Language in Medieval Britain

‘Trilingual England’ and the various cultures implied by the concurrent usage of Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Latin and the developing English language have been the subject of increasing scholarly investigation for some years now. The 2013 Harlaxton Symposium widened the focus by bringing together scholars from a number of different disciplines: architecture and music, Books of Hours, surgery, cookery and law. Some of the papers published here, edited by Mary Carruthers, offer wide-ranging surveys of their topic (Paul Brand on legal procedures, for instance), but many provide tightly-focused analyses of specific issues and texts, performing a kind of keyhole surgery that shows up the complications of different technical discourses within a multilingual culture. What emerges is not so much the separation of languages for use in different contexts, but, as the title of the volume indicates, their overlaps, the assumption of multilingual competence on the part of those making the records or the manuscripts—and, at times, the not so great competence on the part of those at the receiving end of these texts

Archaeology · Competence (human resources · Linguistic competence · Linguistics · Architecture · Classics · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology