Dr Bernhard Zeller on the languages of the St Gall charters

Yesterday the team was visited by Dr Bernhard Zeller (Vienna), who delivered a fascinating talk on the languages of the charters of St Gall, a monastery in present-day Switzerland which preserves one of the richest documentary collections from the early medieval period – over 800 original single-sheet charters from before the year 1000. Dr Zeller has been editing the ninth-century St Gall charters for the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores over the course of the last decade, and this week he shared with us his thoughts on several linguistic aspects of the collection. The St Gall archive is particularly interesting from a linguistic perspective, as it preserves charters from both the Germanic- (Alemannic-) speaking area around St Gall and the southerly Romance-speaking region of Rhaetia. Dr Zeller explored the Latinity of these charters and surveyed how an initially rustic Latin evolved over the course of the late eighth and early ninth century as monastic scribes increasingly came to monopolise the drafting of documents and Carolingian Latin reform began to take root. Traces of the Germanic vernacular can also be spotted in these charters, and Bernhard outlined several important contexts for its occasional use.