Author: Laura Wright
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110687577
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
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.
Author: Olga Timofeeva
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027257663
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
This is the first extensive study of Old English to utilise the insights and methodologies of sociolinguistics. Building on previous philological and historical work, it takes into account the sociology and social dialectology of Old English and offers a description of its speech communities informed by the theory of social networks and communities of practice. Specifically, this book uses data from historical narratives and legal documents and examines the interplay of linguistic innovation, variation, and change with such sociolinguistic parameters as region, scribal office, gender, and social status. Special attention is given to the processes of supralocalisation and their correlation with periods of political centralisation in the history of Anglo-Saxon England.
Author: David Howlett
Publisher: OUP/British Academy
ISBN: 9780197264218
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
This dictionary is an indispensable guide to the study of the Latin Middle Ages. It records the continuing usage of classical and late Latin in this period (6th-16th centuries), but it presents most fully the medieval developments of the language, drawing on a rich variety of printed and manuscript sources.
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1903153476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 562
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Book Description
Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain.
Author: Cordelia Warr
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 183765185X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. The essays collected here continue the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. Topics include literary evidence for linen armour; serial production in late medieval silks; the inventory of Isabella Bruce's bridal goods; the depiction of women textile workers in the frescoes of the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, Italy; ideal female beauty in the Middle Ages and the means used to attain and assess it; and social status as evidenced by clothing and textiles in the Scottish royal treasurer's accounts of the mid-sixteenth century.
Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812297474
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.
Author: C. P. Biggam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107377706
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Human societies name and classify colours in various ways. Knowing this, is it possible to retrieve colour systems from the past? This book presents the basic principles of modern colour semantics, including the recognition of basic vocabulary, subsets, specialised terms and the significance of non-colour features. Each point is illustrated by case studies drawn from modern and historical languages from around the world. These include discussions of Icelandic horses, Peruvian guinea-pigs, medieval roses, the colour yellow in Stuart England, and Polynesian children's colour terms. Major techniques used in colour research are presented and discussed, such as the evolutionary sequence, Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Vantage Theory. The book also addresses whether we can understand the colour systems of the past, including prehistory, by combining various semantic techniques currently used in both modern and historical colour research with archaeological and environmental information.
Author: Hermannus Schottennius
Publisher: Durham Modern Languages
ISBN: 9780907310686
Category : College and school drama, Latin (Medieval and modern)
Languages : en
Pages : 626
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Book Description
The humanist Hermann Schotten, or Hermannus Schottennius Hessus (c. 1503-1546), student, schoolmaster, and university lecturer in Cologne, was the author of a number of works on humanist pedagogy. His *Confabulationes tironum litterariorum* of 1525, a collection of Latin dialogues designed to help schoolboys master Classical Latin conversation, was written in admiring imitation of the colloquies of Erasmus. But Schotten had his own distinctive style: a natural ear for dialogue, and a sympathetic understanding of the schoolboy world. As a result, he produced one of the liveliest pedagogical works of the century and a vivid and valuable cultural document of life in the early modern metropolis of Cologne. This critical edition of the *Confabulationes*, the first since the sixteenth century, makes this one-time best-seller available and comprehensible to modern readers. It presents the Latin text, a full English translation, and extensive notes on the language and on Schotten's many literary and cultural allusions, accompanied by a detailed investigation of the early printing history of the collection.
Author: Sara Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316851559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
How was the complex history of Britain's languages understood by twelfth-century authors? This book argues that the social, political and linguistic upheavals that occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest intensified later interest in the historicity of languages. An atmosphere of enquiry fostered vernacular literature's prestige and led to a newfound sense of how ancient languages could be used to convey historical claims. The vernacular hence became an important site for the construction and memorialisation of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities. This study demonstrates the breadth of interest in the linguistic past across different social groups and the striking variety of genre used to depict it, including romance, legal translation, history, poetry and hagiography. Through a series of detailed case studies, Sara Harris shows how specific works represent key aspects of the period's imaginative engagement with English, Brittonic, Latin and French language development.
Author: Jill Mann
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019887281X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646
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Book Description
An edition and English translation of the Speculum Stultorum (The Mirror for Fools), a long Latin beast epic written near the end of the twelfth century by a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury. This was one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, a favourite of Chaucer, Gower, and Henryson, and was copied for over three centuries, with a circulation extending as far as eastern Europe. It is not only a milestone in the history of medieval beast epic, but a rich source of information about contemporary life and events at Canterbury. The work is dedicated to William Longchamp, who was Richard I's chancellor, and the significance of this fact is shown. This is a highly entertaining narrative about a donkey who longs to have a longer tail and journeys to Salerno to buy some (imaginary) medicines which will provide it. When his medicines are destroyed in an accident, he decides to become learned instead, and goes off to study at the university of Paris for seven years, but can still say only 'heehaw'. Interwoven into this simple narrative are other stories and long rhetorical set-pieces which satirise the distorted values of contemporary religious life or the corruption of the papal curia, and describe the qualities of an ideal bishop (which the donkey hopes to become).
