St. Ciaran: a Punishing Hand?

The paper focuses on a historical episode occurring in a few Middle Irish Annals: the death of the Munster king Fedemid mac Crimthann: 844 (846?): “Saint Ciaran (dead in 549 - T.M.) gave him a thrust of his crozier, and he (Fedelmid) received an internal wound, so that he was not well until his death”. The compiler presumed his future addressees could understand this deed as a act of vengeance: king Fedelmid Feidlimid, king of Caisel, as Annals say, “put to death members of the community of Cluain Moccu Nóis and burned their church-lands to the very door of their church”. The paper aims at showing that the king was killed by a real person. The narrative structure follows the traditional folk one: S - V - O. The Subject and the Object may be replaced by supernatural beings. So, in our case the Subject (a real person) has been replaced by Saint Ciaran.

Natural Science and Real Life: Linguistic Decisions of the German Incunabula Herbals

The first German illustrated herbals printed in Mainz by Peter Schöffer were intended for ordinary lay readers including the poorer classes. While the Hortus Sanitatis of March 1485 presented a full German translation of the text, the Herbarius of 1484 was Latin with only German plant names added in the chapter titles along with the Latin ones. The popularizing impact of this minimal vernacular adaptation is questioned and the inserted plant names are analysed to estimate their role in making scientific knowledge understandable and accessible for the broad public. The study showed surprisingly, that in the majority of cases these ‘vernacular' lexemes were of Latin origin (loanwords or loan translations). The native terms used by the publisher proved to be regional or dialect words from his Rhine area; in reprints made in Passau they were substituted by Bavarian forms. Both tendencies allowed an insight into the linguistic choices which had an effect on later language usage.

The Preacher and His Audience: On Continuity in Medieval English Homilies

Ælfric's writings, in particular his Catholic Homilies, were not forgotten by the generations that followed; they continued to be copied and read even after the Norman Conquest. It is sometimes assumed that Orm, the author of the Ormulum - a collection of poetic homilies written in the middle of the 12th century, could have relied on Ælfric's works as well. This article examines how the writings of Ælfric and Orm represent the preacher and his sources as well as how they handle the relationship between the preacher and his audience.

The Functioning of the Second-person Imperative and Optative Forms in the Gothic Gospels

The present article focuses on the functions of the second-person forms of the imperative and the optative mood that occur in independent clauses in the Gothic Gospels. Both mood forms carry the incentive (injunctive) meaning and thus have been viewed as interchangeable. This article illustrates, however, that the imperative and the optative are opposed in terms of their grammatical meaning. Specifically, while the imperative mood expresses a high degree of performativity and control over a caused action that is to be performed by a specific addressee, the optative generally denotes the causation of an uncontrolled or a less-controlled action, often by an indefinite or a generalized addressee, which may be presented as a wish of the speaker, and thus may exhibit a low degree of performativity. This grammatical opposition is formed as a means of rendering the senses of the original Greek text of the gospels in the Gothic language, and it plays an essential text-building role in Gothic. Speech acts of varying degrees of performativity (“order” and “request,” vs “advice” and “instruction,” i.e. “eternal moral commandments”) are strongly associated with two registers within the text of the gospels: (1) descriptions of events in the life of Jesus Christ: His actions (the calling of the apostles, the healings, etc.) and the appeals to Him with requests for help; and (2) the preaching of Jesus Christ: His calls and appeals to His audience with the intent of teaching them. Moreover, the two grammatical forms of the incentive (injunctive), the imperative and the optative, act as the means of the stylistic coloring of these two registers: the descriptive prose and the parenetic contexts (“expressively saturated direct speech”). The article further argues for a direct connection between the lexical meaning of the verb and its ability to form the second-person imperative and optative: the imperative is generally formed by voluntary perfective verbs, while the optative is formed by aspect-neutral involuntary verbs used in atelic meanings.