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Dr Mark Chambers presented a paper at the Schendl Symposium in Vienna 24-25 February, 2012. This is his report:

 

Report on the SCHENDL Symposium,

Vienna, 24-25 February 2012

 

Colleagues involved

MCC (Dr. Mark Chambers)

LS (Dr. Louise Sylvester)

The symposium was held in a lecture hall in the Department of English and American Studies (Hof. 8). There were 11 individual papers plus the symposium opening and closing. The opening paper on ‘Dialect contact in the history of English’ was delivered by Peter Trudgill (Adger, La Trobe, UEA), and the closing was given by Ursula Lutzky (BCU) and by Professor Schendl himself. The running of the symposium was exemplary: the schedule, timings for presentations and questions, arrangements for computer equipment and other necessaries, etc., were managed with exceptional efficiency, and although meals were not provided, there was an informal conference dinner held at Professor Schendl’s apartment on 25th Feb.

On Saturday morning (25 Feb.), MCC delivered the opening paper, entitled ‘Linguistic choices related to dress and textiles across different text types produced in medieval Britain’. The paper was co-authored with LS, who was unfortunately unable to attend the symposium due to family commitments. Data and screenshots for the ‘Lexis of Cloth and Clothing’ project were presented, its initial ‘live’ launch date in May was announced, and further data was presented from the ‘Cloth and Clothing Vocabulary in Medieval Britain from Unpublished Sources’ project. The paper was very well received, and many attendees expressed very positive interest in both projects.

Matters arising

There were two questions following the presentation, the first of which has particular relevance for both projects:

Professor Schendl raised the issue of the reliability of the published editions of the York Wills:

[they are Rain, J., ed. 1835 Wills and Inventories Illustrative of the History, Manners, Lanugage, Statistics, &c. of the Northern Counties of England from the Eleventh Century Downwards. Surtees Society, 2 vols. London: J. B. Nichols and Son and William Pickering; and

Raine, James ed. 1836 Testamenta Eboracensia or Wills registered at York, illustrative of the history, manners, language, statistics, etc., of the province of York, from the year MCCC. downwards. Part I. (Surtees Society, 4 vols). London: J.B Nichols & Son].

Colleagues who attended the ICEHL conference in Péc last year, or who read the subsequent report, may recall Geert de Wilde’s similar comments regarding Testamenta Eboracensia and its attestations in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. The AND, MED and DMLBS all use these editions (sigla Test Ebor, Will York in Sur.Soc., and Test Ebor) although there seems to be general agreement that they are fairly unreliable.

Regarding the corpus of the ‘C. & C. Vocab. from Unpublished Sources’ project, Richard Ingham (BCU) asked if we had noticed any identifiable trends regarding borrowings or switches into the vernacular at the lexical level, where Latin is the matrix language and taking into account the distortion caused by abbreviation and suspension.  Such a question clearly required a detailed and qualified response, and MCC had a quite fruitful discussion with Dr. Ingham during the break that followed.

 

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Dr. Louise Sylvester presented a paper on the three-year 'Wardrobe' project at ICEHL in August 2010

'The Medieval dress and textile vocabulary in unpublished sources project'

This paper will introduce the initial findings of the Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources project (funded by the Leverhulme Trust, beginning November 2009). The objectives of this project centre on the assembly of a corpus of unpublished and/or unedited documents relating to the use, trade and processes of production of dress and textiles in medieval Britain. It is hoped that the corpus will supplement the resources of the ongoing Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.700-1450 project. The main aim of this new project, however, is the examination of language choices in the macaronic documents of the corpus in order to interrogate the motivations for codeswitching and the degree of `foreignness' of loan words in Middle English in the light of work on Anglo-Norman which indicates that while some French terms are deployed for their exotic, foreign qualities, others were in regular use in the business documents of the period (Burnley 2003; Schendl 2000; Trotter 2000, 2006; Rothwell 2000, 2007). Secondly, we address the question of whether there are detectable patterns in language choice within these documents. The mixed-language texts relating to wardrobe accounts and the medieval petitions to Parliament, for example, contain both definite references and a wealth of noun phrases within a specific semantic field. Focus on a single semantic field enables the testing of theories relating to lexical hierarchies and language choice (see, e.g. Wright 1995, 2000, 2003). The documents provide a range of terms at various levels of the lexicon, subordinate, basic and superordinate, which may be categorised according to their place in the taxonomy set alongside the language used in each case and the matrix language of the relevant document.

