Vernacular vocabulary in the Durham Account Rolls (1278-1538): a philological approach
type: CreativeWork
description: The burgeoning interest in historical multilingual texts has modified our appreciation of written material traditionally deemed macaronic: the mixing of Medieval Latin with the vernaculars is now considered not the result of an imperfect grasp of Latin but understood as fundamentally instrumental in articulating specific communicative functions in texts such as the multilingual administrative documents which form the basis of this PhD dissertation: the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). Previous research into multilingual records produced in medieval England has pinpointed a series of central linguistic patterns, including the occurrence of the French definite article, non-existent in Latin, the use of lexical items that could be interpreted as simultaneously belonging to multiple languages and, in relation to this, abbreviations or suspension marks in lieu of full inflectional Latin suffixes. This dissertation goes one step further: not only does it examine the vernacular vocabulary in multilingual accounts in terms of attestations, etymology, and semantics, but it also explores whether, within this multilingual system, it is possible to trace features of Northern Middle English (NME). To the best of my knowledge, this question has not been tackled so far in the examination of multilingual sources. I draw on previous work on Middle English dialects, which has made use of English monolingual sources, and discuss to what extent they can be applied to texts whose matrix language is Medieval Latin (see Section 1.2), thereby offering a fresh perspective on a long- standing topic. I collected all the lexis that could be recognised as 'English', but as this is a problematic assumption given the often blurry boundaries between Anglo-French and Middle English vocabulary, the term vernacular seemed more suited to describe the multilingual reality of these rolls. Section 1.3 describes the textual sources in question, giving some notes on editorial principles and the underlying manus…
abstract: The burgeoning interest in historical multilingual texts has modified our appreciation of written material traditionally deemed macaronic: the mixing of Medieval Latin with the vernaculars is now considered not the result of an imperfect grasp of Latin but understood as fundamentally instrumental in articulating specific communicative functions in texts such as the multilingual administrative documents which form the basis of this PhD dissertation: the Durham Account Rolls (DAR). Previous research into multilingual records produced in medieval England has pinpointed a series of central linguistic patterns, including the occurrence of the French definite article, non-existent in Latin, the use of lexical items that could be interpreted as simultaneously belonging to multiple languages and, in relation to this, abbreviations or suspension marks in lieu of full inflectional Latin suffixes. This dissertation goes one step further: not only does it examine the vernacular vocabulary in multilingual accounts in terms of attestations, etymology, and semantics, but it also explores whether, within this multilingual system, it is possible to trace features of Northern Middle English (NME). To the best of my knowledge, this question has not been tackled so far in the examination of multilingual sources. I draw on previous work on Middle English dialects, which has made use of English monolingual sources, and discuss to what extent they can be applied to texts whose matrix language is Medieval Latin (see Section 1.2), thereby offering a fresh perspective on a long- standing topic. I collected all the lexis that could be recognised as 'English', but as this is a problematic assumption given the often blurry boundaries between Anglo-French and Middle English vocabulary, the term vernacular seemed more suited to describe the multilingual reality of these rolls. Section 1.3 describes the textual sources in question, giving some notes on editorial principles and the underlying manus…
author: Roig Marin, Amanda Dafne
language: eng
keywords: Historical multilingualism, Vernacular vocabulary, Medieval Latin, Middle English
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/43643186-740c-4509-adef-daf4b122ef46/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-07-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:10Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.65715