Medieval Multilingualism

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 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.

Bi- and multilingualism are of great interest for contemporary linguists since this phenomenon deeply reflects on language acquisition, language use, and sociolinguistic conditions in many different circumstances all over the world. Multilingualism was, however, certainly rather common already, if not especially, in the premodern world. For some time now, research has started to explore this issue through a number of specialized studies. The present volume continues with the investigation of multilingualism through a collection of case studies focusing on important examples in medieval and early modern societies, that is, in linguistic and cultural contact zones, such as England, Spain, the Holy Land, but also the New World. As all contributors confirm, the numerous cases of multilingualism discussed here indicate strongly that the premodern period knew considerably less barriers between people of different social classes, cultural background, and religious orientation. But we also have to acknowledge that already then human communication could fail because of linguistic hurdles which prevented mutual understanding in religious and cultural terms.

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.

The Occitan literary tradition of the later Middle Ages is a marginal and hybrid phenomenon, caught between the preeminence of French courtly romance and the emergence of Catalan literary prose. In this book, Catherine Léglu brings together, for the first time in English, prose and verse texts that are composed in Occitan, French, and Catalan-sometimes in a mixture of two of these languages. This book challenges the centrality of "canonical" texts and draws attention to the marginal, the complex, and the hybrid. It explores the varied ways in which literary works in the vernacular composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries narrate multilingualism and its apparent opponent, the mother tongue. Léglu argues that the mother tongue remains a fantasy, condemned to alienation from linguistic practices that were, by definition, multilingual. As most of the texts studied in this book are works of courtly literature, these linguistic encounters are often narrated indirectly, through literary motifs of love, rape, incest, disguise, and travel.

In new readings of medieval language attitudes and identities, this book concludes that multilingualism informed masculinist discourses, which were aligned against the vernacular sentiment traditionally attributed to Langland and Chaucer.

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 collection explores the links between multimodality and multilingualism, charting the interplay between languages, channels and forms of communication in multilingual written texts from historical manuscripts through to the new media of today and the non-verbal associations they evoke. The volume argues that features of written texts such as graphics, layout, boundary marking and typography are inseparable from verbal content. Taken together, the chapters adopt a systematic historical perspective to investigate this interplay over time and highlight the ways in which the two disciplines might further inform one another in the future as new technologies emerge. The first half of the volume considers texts where semiotic resources are the sites of modes, where multiple linguistic codes interact on the page and generate extralinguistic associations through visual features and spatial organizaisation. The second half of the book looks at texts where this interface occurs not in the text but rather in the cultural practices involved in social materiality and text transmission. Enhancing our understandings of multimodal resources in both historical and contemporary communication, this book will be of interest to scholars in multimodality, multilingualism, historical communication, discourse analysis and cultural studies. Chapters 1, 4, and 5 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. Chapters 1 & 4 have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license, with Chapter 5 being made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.