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Abstract of a paper given at ICHLL in June 2010

'Borrowed finery: issues of language classification in the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450 project'

In 2006 work began on the AHRC-funded project the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450 at the universities of Manchester and Westminster. Our aim is to collect the terms for garments, textiles, and processes of production and trade across all the languages in use in medieval Britain. All the items collected from dictionaries and scholarly work in the field are being entered into a web-held database which will be illustrated with citations, images, and references to archaeological and other scholarship. In this paper we discuss the question of language assignment that arises from the preparation of a multilingual lexicographical resource.

In a forthcoming article David Trotter examines lexical choices in the customs accounts for Southampton for 1435-36. Noting the wide variety of lexical items apparently from languages other than the matrix language (Anglo-Norman), he questions which languages certain lexical items should be assigned to. The account calls, for example, for `M1 dos de grey' for a John Medicus,. Grey is the common Middle English designation for the fur of European grey squirrels (MED, grei, n.2), but what are we to make of dos? Foster proposes that dos is an Italian borrowing citing Italian-looking terms in the account, e.g. cotingnato, sporta and fangotto. Trotter contests this designation observing that an indisputable `French' form dos appears in the same sense in the (French) Livre des mestiers (c1268).

As this example indicates, we are frequently confronted with terms which appear to be replicated across disparate linguistic communities. Research on the multilingual situation of Britain in the late medieval period has started to suggest that assigning lexical items, in particular those found in macaronic texts, to particular languages is at best anachronistic. We need, it seems, to find new ways of thinking about, and classifying, the vocabulary that we are collecting.

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Abstracts of papers to given at Kalamazoo Medieval Congress in May 2010

'Investigating multilingualism in the lexis of cloth and clothing'

Louise Sylvester

The database of the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Britain c.700-1450 contains a large number of terms for the use of gold and/or silver (sometimes it is not possible to tell which is being described from the terms chosen) as ornamentation, jewellery, gold thread, etc. At first sight these fall into two main groups: those deriving from the Latin aura and those which are built on the OE term gold. I would like, as far as possible, to investigate the terms used to describe gold in its various forms as used in jewellery and textile production, comparing the terms collected in the Lexis project, which draws on all languages in use in medieval Britain, with the data of the Historical Thesaurus which records only terms deemed to be part of the English language.

I will also consider the textual contexts in which the terms appear, bearing in mind Jefferson's (2000) work on the language and vocabulary of the late medieval records of the Goldsmiths' Company and other suggestions (e.g. Wright 1995, 2000, 2003) about linguistic usage by artisans and craftsmen in late medieval Britain investigating what kinds of language varieties are legible in the documents and the linguistic choices indicted in them.

 

'Units of measure for cloth in late medieval Britain'

Mark Chambers

Some work currently underway on the planned Encyclopaedia of Medieval Cloth and Clothing, edited by Gale Owen-Crocker and a team of scholars, examines the ways in which cloth was measured and weighed. This paper proposes to examine terms for measuring cloth in the various languages of later-medieval Britain. Thus far, the Lexis project has focused only on terms used to measure the length of pieces of cloth, but even here there are points of interest in which it is difficult to determine whether terms indicated in dictionaries were really used for this purpose. A recent example concerns launces of material in Anglo-Norman accounts, which may be supported by similar references in later Continental records. This study will take into account recently discovered dictionary evidence and set in within the context of the multilingual data that the Lexis project has collected in this area.

