When the Vernaculars (Anglo-Norman and Middle English) and Medieval Latin Fuse into a Functional Variety: Evidence from the Administrative Realm

Abstract

For a long time, some of the most revealing testimonies to medieval multilingual societies and their communicative practices have been neglected for their purportedly faulty nature. I am referring to the so-called mixed-language texts, those which combine several languages in the same communicative event (communicative event herein exclusively understood as a written text). This article takes two case studies from the administrative world in late medieval England as its basis, namely the Building Accounts of King Henry III (1216–1272) and the Inventory and Account Rolls of the Benedictine House or Cell of Jarrow (1303–1537). Its aims are threefold: (a) to describe the use of vernacular descriptors in these hitherto unexplored medieval accounts; (b) to examine what kinds of lexemes are particularly susceptible to be introduced by le(s) as a marker indicating a switch to the vernacular; and, finally, (c) to show how the multilingual system at work in the accounts challenges any contemporary taxonomical distinctions grounded in the notion of languages as clearly distinguishable entities.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.