scholarly journals A pragmatic study of oath swearing in late Anglo Norman and Middle English

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (s2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Reed
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Language Attitudes ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Pragmatic Development ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Anglo Norman

AbstractProfanity has attracted much scholarly attention for the reason that swearing, oaths, and insults “manifest language use in its most highly charged state” (Taavitsainen 1997: 815). This article examines the possible functions of swearing per membra Christi [by Christ’s limbs], starting with a particularly revealing example from a group of late medieval pedagogical dialogues, the Manières de langage. Taking the perlocutionary reaction to this utterance as a starting point, the wider phenomenon of swearing on the body parts of Christ in both Middle English and Anglo Norman will be explored. This behaviour was initially conceptualised (and widely condemned) as an act of blasphemy, the notion of dismembering Jesus being especially widespread. However, this article also concerns itself with the emotive interjectory function of swearing oaths on God and Christ, and will posit that this behaviour is caught in a long process of pragmaticalisation during the high and late Middle Ages. This research supports the view of a bidirectional channel of influence between Middle English and Anglo Norman, and suggests a similar trajectory of both pragmatic development and language attitudes.

scholarly journals Incongruent humour and pragmatic competence in the late-medieval Manières de langage

Multilingua ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-267
Author(s):  
Emily Reed
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Pedagogical Environment

AbstractThis article examines the acquisition of pragmatic competence in L2, applying this stimulating area of research to premodern texts in a way that has yet to be done (to the author’s knowledge). Specifically, this article discusses the teaching of “challenging” incongruent speech behaviours (such as sarcasm, banter, and irony) in a group of Anglo-Norman dialogues of the late Middle Ages. The present work focuses on the representation of incongruent speech acts in the dialogues, how this representation speaks to a pedagogical method that incorporated humour, and also the possible functions of humour in the pedagogical environment. The topic of incongruent performance and its pedagogical implications will also be considered. By discussing the depiction and role of incongruent speech behaviours in the dialogues, I argue that these texts were sophisticated teaching aides that may have used humour as a pedagogical tool to teach more difficult elements of language use.

Sanctae Margaretae, virginis et martyris: Latin texts of the later Middle Ages and their derivatives

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Dresvina
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Golden Legend ◽  
Legenda Aurea ◽  
The One

Chapter 3 focuses on the Latin versions of St Margaret’s vita, circulating in medieval England. These include the one from the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), which became a base for many other versions, both Latin and vernacular. Its influence is also found in some of the English breviaries, discussed in the second section of the chapter. The chapter proceeds with an overview of Latin verses and hymns to St Margaret and finally discusses the vernacular texts influenced by the Legenda Aurea: the two Middle English translations, the Gilte Legende and Caxton’s Golden Legend; Nicholas Bozon’s Anglo-Norman verse life, and St Margaret’s legend from the Scottish Legendary.

Prayers

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 137-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bossy
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Latin Text ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Excellent Opportunity ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Corporate Worship ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Low Mass

In 1945, which is beginning to seem a long time ago, Dom Gregory Dix published The Shape of the Liturgy. In the last two chapters of the book he expressed a view about the devotional and liturgical practice of the late Middle Ages which will provide a convenient starting-point for my subject. He said that the trouble about the medieval Mass was its separation of the ‘corporate offering’ assumed to have occurred in the primitive liturgy from the ‘priesthood of the priest’; the notion of worship it expressed, like the doctrine of the eucharist it exemplified, was ‘inorganic’. The effect of this was to let in, especially during the fifteenth century, non-liturgical, individualist forms of devotion which were unparticipatory and obsessed with historical facts about the life of Christ, notably with the facts of his Passion. ‘The quiet of low mass afforded the devout an excellent opportunity for using mentally the vernacular prayers which they substituted for the Latin text of the liturgy as their personal worship … The old corporate worship of the Eucharist is declining into a mere focus for the subjective devotion of each separate worshipper in the isolation of his own mind.’ Liturgical doing had subsided into inactive seeing and hearing, on the way to being engulfed in a miasma of private thinking and feeling. The Protestant reform of the liturgy amounted to pickling this pre-Reformation devotional tradition while dropping the ritual performance to which it had been loosely attached.

