Textual and Codicological Manifestations of Multilingual Culture in Medieval England

Putter, Ad; Kopaczyk, Joanna; Bridges, Venetia

Abstract

Focusing on multilingual literary texts and manuscripts, this chapter takes stock of developments in recent scholarship and highlights areas in which further work is needed. Changes of approach by editors and literary historians are illustrated with special reference to the substantial body of scholarship on the multilingual miscellany London, British Library, MS Harley 2253. Using this manuscript and its texts to illustrate new departures and new possibilities, this essay discusses a number of issues that merit further investigation. It calls attention to the presence of languages other than English, French and Latin in medieval England and the cross-linguistic influence which these languages exerted on each other; to the synchronic and diachronic fluctuations in the relations between the different languages in different texts and codices of the period; and to the latent multilingualism that is typical even of Middle English texts traditionally regarded as monolingual and that is recoverable through analysis of linguistic detail (e.g. grammatical inflections, abbreviations, discourse markers), manuscript detail (e.g. titles and explicits), and literary context (e.g. the use of sources and verse forms taken from other linguistic traditions). Finally, we emphasise the need to pay attention to the visual aspects of multilingual communication (such as the presence or absence of rubrication for Latin phrases in Middle English texts) and to the variations in scribal practice and the changing trends over time.

Citation

Putter, A., Kopaczyk, J., & Bridges, V. (2023). Textual and Codicological Manifestations of Multilingual Culture in Medieval England. In Medieval English in a Multilingual Context (407-439). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30947-2_14

• Online Publication Date: Nov 15, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 18, 2024
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 407-439
• Series Title: New Approaches to English Historical Linguistics
• Book Title: Medieval English in a Multilingual Context
• ISBN: 9783031309465; 9783031309472
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30947-2_14
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2971634