. Some essays examine specific cases or text-corpora, while others examine questions of multilingualism from more theoretical, linguistic, and rhetorical points of view. Together, they form an invaluable introduction to the topic of medieval multilingualism, illustrated by meticulously executed case-studies, which future work in the area will have to take into account.

Essays reappraising the relationship between the various languages of late medieval Britain. The languages of later medieval Britain are here seen as no longerseparate or separable, but as needing to be treated and studied together to discover the linguistic reality of medieval Britain and make a meaningful assessment ofthe relationship between the languages, and the role, status, function or subsequent history of any of them. This theme emerges from all the articles collected here from leading international experts in their fields, dealing withlaw, language, Welsh history, sociolinguistics and historical lexicography. The documents and texts studied include a Vatican register of miracles in fourteenth-century Hereford, medical treatises, municipal records from York, teaching manuals, gild registers, and an account of work done on the bridges of the river Thames. Contributors: PAUL BRAND, BEGON CRESPO GARCIA, TONY HUNT, LUIS IGLESIAS-RABADE, LISA JEFFERSON, ANDRES M. KRISTOL, FRANKWALTMOHREN, MICHAEL RICHTER, WILLIAM ROTHWELL, HERBERT SCHENDL, LLINOS BEVERLEY SMITH, D.A. TROTTER, EDMUIND WEINER, LAURA WRIGHT Professor D.A. TROTTER is Professor of French and Head of Department of European Languages at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

This book examines the development of English as a written vernacular and identifies that development as a process of community building that occurred in a multilingual context. Moving through the eighth century to the thirteenth century, and finally to the sixteenth-century antiquarians who collected medieval manuscripts, it suggests that this important period in the history of English can only be understood if we loosen our insistence on a sharp divide between Old and Middle English and place the textuality of this period in the framework of a multilingual matrix. The book examines a wide range of materials, including the works of Bede, the Alfredian circle, and Wulfstan, as well as the mid-eleventh-century Encomium Emmae Reginae, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, the Ancrene Wisse, and Matthew Parker’s study of Old English manuscripts. Engaging foundational theories of textual community and intellectual community, this book provides a crucial link with linguistic distance. Perceptions of distance, whether between English and other languages or between different forms of English, are fundamental to the formation of textual community, since the awareness of shared language that can shape or reinforce a sense of communal identity only has meaning by contrast with other languages or varieties. The book argues that the precocious rise of English as a written vernacular has its basis in precisely these communal negotiations of linguistic distance, the effects of which were still playing out in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the book argues that the tension of linguistic distance provides the necessary energy for the community-building activities of annotation and glossing, translation, compilation, and other uses of texts and manuscripts. This will be an important volume for literary scholars of the medieval period, and those working on the early modern period, both on literary topics and on historical studies of English nationalism. It will also appeal to those with interests in sociolinguistics, history of the English language, and medieval religious history.

Situates Celtic languages and literatures in relation to European movements, in the tradition of Helen Fulton's groundbreaking research. Professor Helen Fulton's influential scholarship has pioneered our understanding of the links between Welsh and European medieval literature. The essays collected here pay tribute to and reflect that scholarship, by positioning Celtic languages and literatures in relation to broader European movements and conventions. They include studies of texts from medieval Wales, Ireland, and the Welsh March, alongside discussions of continental multicultural literary engagements, understood as a closely related and analogous field of enquiry. Contributors present new investigations of Welsh poetry, from the pre-Conquest poetry of the princes to late-medieval and early Tudor urban subject matters; Welsh Arthuriana and Irish epic; the literature of the Welsh March - including the writings of the Gawain-poet; and the multilingual contexts of medieval and post-medieval Europe, from the Dutch speakers of polyglot medieval Calais to the Romantic poet Shelley's probable ownership of a Welsh Bible.

Textbooks inform readers that the precursor of Standard English was supposedly an East or Central Midlands variety which became adopted in London; that monolingual fifteenth century English manuscripts fall into internally-cohesive Types; and that the fourth Type, dating after 1435 and labelled ‘Chancery Standard’, provided the mechanism by which this supposedly Midlands variety spread out from London. This set of explanations is challenged by taking a multilingual perspective, examining Anglo-Norman French, Medieval Latin and mixed-language contexts as well as monolingual English ones. By analysing local and legal documents, mercantile accounts, personal letters and journals, medical and religious prose, multiply-copied works, and the output of individual scribes, standardisation is shown to have been preceded by supralocalisation rather than imposed top-down as a single entity by governmental authority. Linguistic features examined include syntax, morphology, vocabulary, spelling, letter-graphs, abbreviations and suspensions, social context and discourse norms, pragmatics, registers, text-types, communities of practice social networks, and the multilingual backdrop, which was influenced by shifting socioeconomic trends.

This investigation contributes to issues in the study of second language transmission by considering the well-documented historical case of Anglo-Norman. Within a few generations of the establishment of this variety, its phonology diverged sharply from that of continental French, yet core syntactic distinctions continued to be reliably transmitted. The dissociation of phonology from syntax transmission is related to the age of exposure to the language in the experience of ordinary users of the language. The input provided to children acquiring language in a naturalistic communicative setting, even though one of a school institution, enabled them to acquire target-like syntactic properties of the inherited variety. In addition, it allowed change to take place along the lines of transmission by incrementation. A linguistic environment combining the ‘here-and-now’ aspects of ordinary first language acquisition with the growing cognitive complexity of an educational meta-language appears to have been adequate for this variety to be transmitted as a viable entity that encoded the public life of England for centuries.