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Abstract of a paper to be given at UCL in March 2010 by Dr. Louise Sylvester

'The Lexis of Medieval Cloth and Clothing: projects and research questions'

In 2006 work began on the AHRC-funded project the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c700-1450 at the universities of Manchester and Westminster. The aim is to collect the terms for garments, textiles, and processes of production and trade across all the languages in use in medieval Britain. Research on the multilingual situation of Britain in the late medieval period has started to suggest, however, that a paradigm in which languages such as Middle English and Anglo-Norman are seen as distinct may be anachronistic when applied to the British Isles in the medieval period arguing for the need to find new ways of thinking about, and classifying, the vocabulary that we are collecting. One theory suggests that is that it is possible to account for patterns of codeswitching by examining the levels of the lexicon in which lexical switches occur. This seems to present the possibility of application through the examination of linguistic varieties employed at the various levels in lexical corpora such as the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing project and the Historical Thesaurus of English; the latter offers a hierarchical arrangement of the lexis of English from the Old English period to the present from which the medieval lexis can be extracted and investigated while retaining the category structure of the project. This paper examines some of the results and implications of such an investigation.

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Dr. Mark Chambers gives details of his publications since the start of the Lexis Project:

 

-- ‘“Surcot overt” and “surcot clos”: The Specifics of Clothing in Some Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Petitions’, Medieval Clothing and Textiles 6 (forthcoming in 2010).

-- ‘“What is this, a betell, or a batowe, or a buskyn lacyd?”: Lexicological Confusion in Medieval Clothing Culture’, Textual Healing: Studies in Medieval English Medical, Scientific and Technical Texts, eds. Javier E. Díaz Vera & Rosario Caballero Rodríguez, Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication, Vol. 101 (Bern & New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2009).

-- ‘Redressing Medieval Dress with the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain Project’, with Louise Sylvester, in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings, eds. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, forthcoming in 2009).

-- ‘From apareil to warderobe: some Observations on Anglo-French in the Middle English Lexis of Cloth and Clothing’, with Louise Sylvester, The Anglo-Norman Language and its Context ed. Richard Ingham (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: York Medieval Press, forthcoming in 2009).

-- ‘From Head to Hand to Arm: The Lexicological History of “Cuff”’, with Gale Owen-Crocker, Medieval Clothing and Textiles 4 (2008), 55-68.

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Professor Gale Owen-Crocker gives details of her publications from 2007 to date:

Authored Books

2007 (with Elizabeth Coatsworth) Medieval Textiles of the British Isles c. 450-1100: an Annotated Bibliography, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 445, Oxford, Archaeopress.

Edited Books

2009 Working with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, Exeter, University of Exeter Press

2009 (with Robin Netherton) Medieval Clothing and Textiles 5 (refereed annual)

Also 2007 and 2008 vols 3 and 4

Articles and chapters

2008 ‘Embroidered wood: animal-headed posts in the Bayeux Tapestry’ in Aedificia nova: studies in honor of Rosemary Cramp, eds C. Karkov & H. Damico, Kalamazoo, MI, Medieval Institute Publications, pp. 106-38

2008 (with Mark Chambers) ‘From Head to Hand to Arm: The Lexicological History of “Cuff”’, Medieval Clothing and Textiles 4, pp. 55-67

2007 ‘The interpretation of gesture in the Bayeux Tapestry’ Anglo-Norman Studies 29, 145-78

2007 ‘The Bayeux Tapestry: the voice from the border’ in Signs on the Edge: Space, Text and Margin in Medieval Manuscripts, eds R. Bremmer & S. Keefer, Medievalia Groningana, Paris, Leuven, Sterling, VA, Peeters, pp. 235-58.

2007 (with Win Stephens) ‘Design or divine: the cross in the grave’ in Cross and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England: Santa Crux Halig Rod, eds C. Karkov, K. Jolly & S. Keefer, Morgantown, West Virginia University Press, pp. 117-37

2007 ‘Dress and Authority in the Bayeux Tapestry’ in Aspects of Power and Authority in the Middle Ages, International Medieval Research Series 14, eds B. Bolton and C. Meek, Turnhout, Brepols, pp. 53-72

2007 ‘Beast Men: Wulf and Eofor and the mythic significance of names in Beowulf’ in Myth in Early Northwest Europe, ed. S. Glosecki, Tempe, AZ, Arizona University Press, pp. 257-80

