Manuscripts provide rich documentary evidence for understanding the history of cultural life across the breadth of Europe and Asia down through the Middle Ages. Many illustrate engagement between and across languages, in both similar and contrasting ways from east to west. The demarcation of manuscript studies into single-language academic disciplines has often obscured this reality, privileging one constituent part or contributing language from each manuscript rather than exploring the combination as a nuanced and complex whole. This volume seeks to examine manuscripts as integrally united artefacts, respecting the diversity of their constituent elements. Case studies are presented of twelve manuscripts with evidence for various levels of inter-language exchange and collision, from horizons as diverse as the Atlantic West, Carolingian Europe, the Byzantine world, the Silk Road cultures, and east Asia. The essays function individually as discrete contributions, but together they highlight a range of overlapping themes, illustrating language interaction in global religions, pedagogical exchange, and secular society-building.The analogies as well as the concrete points of connection between them underline the value of a cross-disciplinary approach.

Manuscripts provide rich documentary evidence for understanding the history of cultural life across the breadth of Europe and Asia down through the Middle Ages. Many illustrate engagement between and across languages, in both similar and contrasting ways from east to west. The demarcation of manuscript studies into single-language academic disciplines has often obscured this reality, privileging one constituent part or contributing language from each manuscript rather than exploring the combination as a nuanced and complex whole. This volume seeks to examine manuscripts as integrally united artefacts, respecting the diversity of their constituent elements. Case studies are presented of twelve manuscripts with evidence for various levels of inter-language exchange and collision, from horizons as diverse as the Atlantic West, Carolingian Europe, the Byzantine world, the Silk Road cultures, and east Asia. The essays function individually as discrete contributions, but together they highlight a range of overlapping themes, illustrating language interaction in global religions, pedagogical exchange, and secular society-building.The analogies as well as the concrete points of connection between them underline the value of a cross-disciplinary approach.

This Element offers a comprehensive synthesis of the evidence from the pre-Norman period that situates Old English as one of several living languages that together formed the basis of a vibrant oral and written literary culture in early medieval Britain.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

Postcolonial theories have transformed literary, historical and cultural studies over the past three decades. Yet the study of medieval art and visualities has, in general, remained Eurocentric in its canon and conservative in its approaches. 'Postcolonising', as the eleven essays in this volume show, entails active intervention into the field of medieval art history and visual studies through a theoretical reframing of research. This approach poses and elicits new research questions, and tests how concepts current in postcolonial studies - such as diaspora and migration, under-represented artistic cultures, accented art making, displacement, intercultural versus transcultural, hybridity, presence/absence - can help medievalists to reinvigorate the study of art and visuality. Postcolonial concepts are deployed in order to redraft the canon of medieval art, thereby seeking to build bridges between medievalist and modernist communities of scholars. Among the varied topics explored in the volume are the appropriation of Roman iconography by early medieval Scandinavian metalworkers, multilingualism and materiality in Anglo-Saxon culture, the circulation and display of Islamic secular ceramics on Pisan churches, cultural negotiation by Jewish minorities in Central Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Holy Land maps and medieval imaginative geography, and the uses of Thomas Becket in the colonial imaginary of the Plantagenet court.

As part of the historicizing corpus of seventh-century Irish writing, the Lives framed the narrative of the early saints as an effective weapon in contemporary political and ecclesiastical conflicts. Cogitosus’s Life of Brigit, Muirchú’s and Tírechán’s accounts of Saint Patrick, and Adomnán’s Life of Columba created the understanding of the history of early Ireland that has endured to this day. How did the writers accomplish this through their literary choices? The authors of Irish saints’ Lives used the literary form of hagiography (Christian biography), miracle stories, and an elaborate rhetorical style to present the words and actions of their subjects. These Lives created a narrative of early Irish history that supported the political/ecclesiastical elites by showing that their power derived from the actions of their patron saints.

The complex linguistic situation of earlier multilingual Britain has led to numerous contact-induced changes in the history of English. However, bi- and multilingual texts, which are attested in a large variety of text types, are still an underresearched aspect of earlier linguistic contact. Such texts, which switch between Latin, English and French, have increasingly been recognized as instances of written code-switching and as highly relevant evidence for the linguistic strategies which medieval and early modern multilingual speakers used for different purposes. The contributions in this volume approach this phenomenon of mixed-language texts from the point of view of code-switching, an important mechanism of linguistic change. Based on a variety of text types and genres from the medieval and Early Modern English periods, the individual papers present detailed linguistic analyses of a large number of texts, addressing a variety of issues, including methodological questions as well as functional, pragmatic, syntactic and lexical aspects of language mixing. The very specific nature of language mixing in some text types also raises important theoretical questions such as the distinction between borrowing and switching, the existence of discrete linguistic codes in earlier multilingual Britain and, more generally, the possible limits of the code-switching paradigm for the analysis of these mixed texts from the early history of English. Thus the volume is of particular interest not only for historical linguists, medievalists and students of the history of English, but also for sociolinguists, psycholinguists, language theorists and typologists.

Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital representation of a tangible object. Approaches extend from the codicological, palaeographical, linguistic, and cultural to considerations of reader reception, image production, and the implications of new technologies for future discoveries. Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age advances the debate in manuscript studies about the role of digital and computational sources and tools. As such, the book will appeal to scholars and students working in the disciplines of Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Library and Information Science, and Book History.