The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Future Study ◽  
Medical Discourse ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Ancrene Wisse ◽  
Material Analysis ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Miracle Narratives ◽  
Porous Boundaries

Anchorites and their texts, such as <i>Ancrene Wisse</i>, have recently undergone a reevaluation based on material circumstances, not just theological import. The articles here address a variety of anchoritic or anchoritic-adjacent texts, encompassing guidance literature, hagiographies, miracle narratives, medical discourse, and mystic prose, and spanning in date from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Exploring reclusion and materiality, the collection addresses a series of overlapping themes, including the importance of touch, the limits of religious authority, and the role of the senses. Objects, metaphorical and real, embodied and spiritual, populate the pages. These categories are permeable, with flexible and porous boundaries, demonstrating the conflation of ideas, concepts, and manifestations in medieval materiality. In fact, the permeability of these categories demonstrates how materiality can reshape our approach to medieval texts. It leaves room for directions for future study, including the application of material analysis to previously unstudied objects, spaces, and literary artifacts.

scholarly journals The diffusion of higher-status lexis in medieval England: the role of the clergy

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-224
Author(s):  
RICHARD INGHAM
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Spiritual Guidance ◽  
Lexical Knowledge ◽  
Religious Instruction ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Ancrene Wisse ◽  
Cursor Mundi ◽  
Lexical Innovation

For Rothwell (1998: 156) ‘words of ultimately French origin became part of the lexis of English as a result of the myriad daily contacts between Anglo-French and Middle English in the minds and under the pens of a whole literate class’. Although such contact interfaces between Francophone and Anglophone speakers clearly must have existed, not enough is known as to the means by which French-origin lexis was borrowed and diffused. I argue that a principal agency of contact-induced lexical change in Middle English was the clergy in their everyday role of spiritual guidance, whether or not they themselves composed religious texts. French loans in works of spiritual guidance are known to be common from the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse onwards (Trotter 2003a). According to contemporaneous sources, English clerics received a Francophone-medium school education (Orme 1973), which would have familiarised them with the French vocabulary used in religious instruction in chantry schools and beyond.The various manuscripts of the Cursor Mundi, a work of lay religious instruction probably composed around 1300, also offer a revealing window on the process of lexical innovation and replacement instigated by the clergy. An analysis of variant lexical forms, native and French-origin, found in the first 10,000 lines of this work shows that the latter would go on to replace native items the majority of the time. The loss of many native variants, e.g. niþ, mensk and þole, and their replacement, respectively, by envy, honour and suffer, can be attributed to the role played by the clergy in diffusing French-origin items in the domains of discourse they dominated. Rather than merely reflecting the pre-existing lexical knowledge of monolingual English speakers, the clergy's use of such items initially introduced and then maintained French-origin lexemes in at least the receptive competence of such speakers. Their regular and widespread contact with the population at large would have enabled the take-up of lexical innovation via the spoken medium, thus motivating the use observed in homiletic and devotional written texts of extensive French-origin lexis.

Using the senses to evaluate aesthetic products at the point of sale: The moderating role of consumers’ goals

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 82-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Vilches-Montero ◽  
Nik Mohd Hazrul Nik Hashim ◽  
Ameet Pandit ◽  
Renzo Bravo-Olavarria
Keyword(s):  
Point Of Sale ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Moderating Role

Literature and the Senses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Dugan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Study ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Culture And Language ◽  
Sensory Studies

Sensory studies is an interdisciplinary field connecting insights from history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion, literature, and art to the scientific study of human perception. Though research in this field draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and focuses on different historical periods and geographical areas, it is unified through a core tenet: that the human sensorium is as much a cultural, historical, and aesthetic phenomenon as it is an environmental and a biological one. Social mores, geographies, religious beliefs, and individual abilities shape perception in uniquely cultural ways. Put more succinctly, sensory studies, as a field, argues for the cultural study of the senses and the sensuous study of culture. And language is squarely at the center of scholarly questions about perception; literary studies thus provides useful methodological tools for understanding not only how we represent visceral experiences (such as sensation) to others through language but also how these strategies have changed over time. The study of literature and the senses emphasizes the important role of language in representing visceral experience and the important role of aesthetics and history in shaping literary representations.

Ambiguity avoidance as a factor in the rise of the English dative alternation

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Zehentner
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Analysis ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Cognitive Factors ◽  
Case Marking ◽  
Dative Alternation ◽  
Cue Reliability ◽  
History Of ◽  
Potential Impact

Abstract This paper discusses the role of cognitive factors in language change; specifically, it investigates the potential impact of argument ambiguity avoidance on the emergence of one of the most well-studied syntactic alternations in English, viz. the dative alternation (We gave them cake vs We gave cake to them). Linking this development to other major changes in the history of English like the loss of case marking, I propose that morphological as well as semantic-pragmatic ambiguity between prototypical agents (subjects) and prototypical recipients (indirect objects) in ditransitive clauses plausibly gave a processing advantage to patterns with higher cue reliability such as prepositional marking, but also fixed clause-level (SVO) order. The main hypotheses are tested through a quantitative analysis of ditransitives in a corpus of Middle English, which (i) confirms that the spread of the PP-construction is impacted by argument ambiguity and (ii) demonstrates that this change reflects a complex restructuring of disambiguation strategies.

Materiality, Documentary Authority, and the Circulation of the Katherine Group

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Jenny C. Bledsoe
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Manuscript Culture ◽  
Ancrene Wisse ◽  
Textual Community ◽  
West Midlands ◽  
Katherine Group

Written in the decades before Ancrene Wisse, the Early Middle English hagiographies of the Katherine Group depict three virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana. Using touch and eyewitness accounts as measures of proof, the legend equates St. Margaret’s body with the textual corpus inscribed on animal hide. The manuscript’s documentary authority is verified through proximity to the holy body of the saint, and, in a similarly body-centred (and precarious) authority, the anchoress functions as the centre of an ephemeral textual community in the early thirteenth century. The Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic-lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture, consistent with Catherine Innes-Parker’s theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands. This “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped lay literacy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts.

A politics of the senses: the political role of theKing’s-Evil in Richard Wiseman’s Severall Chirurgicall Treatises

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-294
Author(s):  
Adam S Komorowski ◽  
Sang Ik Song
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Case Series ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Political Expediency ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
Charles Ii

Written by Richard Wiseman, sergeant-surgeon to King Charles II of England, ‘A Treatise on the King’s-Evil’ within his magnum opus Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (1676), acts as a proto-case series which explores the treatment and cure of 91 patients with the King’s-Evil. Working within the confines of the English monarch’s ability to cure the disease with their miraculous (or thaumaturgic) touch, Wiseman simultaneously elevates and extends the potential to heal to biomedicine. Wiseman’s work on the King’s-Evil provides an interesting window through which the political expediency of the monarch’s thaumaturgic touch may be explored. The dependence of the thaumaturgic touch on liturgy, theatricality and its inherent political economy in Restoration England allowed Wiseman to appropriate the traditionally monarchical role of healer as his own, by drawing attention to a medical ritual of healing that was as reliant, just as the theatrical ritual of monarchical thaumaturgy was, on symbolic binaries of healer–healed, head–body and touch–sight.

The Role of the Senses in Emotion

2016 ◽  
pp. 65-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Rouby ◽  
Arnaud Fournel ◽  
Moustafa Bensafi
Keyword(s):  
The Senses
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