2007 ‘British Wives and Slaves? Possible Romano-British techniques in “Women’s Work”’ in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. N. J. Higham, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, pp. 80-90

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Linda Sever updatesand expands her research

Following the detailed listing of cushions and other soft furnishings that appear in Illuminated Manuscripts undertaken lin 2008, this year has involved examining a wider body of documents such as wills and inventories to ascertain the importance bestowed on such items as cushions and pillows. One notable piece of information I have uncovered is examples of floor cushions used in outdoor locations, which could be described as large beanbag-type cushions. I have also been widening my research beyond Britain to examine sources and examples in France and Scandinavia and have been reading and noting literary sources that mention soft furnishings (for example early medieval romances).

 

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Details of a Seminar given by Dr. Mark Chambers on March 19th 2008

' Fussy Fustian: Medieval Toponyms for Clothing and the Work of the Lexis Project'

 

In his seminal collection of articles on Multilingualism in LaterMedieval Britain, David Trotter issued a challenge for "a concerted moveforward to a truly interdisciplinary approach to the languages ofmedieval Britain" (2000: 2).  Moreover, multilingualism (particularlythat involving Middle English, Latin and Anglo-French) is prevalent inmany later-medieval texts and was endemic amongst the literatepopulation:  "[a] monolingual approach makes it impossible to apprehendthis world" (2000: 2).On the other side of the interdisciplinary coin, the study of medievalcloth and clothing (as with historical material culture or technology ingeneral) is fraught with its own difficulties, particularly with regardto accurate naming.  The fashion historians Perrine Mane and FrançoisPiponnier are forced to admit, "it remains difficult to relate thewritten word to the realia supplied by archaeology or the images oficonography" (1997: 12), leaving the graphic and archaeological evidenceand the multilingual medieval lexis regrettably "unrelated".

 

In response to such concerns, Dr. Louise Sylvester and I are contributing research to a new five-year, AHRC-funded project entitled The lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c. 700-1450: origins, identification, contexts and change, hosted jointly by the University of Westminster and the University of Manchester.  The project will attempt to unite medieval terms for cloth and clothing with images, archaeological evidence and current scholarship, in the form of a searchable database.  This seminar will function as an introduction to the Lexis project, setting out its objectives, methods and some of its early conclusions.  Often our names for clothing are more important that the clothes themselves.  One of the most common ways of naming cloth and clothing is with the use of toponyms (words derived from place names), which can reflect an etymological derivation, a semantic derivation, or both.  Looking at a number of common cloth and clothing toponyms, I will offer a very brief overview of some of the concerns of late-medieval lexicology and explain some of the ways the project is attempting to address these concerns.  Ultimately I hope to suggest that the medieval clothing lexis may shed light on many modern preoccupations: on language contact in multilingual societies, on the psychology and sociology of fashion, and on the complex wider phenomena of western consumerism and material culture.

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Abstract of a paper given by Pamela Walker at the Conference on 'Locating the Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages' at the University of Sheffield,June 14-15.

'Wives, widows, and women: voicing identity in death through clothing on medieval funeral monuments'.

This paper will look at the assertion of identity through costume as depicted on medieval funeral monuments. I will question whether the women represented in effigies and brasses have used their clothing as a voice to show their identities and status. By comparing lone female effigies with wives and widows the paper will ask whether women's voices can be heard through their clothing or whether they are just reflecting their husband's status.

I will focus on funeral monuments in Yorkshire and will look closely at the costume being worn by women who have been commemorated with their husbands, in comparison to women who have their own individual tombs.

I will suggest that beliefs about the afterlife, in particular the idea of the resurrection, play an important part in the clothing worn by the effigy; but also that secular interests, such as status in the community and the role of wives, widows and women in their own right, have a strong influence on how a woman voiced her identity in death through fashion.

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Abstract of a paper given by Pamela Walker at the Conference on'Women and the Sacred in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods', June10 -12, at the University of Bangor.

'Dressing the sacred: religious implications of women's costume on funerary monuments in fourteenth century England.'

This paper will question whether medieval women dressed for God or their peers in death. It will ask if the costume depicted on funeral monuments can be said to have sacred connotations or whether it is simply a display of social status and material wealth as in life.

