We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the 2016 Kalamazoo ICMS:
—
Comparing Bilingualism in the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Worlds
Two sessions for the 2016 Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University (12-15 May 2016), sponsored by The Languages of Early Medieval Charters project, University of the Basque Country, Spain.
Discussion and debate concerning early medieval (c.700–c.1100) multilingualism has classically gravitated towards the questions of when Latin ceased to be a spoken language and how it was superseded by Romance vernacular. Strikingly little, however, has been said about bilingualism in non-Romance early medieval Europe. In the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and the Frankish realm east of the Rhine, Latin was never a native language; it needed to be learned as a second or foreign language. Surviving texts from these regions – variously written in Latin, Germanic vernacular, or both – thus enable us to pose questions about the nature of literacy, the relationship between written and oral communication, language choice, and code-switching (i.e. the use of two or more languages in speaking or writing) that cannot be asked of Romance-speaking regions of Europe.
These sessions will showcase new approaches to the study of literacy and communication in the early Middle Ages by examining the uses of and interaction between Latin and Germanic vernacular in Anglo-Saxon England and eastern Francia. These two regions offer a particularly attractive case for comparison on account of their shared Germanic linguistic heritage and the existence of numerous cross-channel contacts throughout the period. But Anglo-Saxons and Franks invoked written vernacular in strikingly different ways. In England, Old English literature took off at a relatively early date, and the vernacular played an important role in administrative practice and documentary culture from the ninth century onward. In eastern Francia, on the other hand, the vernacular was used sparingly: there is a relatively small number of Old High German texts, and just a few instances of it in legal documents. These contrasting linguistic situations have each been taken for granted. Multilingual Anglo-Saxon and East Frankish societies fostered remarkably different cultures of writing, but the reasons for this variance remain to be explored and understood.
New light can be thrown on these questions by applying a range of approaches (historical, literary, palaeographic, sociolinguistic, philological) to a variety of sources (charters and legal documents, narrative sources, hagiography, poetry and verse, sermons and liturgical texts, glosses and glossaries, and many more). We welcome equally papers exploring one or both of the regions under consideration. These sessions promise to help uncover an under-researched aspect of early medieval literacy, and to further develop our understanding of the relationship between the written and spoken word in early medieval society.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers to be given as part of these sessions. Please send abstracts of 300 words together with a completed Participant Information Form (available here) to one of the organizers, Dr Francesca Tinti (francesca.tinti@ehu.eus) or Dr Edward Roberts (edward.roberts@ehu.eus), by 15 September 2015.
—
The full Kalamazoo CFP can be found here (see p. 15 for our entry and further contact details).
Leave a Reply