Heresy and Humanism

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Cole
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Considerable Debate

A controversial idea associated with religious culture in the late Middle Ages is that anyone who considers himself a part of mainstream religion must know his difference from heretics. A religious writer in this period who does not hew closely to orthodox teachings may be accused of being a heretic in his lyrical or prosaic musings about Church hierarchies, the Scripture, or the sacraments. This notion has become a subject of considerable debate among some specialists in Middle English literature. This article considers other paradigms that may broaden our notions about religious literature in fifteenth-century England. In particular, it proposes a paradigm that includes bishops rather than heretics, in part because bishops are mainly responsible for innovations that are neglected in a focus on Wycliffism. It also explores the critically neglected innovations within what it calls ecclesiastical humanism, some of its features, and how it emerged during the fifteenth century. It argues that the prevailing cultural obsession with the Wycliffite heresy had largely disappeared between the 1430s and the 1480s and was replaced, in part, by attempts to promote ecclesiastical institutions as centers of patronage and humanist literary culture.

In Praise of Spurious Saints: The Missae Floruit egregiis by Pipelare and La Rue

1991 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Jennifer Bloxam
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Local Traditions

The cult of saints exerted a profound influence on the liturgy and plainsong of the Roman Catholic church in the later Middle Ages, as individual churches evolved local traditions of liturgy and plainsong to celebrate saints held dear by certain communities. Sacred polyphonic composition during this period also reflects the stimulation to musical creativity engendered by the veneration of special saints. This study explores a particularly fine example of the intersection of liturgy, chant, and polyphony inspired by the adoration of saints in the late Middle Ages. The introduction of a new local saint, Livinus, to the liturgy of the Flemish city of Ghent during the eleventh century provides the starting point for the investigation, which introduces a newly-discovered body of plainsong in his honor, notably a rhymed Office, preserved in manuscripts spanning the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. From this corpus of plainsong the composer Mattheus Pipelare (c. 1450-c. 1515?) selected no fewer than sixteen chants for inclusion in his four-voiced Missa Floruit egregiis infans Livinus; the identification of these heretofore unknown cantus firmi prompts a fresh look at the provenance, style and structure of this remarkable Mass, which proves to be a musical historia akin to other multiple cantus firmus Masses of the period, notably those by Jacob Obrecht. The essay concludes with an examination of the Missa de Sancto Job by Pierre de la Rue, whose debt to Pipelare's Missa de Sancto Livino is elucidated through a discussion of its background and compositional technique.

scholarly journals Development of plastic surgery

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 199-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Pecanac
Keyword(s):  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medical Specialty ◽  
Neck Surgery ◽  
The Body ◽  
Surgical Reconstruction ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Esthetic Surgery ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Reconstructive Plastic Surgery

Introduction. Plastic surgery is a medical specialty dealing with corrections of defects, improvements in appearance and restoration of lost function. Ancient Times. The first recorded account of reconstructive plastic surgery was found in ancient Indian Sanskrit texts, which described reconstructive surgeries of the nose and ears. In ancient Greece and Rome, many medicine men performed simple plastic cosmetic surgeries to repair damaged parts of the body caused by war mutilation, punishment or humiliation. In the Middle Ages, the development of all medical braches, including plastic surgery was hindered. New age. The interest in surgical reconstruction of mutilated body parts was renewed in the XVIII century by a great number of enthusiastic and charismatic surgeons, who mastered surgical disciplines and became true artists that created new forms. Modern Era. In the XX century, plastic surgery developed as a modern branch in medicine including many types of reconstructive surgery, hand, head and neck surgery, microsurgery and replantation, treatment of burns and their sequelae, and esthetic surgery. Contemporary and future plastic surgery will continue to evolve and improve with regenerative medicine and tissue engineering resulting in a lot of benefits to be gained by patients in reconstruction after body trauma, oncology amputation, and for congenital disfigurement and dysfunction.