The aim of the paper is to show that the women or those who were responsible for depicting them in death were motivated by both sacred and material beliefs when choosing the costume for their final resting place. I will argue that sacred beliefs about the afterlife and the idea of the resurrection or day of judgement played an important role in shaping the representation of women in death but tied in with this rationale was also the desire to show off material status to their peers.

Using examples from fourteenth century England I will show the types of costume depicted on female effigies and discuss the reasoning behind the choice of dress, illustrating the differences between materially-motivated and sacred choices.

 

 

 

 

Multilingualism in Medieval Britain, 1100-1400, 11-13 July, 2008.

This conferenc ewas held at Bristol University and was devoted to the study of the linguistic and sociolinguistic situation in medieval Britain. Speakers include: Caroline Barron, Keith Busby, Alan Fletcher, Tony Hunt, Tim Machan, Anthony Musson, Thea Summerfield, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and Laura Wright. Areas of interest included the purposes and effects of "code switching"; the functional and territorial distribution between Latin and vernacular languages; encounters between speakers of different languages in reality and literature; similarities and dissimilarities between medieval and modern modalities of multilingualism. The organizers particularly invite papers that explore these issues through a close analysis of one or two specific types of source material.

This is a report from that conference attended by Dr. Mark Chambers and Dr. Louise Sylvester:

 At an afternoon panel Richard Sharpe (Oxford) presented a paper on the evidence concerning different language groups in some post-Conquest Royal Charters.  Many individual charters of William and of David (in present-day Scotland) contain OE and L references to different language groups that raise more questions about nominal linguistic identity after the Conquest than they answer.  This paper was followed by a fascinating presentation by Eva De Visscher (Oriel, Oxford) who looked at mixed-language use by the post-Conquest Jewish communities of Britain, before the general expulsion by Edward I. The final paper, by Thomas O'Donnell (UCLA) discussed attitudes towards the vernacular expressed in texts such as the First Worcester Fragment, the Ramsay Chronicle, Ralph of Dunstable's Vita Metrica Sancti Albani and in works by William of Malmesbury.

A second panel was chaired by Jean-Pascal Pouzet (Sorbonne). The session opened with another fascinating paper, this time by Richard Ingham (Birmingham City Univ.), who looked at evidence of language mixing from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manorial accounts.  Following on from David Trotter's identification of the 'vernacular-signalling' use of the French definite article in the largely L accounts, Ingham demonstrated that this eccentric language-mixing might be a "fragment of an oral discourse...of the manor," which (inevitably) started a lively debate.  This paper was followed by a look at mixed-language accounts as a source for linguistic analysis by Laura Wright (Camb.).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reports and comments from the Leeds Medieval Congress

Outline of a session held at the Leeds Medieval Congres 7-10th July 2008

 

The session illustrates current research in the 5-year AHRC-funded Lexis Project. Each so-called language produces its own dictionary. Illustrated by a study of Latin planeta, in Old and Middle English texts and major dictionaries, the first paper (by Dr.Stuart Rutten) discussed alternative methods for identifying language communities. The second (by Dr.Mark Chambers) considered the cloth and clothing used to represent nudity on the medieval English stage, including materials, types of garments and vocabulary. The third (by Ph.D student Pamela Walker) examined the logistical problems of compiling images of medieval costume to illustrate a multilingual dictionary.

 

Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker attended a session on the London silkwomen, which should prove useful for The Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles as well as Medieval Clothing and Textiles (but not directly for the Project) and had a productive discussion with the Editor, conclusions of which will be passed on to the Encyclopaedia editorial team.  

Dr. Stuart Rutten reported that 'attendance at this conference was particularly useful for our project, especially in regard to how it will affect further presentations of our database. It is clear that many of the issues regarding methods proposed in our project have an extremely wide scope of interest beyond the aspect of cultural artefact, and we are best represented by providing a product of limited scope but strong methodological value'.

 Dr. Mark Chambers and Dr. Louise Sylvester attended the 'Multilingualism in Medieval Britain, 1100-1400: Sources and Analysis' Conference at the Clifton Hill House, Bristol on 11 July.

