The Languages of Early Medieval Charters

Last month, Professor Simon Keynes (Cambridge) delivered a lecture on ‘Anglo-Saxon charters in the vernacular’. The lecture is now available online to view here.

Last week, Professor Simon Keynes (Cambridge) delivered a lecture at UPV in Vitoria on ‘Anglo-Saxon charters in the vernacular’, offering a thoughtful overview of the development of the use of Old English in the documentary culture of early medieval England. Professor Keynes is one of the leading historians of the Anglo-Saxon world (and of charters in particular), so it was a great pleasure to hear him speak about the singularity of Anglo-Saxon documentary tradition and the remarkable variety in documentary form. And to everyone’s delight, he even brought his ‘personal copies’ of several Anglo-Saxon charters with him!

We are delighted to be welcoming Dr Annina Seiler (Zurich) to Vitoria next week. Dr Seiler will be speaking on ‘Ego UUalto scripsi: Germanic names, vernacular sounds, and Latin spellings in early Alemannic and Anglo-Saxon charters’.

11.00, Wednesday 11 November, Aula 0.01, Facultad de Letras, UPV/EHU Vitoria. All are warmly invited to attend.

On Monday, 28 September, we welcomed Professor Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge) to Vitoria-Gasteiz, who delivered a lecture on ‘Literacy, communication and the power of words in the early Middle Ages’, in which she discussed the origins of her seminal The Carolingians and the Written Word (1989) and its impact on subsequent studies of the social and cultural history of early medieval Europe. Professor McKitterick also discussed two case studies in order to highlight how new research is continuing to nuance and widen our understanding of languages and literacy in the early Middle Ages.

Watch the full lecture here.

Professor McKitterick with the team in front of the Catedral de Santa María in Vitoria.

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for the 2016 Kalamazoo ICMS:

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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.

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The full Kalamazoo CFP can be found here (see p. 15 for our entry and further contact details).