Emotional Attachments

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gagné
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Technical Knowledge ◽  
Ambroise Paré ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Conceptual Problems ◽  
Ambroise Pare ◽  
The Way

This study of iron hands situates prosthetics at the nexus of several confluent craft fields in the late Middle Ages. In particular, it shows the way that the technology behind these body attachments emerged out of masculine artisans’ communities associated with metalwork and often also with war: surgeons, locksmiths, clockmakers, and gunners. It argues that these ‘communities of technique’ were mutually collaborative fraternities whose technical knowledge moved laterally across fields. It examines several extant iron hands, including the famous model based on Ambroise Paré. The chapter proposes that these prostheses were emotionally and professionally restorative rather than transformative. It concludes by suggesting that such objects posed philosophical and conceptual problems about the body as mechanism or machine, and that the absence of prosthetics for women in this period helps to frame the gender of mechanism in the Renaissance.

Miracles of the Virgin in Middle English, ed. and trans. by Adrienne Williams Boyarin. A Broadview Anthology of British Literature. Peterborough, Ont., 2015, 164 pp., 12 b/w ill.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 291-291
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Middle English ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Present Book ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
South English Legendary ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Miracles Of The Virgin

The admiration and worship of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages was simply paramount, both in clerical and in secular literature, in the visual arts, and in music. Mary <?page nr="292"?>appears countless times in legendary literature, and so also in Middle English. She might produce miracles and help miserable people in need if they pray hard enough. Those stories were ubiquitous all over medieval Europe, as Williams Boyarin comments, referring to Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, Provençal, Italian, Spanish, Castilian, Arabic, and Ethiopean (10). I wonder, however, what the difference between Spanish and Castilian might be, and why German, French (Gautier de Coincy) or Swedish, Polish or Czech texts are missing entirely in this list. Nevertheless, the focus of the present book rests on Middle English examples, such as those contained in The South English Legendary, in the Vernon Manuscript, and in the collection produced by the printer Wynken de Worde in 1496.

scholarly journals Exploring the penetration of loanwords in the core vocabulary of Middle English: carry as a test case

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282
Author(s):  
PHILIP DURKIN
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Test Case ◽  
The Core ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Basic Vocabulary ◽  
Core Vocabulary ◽  
The Impact

This article takes as its starting point the extent of borrowing in Middle English among the hundred meanings included in the Leipzig–Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, a recently developed tool for exploring the impact of borrowing on basic vocabulary on a cross-linguistic basis. This is adopted for the possibility it provides for taking an empirically based approach to identifying at least a proportion of those loanwords that have most impact on the core lexicon. The article then looks in detail at a particularly striking example identified using this list: the verb carry, borrowed into English in the late fourteenth century from Anglo-Norman, and found with some frequency in its modern core meaning from the very beginning of its history in English. The competition this word shows with native synonyms, especially bear, is surveyed, and the systemic pressures that may have facilitated its widespread adoption are explored, as well as the points of similarity it shows with some other borrowings into the core vocabulary of Middle English; in particular, the hypothesis is advanced that a tendency towards isomorphism in vocabulary realizing basic meanings may be a significant factor here. The article also contends that the example of carry sheds new light on the receptivity of even basic areas of the lexicon to Anglo-Norman lexis in the late Middle English period. The trajectory shown by this word is particularly illuminating, with borrowing in a restricted meaning with reference to the commercial bulk transportation of goods, merchandise, etc. being followed by very rapid development of a much broader meaning, which even within the fourteenth century appears in at least some varieties (notably the works of Chaucer) to be a significant competitor for native bear as default realization of the basic meaning ‘to transfer/carry (something, especially in one's hands)’.

scholarly journals Earthrise

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-117
Author(s):  
Julia McClure
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The Body ◽  
Global History ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Vision ◽  
A Site

This article uses Franciscan history to explore an alternative approach to global history. Following Benjamin Lazier’s observations about ‘Earthrise’, which showed that images of the world have been entangled with intellectual and political discourses, this article explores the Franciscans’ own Earthrise perspective which can be traced in the spiritual and mystical writings produced in the late Middle Ages. The aim of this article is not only to contest the kind of periodisation which has seen the global turn and ‘global era’ as peculiarly ‘modern’, but to suggest that any study of the ‘global’ must incorporate an analysis of the multilayered nature of that concept. It suggests that the global is not so much a scale as an idea, and considers how the hyper-local place of the body can be a site for realising a global vision.

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