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Dr. Stuart Rutten attended and gave a paper at the recent Euralex conference in Barcelona (July 15-19). The following is a précis of his report on the conference.

The use of illustrations in dictionaries appears to be an issue of importance for the lexicographers and interest was expressed in the methods being used by The Lexis Project to deal with the illustrative evidence to be made available. Similar interest was shown in the use of a primarily semantic set of information as opposed to linguistic and morphological structures. Participants at the congress were mainly corpus lexicographers as opposed to historical linguists; they were interested in a project which approached lexicography from the semantic angle and recognized the difficult cross-disciplinary approaches in method being adopted by The Lexis Project. A number of participants had already visited the project website, based on the abstract of Dr. Rutten's paper, which was presented in the program. The complete paper should be published on line (possibly next year) as part of the proceedings.

Nick Cipollone of Microsoft presented a software program currently in use to create Lexicon analyzers and searchers. It is an impressive piece of software, which unfortunately may never be introduced to the public. If Microsoft does release the software, it would make similar, but less comprehensive, programs immediately obsolete. The program would be of immense use for looking up particular morphological formations in a corpus, then comparing similar semantic strategies in a second language

In a poster presentation, Elisa Corino from the University of Torino displayed her project: a comparison of German and Italian food terms from modern dictionaries. One of the results of her project was the method of using calques to name foods across the linguistic communities, which related directly to the Munich study of compounding in OE plant names, presented by the Munich researcher at the recent Leeds Medieval Congress.

Another researcher provided an interesting session, which examined the methods of presenting Lexical and Semantic gaps in bilingual dictionaries. No solutions were arrived at and delegates agreed that generalities in the description are better than specifics. For example, if a semantic gap exists, it is better to describe the referent using general terms such as over-garment, without using similes, which could be misleading. In dictionaries that are able to provide longer commentaries, similes can be used, but with restraint. For example, a term like 'mantel' could be described as an over-garment first and then be looked at in more restrictive terms, such as cloak or 'mantle'.Professor Patrick Hanks of Masaryk University gave one of the plenary lectures, providing a history of British dictionaries for foreign speakers and the use of FrameNet practice to create appropriate senses in a dictionary article. Hanks is one of the editors of the Oxford Dictionary of Surnames and was interested in the names and occupations portion of the project's database.He has a website (www.patrickhanks.com).

The conference was very worthwhile and the next one will be held in Frisia in two years time.(Two general observations: first, there is a textile museum in Barcelona, which is full of many very old and expensive items and would have been a good place to visit; unfortunately it was closed till October; Second, holding a conference so near the Mediterranean Sea seems to be very conducive to its success - other conference organisers, please note!).


 

Abstract of a paper to be written by ProfessorGale Owen-Crocker and Stuart Rutten for presentation at ICEHL 2008 by Professor Owen-Crocker

 

 

'Body, Shape, Fibre, Homeland, User: The Naming of Garments and Textiles'

An analysis of the way garments are named demonstrates that most Germanic constructions are descriptive: they either identify the part of the body which is covered by the garment or they indicate how the garment works (eg. it binds closely or it wraps loosely); some terms incorporate both the anatomical and the functional elements. Others indicate the cut or shape of a garment; from the texture of its fabric, or more rarely, the colour; or the profession of its wearer and the use to which it was put. Textile names are sometimes also descriptive of fibre or technique, or may derive from place of origin, real or supposed, or from trade route which brought the cloth to England. Many cloth words were introduced as Latin loan words or calques. The paper will briefly consider the later semantic development of a selection of terms from these categories, highlighting examples where the item later diversified from, even contradicted, the etymology of its name and considering if there is any difference in the subsequent development of loan words and calques from that of native coinages. The paper will draw on material from the AHRC-funded Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project.

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Abstract of the paper to be presented by Dr.Louise Sylvester at ICEHL, 2008.


Multilingualism and Lexical Hierarchies

Recent discussions by David Trotter have indicated that a paradigm in which languages such as Middle English and Anglo-Norman are seen as distinct may be anachronistic when applied to the British Isles in the medieval period. While this seems, theoretically, to be true, there remains much to discover about the multilinguistic situation of medieval Britain.

