Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520)

Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066-1520)
Author: Judith Anne Jefferson
Publisher: Brepols Pub
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 9782503542508

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This book is devoted to the study of multilingual Britain in the later medieval period, from the Norman Conquest to John Skelton. It brings together experts from different disciplines--history, linguistics, and literature - in a joint effort to recover the complexities of spoken and written communication in the Middle Ages. Each author focuses on one specific text or text type, and demonstrates by example what careful analysis can reveal about the nature of medieval multilingualism and about medieval attitudes to the different living languages of later medieval Britain. There are chapters on charters, sermons, religious prose, glossaries, manorial records, biblical translations, chronicles, and the macaronic poetry of William Langland and John Skelton. By addressing the full range of languages spoken and written in later medieval Britain (Latin, French, Old Norse, Welsh, Cornish, English, Dutch, and Hebrew), this collection reveals the linguistic situation of the period in its true diversity and shows the resourcefulness of medieval people when faced with the need to communicate. For medieval writers and readers, the ability to move between languages opened up a wealth of possibilities: possibilities for subtle changes of register, for counterpoint, for linguistic playfulness, and, perhaps most importantly, for texts which extend a particular challenge to the reader to engage with them.

Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain

Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain
Author: D. A. Trotter
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2000
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780859915632

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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.

Medieval English in a Multilingual Context

Medieval English in a Multilingual Context
Author: Sara M. Pons-Sanz
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2023-11-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3031309472

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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.

Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain

Multilingualism in Early Medieval Britain
Author: Lindy Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2023-10-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009275828

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This Element offers a comprehensive synthesis of the evidence from the pre-Norman period that situates Old English as one of several living languages that together formed the basis of a vibrant oral and written literary culture in early medieval Britain.

Multilingual Practices in Language History

Multilingual Practices in Language History
Author: Päivi Pahta
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017-12-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501504908

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Texts of the past were often not monolingual but were produced by and for people with bi- or multilingual repertoires; the communicative practices witnessed in them therefore reflect ongoing and earlier language contact situations. However, textbooks and earlier research tend to display a monolingual bias. This collected volume on multilingual practices in historical materials, including code-switching, highlights the importance of a multilingual approach. The authors explore multilingualism in hitherto neglected genres, periods and areas, introduce new methods of locating and analysing multiple languages in various sources, and review terminology, theories and tools. The studies also revisit some of the issues already introduced in previous research, such as Latin interacting with European vernaculars and the complex relationship between code-switching and lexical borrowing. Collectively, the contributors show that multilingual practices share many of the same features regardless of time and place, and that one way or the other, all historical texts are multilingual. This book takes the next step in historical multilingualism studies by establishing the relevance of the multilingual approach to understanding language history.

Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age

Multilingualism in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2016-09-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 311047090X

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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.

Law in Common

Law in Common
Author: Tom Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2019-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198785615

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There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts tounderstand this complex institutional form of "legal pluralism".Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four "local legal cultures" - in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world - that grew up around legal institutions,landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law.Johnson then turns to examine "common legalities", widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English asa legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, the volume offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives.Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century with, and through legality.

Merchants of Innovation

Merchants of Innovation
Author: Esther-Miriam Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2017-05-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1501503545

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Traders around the world use particular spoken argots, to guard commercial secrets or to cement their identity as members of a certain group. The written registers of traders, too, in correspondence and other commercial texts show significant differences from the language used in official, legal or private writing. This volume suggests a clear cross-linguistic tendency that mercantile writing displays a greater degree of language mixing, code-switching and linguistic innovations, and, by setting precedents, promote language change. This interdisciplinary volume aims to place the traders' languages within a wider sociolinguistic context. Questions addressed include: What differences can be observed between mercantile registers and those of court or legal scribes? Do the traders' texts show the early emergence of features that take longer to permeate into the 'higher' varieties of the same language? Do they anticipate language change in the standard register or influence it by setting linguistic precedents? What sets traders' letters apart from private correspondence and other 'low' registers? The book will also examine bilingualism, semi-bilingualism, reasons for code-switching and the choice of particular languages over others in commercial correspondence.

Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe

Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe
Author: Jackson W. Armstrong
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-11-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429553455

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Drawing together an international team of historians, lawyers and historical sociolinguists, this volume investigates urban cultures of law in Scotland, with a special focus on Aberdeen and its rich civic archive, the Low Countries, Norway, Germany and Poland from c. 1350 to c. 1650. In these essays, the contributors seek to understand how law works in its cultural and social contexts by focusing specifically on the urban experience and, to a great extent, on urban records. The contributions are concerned with understanding late medieval and early modern legal experts as well as the users of courts and legal services, the languages and records of law, and legal activities occurring inside and outside of official legal fora. This volume considers what the expectations of people at different status levels were for the use of the law, what perceptions of justice and authority existed among different groups, and what their knowledge was of law and legal procedure. By examining how different aspects of legal culture came to be recorded in writing, the contributors reveal how that writing itself then became part of a culture of law. Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe: Scotland and its Neighbours c.1350–c.1650 combines the historical study of law, towns, language and politics in a way that will be accessible and compelling for advanced level undergraduates and postgraduate to postdoctoral researchers and academics in medieval and early modern, urban, legal, political and linguistic history.

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain
Author: Sara Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-10-12
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 1107180058

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This book shows how depictions of etymology were used by twelfth-century poets, translators, bureaucrats and historians to portray Britain's past.