2. Like the coins when currencies are combined: contextualizing the written language of fifteenth-century English merchants

Stenroos, Merja; Wagner, Esther-Miriam; Beinhoff, Bettina; Outhwaite, Ben

doi:10.1515/9781501503542-002

Merchants of Innovation 2017

DOI: 10.1515/9781501503542-002

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2. Like the coins when currencies are combined: contextualizing the written language of fifteenth-century English merchants

Merja Stenroos¹,

Esther-Miriam Wagner²,

Bettina Beinhoff³

et al.

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Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

Conde-Silvestre

2021

Anglia

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The Cely Letters is a well-known collection of correspondence exchanged by members of this London family of wool merchants and their associates between 1472 and 1488. A substantial part of the corpus was written and received by factors based in Calais, which had been an English outpost in France since 1346 and was strategically connected to the wool marts of the Low Countries. The great majority of the letters are monolingual English texts, thus attesting to the widespread use of the vernacular in personal correspondence by the late fifteenth century. Nevertheless, behind the monolingual English surface, traces of multilingualism are revealed. In this paper, I intend to analyse this issue with a twofold purpose. In the first place, attention will be paid to the multilingual background of the letters, considering both the persistent use of French in late medieval England and the specificity of the business transactions carried out at Calais and the marts, where language contact must have been the norm. In the second place, different textual reflections of such contact in the letters are examined and classified, both as regards the generic conventions of letter writing and as part of the multilingual business context where they were produced and received.

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Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

Conde-Silvestre

2021

Anglia

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Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration

Oudesluijs

2023

linguistica

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This paper considers Early Modern English urban administration in light of the developing supralocal/standard variety. Previously, research scrutinising the language of administration has focused on Middle English rather than on Early Modern English, where studies have thus far mostly focused on private correspondence and printed texts. To shed more light on the language of this under-investigated text type for this period, in this paper I investigate a collection of indentured texts written in Coventry between 1499 and 1600 and explore its language. More specifically, I analyse the use of periphrastic DO, which I subsequently contextualise both in Coventry’s local civic history – focusing on the people involved in creating the documents, e.g. the town clerk and his team of scribes – as well as in the general development of periphrastic DO with regard to the emerging supralocal/standard variety of English. The analysis reveals that periphrastic DO was used to a different extent compared to other text types from the period, most notably that it did not show a decline in the second half of the sixteenth century after what can be described as a ‘slow start’ in the first half. This change in use can be tentatively attributed to a variety of factors in Coventry’s civic history, particularly in the 1570s, but more data from other urban centres is needed to better contextualise this.

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2. Like the coins when currencies are combined: contextualizing the written language of fifteenth-century English merchants

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

Multilingualism and Language Contact in the Cely Letters

Scribal Networks and the Language of Urban Administration

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