This paper takes as its starting point Laura Wright's 1995 paper in which she identifies what is almost a coding within macaronic business writing, suggesting that that it is possible to distinguish levels of the lexicon in which codeswitching is more likely. Her approach distinguishes only two levels of categorisation, however, superordinate terms and hyponyms. Wright was working with a small corpus of macaronic business writing and it seems likely that a larger lexical corpus would be helpful in testing her conclusions. This paper conducts a more detailed consideration of semantic hierarchies, one that includes basic level terms, a crucial linguistic level delineated in the work of Eleanor Rosch et al. (1975; 1976) and others, and examines the linguistic varieties employed at the various levels of corpora relating to a specific semantic field. The data will be taken from the materials of the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing project and the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus of English project; the latter offers a hierarchical arrangement of the lexis of English from the Old English period to the present from which the medieval lexis can be extracted and investigated while retaining the category structure of the project. The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing project aims to refine the definitions of the recorded vocabulary in this area and will include lexical items from Old and Middle English; Welsh, Old Irish and minor Celtic languages; Anglo-Norman, Medieval Latin, and Norse.

References

 

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Abstract of the paper to be presented by Dr. Mark Chambers at ICEHL 2008

 

“Surcot overt” and “surcot clos,”: The Specifics of Clothing in Some Late-Thirteenth and Early-Fourteenth-Century Petitions

In an Anglo-Norman petition from 1321-2, a clerk named Robert de Montfort demands the livery and clothing due to him from the manor at Castle Combe, which includes “le pelure pur surcot clos et pur surcot overt.” In an earlier petition (c.1275?) by some children in the king's wardship, a complaint is made about a reduction in the children's provisions, including the loss of a “tabar e surcote.” In ever more widely available, “non-literary” examples such as these, the context in which items of clothing appear has the potential to develop our knowledge of specific garments and materials while broadening our understanding of the multi-linguistic lexis of cloth and clothing in medieval Britain, beyond that offered by the major dictionaries.

The ongoing, AHRC-funded “Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain (c. 700-1450)” Project attempts to address some of the limits of current lexicological scholarship by investigating the complex relationships between vocabulary, artefact and image. Arising from the Project, this paper intends to discuss various “surcoats” mentioned in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth-century petitions and their relationship to similar references from their wider linguistic community. Using the resources of the Project the paper will examine textual evidence alongside that of costume and clothing historians, assessing the various types of garments specified by the term surcot(e) in relation to available graphic and archaeological evidence. Ultimately, it intends to clarify exactly what de Montfort and his fellow petitioners would have had in mind.

By moving beyond the previous work of dictionaries and clothing historians, the paper will provide a more accurate lexicographical representation of the word in the languages of the late-Thirteenth and early-Fourteenth Century, helping to refine our understanding of Britain's medieval clothing lexis.

The National Archives (TNA) [online], Special Collections: Ancient Petitions, SC 8/4/193, 16 March 2007, < http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk>.

Ibid., SC 8/196/9797.

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An outline of the workshop to be held on Friday August 29th at the International Conference of English Historical Linguistics in Munich, 24-30th August 2008

 

The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.750-1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change

A proposal for discussing the goals, limits, benefits and problems of creating a multi-lingual dictionary, using The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project as a basis of consideration. Using PowerPoint slides and examples from ongoing work, the presentation will demonstrate both the methods in use for the dictionary and will raise questions regarding lexical practice when developing dictionaries for describing the lexis of multilingual communities.

In the Middle Ages dress was an identifier of occupation, status, gender and ethnicity; textiles ranged from opulent and symbolic to recycled and utilitarian. Cloth production and international trade constituted a major sector of the economy of medieval Britain. Despite this economic importance, evidence for medieval textiles and clothing must currently be sought in diverse academic disciplines: archaeology, archaeological textiles, art history, economic history, literature and linguistics.

Adding to the difficulties for the researcher of British textiles is the disparate treatment of vocabulary of the various languages spoken and written in the British Isles, which finds itself documented in different specialist dictionaries, segregated by syntactic or morphological criteria rather than by geographical or economic communal evidence. However, given current views of code-switching and multilingualism, geographical proximity and interaction through labour and trade would suggest that this evidence should be categorized and analyzed together.

It is worthwhile to discuss the limits on the scope of such a linguistic investigation, as questions regarding that scope are at the heart of creating dictionaries. Instead of being bound by purely linguistic considerations, The Lexis Project is instead bound by four other factors: temporal, geographical, economic, and subject. First, this dictionary resource will limit itself to evidence from 700CE to 1450CE; second, evidence will be obtained from the British Isles alone; third, the study covers only the clothing and textile trade; and fourth, the subject of the study is limited to textile and clothing materials.

The purpose of this workshop is to present a method in which related words can be studied systematically instead of treating them as divorced lexemes in different dictionaries. More than comparing the use of borrowed Latin terms such as pallium, terms such as Old English l_n will be compared with Old Irish lín, two terms closely related but linguistically distinct before the 700s. Even further apart, terms such as Old English web and Welsh gwe, linguistically cognate but not immediately recognizable as such, will also be treated with the same attention to comparison. Finally, it is hoped that such a comparison will bring to light cognitive borrowings such as calques, which cannot be easily recognized by leaping from dictionary to dictionary, e.g. Anglo Norman lingteilm and Old English l_nweb.

Moreover, by examining the contexts in which the terms are used more closely than previously allowed for in general dictionaries, signals regarding status and affiliation of evidential genre can be identified. Moreover, it will be possible to examine how these same significations are translated into all of the new linguistic communities, as similar philosophical and intellectual ideas and texts are carried from place to place.

Finally, it is hoped that such a discussion and such a project will expand, as future scholars see the benefits of such an approach. Surpassing its current borders can augment the database. Evidence from Norse, Middle High German and other related linguistic communities could be added. Different materials and trades could be incorporated into the database, etc.

 

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Abstract of a paper to be given by Pamela Walker at the University of Aberystwyth's 15th Century Conference on 'England and its Neighbours: Frontiers', September 4-6.

'Frontiers of Fashion: Geographical influences on medieval costume'.

 

My paper will question the idea of frontiers in respect of fashion in the fifteenth century.

I will look at internal frontiers in England by comparing and contrasting the clothes worn by medieval women in the south of England, focusing on Sussex, and the north of England, focusing on Yorkshire. Bringing in the idea of external frontiers, to ascertain how geography influences choices in the medieval world, I will use fifteenth century European costume, mainly French, to show how and to what extent fashion crosses frontiers.

Much of what we know about medieval costume comes from visual sources, as there is limited archaeological evidence available .

My research involves close analysis of costume as depicted on funeral monuments such as effigies and brasses, but also manuscripts. By focusing on specific aspects of clothing, for example headdresses, sleeves, necklines, I intend to show whether a 15th century woman from Sussex is depicted in the same fashions as her English counterpart in Yorkshire or whether international frontiers are easier to cross as far as fashion is concerned, and she is dressed more like her French neighbour.

 

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Abstract of a paper given by Pamela Walker at the Leeds Medieval Congress, July 7-10.

 

'Illustrating a lexis project: challenges facing the researcher when collecting art sources for medieval costume'.

 

This paper will look at some of the logistical problems, or challenges, encountered when trying to build up a collection of images of medieval costume, and how they were overcome. The images encompass various art forms, including funeral effigies, sculpture, monumental brasses and stained glass, each offering its own challenges.

From photography skills to map reading to administration skills, the process of collecting visual data on medieval costume encompasses far more than one would initially expect.

Planning research visits, keeping costs down and finding cheap accommodation, filling in AHRC forms, gaining access to remote churches, photographing in difficult situations, lighting problems, people who don't appreciate the historical value of the artworks or the value of the research you are trying to do, and data storage, are just some of the problems encountered.

Also taking into account that project colleagues are working with words and text and the art has to fit around their requirements, makes it more satisfying when at the end of a long day driving round the English countryside the laptop is full of amazing images of medieval costume spanning centuries and styles.

 



 

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