1,721,146 research outputs found
The Elizabethan map of the languages of Britain : Evidence from two Celtic-English wordlists
Full text linkOver a century before the systematic study of the Celtic languages developed, Tudor scholars were busy collecting lexicographical, phonological and etymological information about them. Early modern print and manuscript evidence indicates that the interest in the origins of Irish was particularly rife, and that speculations regarding its affinity with Welsh enjoyed some popularity in English circles. This article studies two little known examples of trilingual Irish-Welsh-English wordlists compiled by English speakers towards the end of the 16th century, which provide hitherto underexploited evidence of a rising interest of English colonists in Irish. The article posits that whilst such interest must be placed in the context of the Tudor discovery of Ireland, it also reflects fascinating developments in Elizabethan linguistic thought
Meredith Hanmer and the Elizabethan Church: A Clergyman’s Career in 16th Century England and Ireland
No full textThis is the first book-length study of the fascinating life of the clergyman and scholar of Welsh descent Meredith Hanmer (c.1545–1604). Hanmer became involved in the key scholarly controversies of his day, from the place of the Elizabethan Church in Christian history to the role of the 1581 Jesuit mission to England led by Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. As an army preacher in Ireland during the Nine Years War, Hanmer campaigned with the most acclaimed soldiers of his day. He nurtured connections with prominent intellectuals of his time and with the key figures of colonial government. His own career as a clergyman was colourful, involving bitter disputes with his parishioners and recurring aspersions on his character. Surprisingly, no study to date has centred on this intriguing character. The surviving evidence for Hanmer’s life and activities is unusually rich, comprising his published writings and a large body of under-exploited manuscript material. Drawing extensively on archival evidence scattered across a wide number of repositories, Dr. Andreani’s book contextualises Hanmer’s clerical activities and wide-ranging scholarship, elucidates his previously little understood career, and thus enriches our understanding of life, politics, and scholarship in the Elizabethan church
Analysing Older English, ed. by D. DENISON, R. BERMUDEZ-OTERO, C. MCCULLY, E. MOORE, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012 (Studies in English language)
No full textThe pragmatics of citation in a digital corpus of early modern English prose writing
Full text linkCitations in contemporary writing perform a variety of functions: they supply verifiable links to sources, they help define the theoretical framework on which a specific text is grounded, and they can help outline a writer’s field or niche. Furthermore, they can provide justification for arguments, they can work as tools for supporting claims, and they can be a strategy to emphasise the relevance of specific points in a text. Yet the practice of citation has undergone changes through the centuries, so that current definitions may not adequately reflect their forms and functions in early modern textuality. Building on Ken Hyland’s model of citation in academic discourse and within the framework of historical pragmatics, the paper analyses examples of citations in a corpus of early modern texts to describe their language, forms and to detect their discursive pragmatic functions. The analysis is carried out on a digital corpus of factual prose writing (historiography) using a digital corpus manager and text analysis software (SketchEngine). The paper aims to bring out how early modern English writers would encode their relationship with sources through language: what forms of citation did they use? Could different practices of citation reflect different ideas about originality and authorship? Can we work out a pragmatics of citations to reveal something about the intellectual processes of reference, appropriation, imitation and borrowing
Translation and historiography : the role of translators writing the ‘true’ history of the Christian church in post-reformation London
Full text linkIn this paper I propose to discuss the early English translations of the key text of Christian ecclesiastical historiography, Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, to highlight the contribution of their authors to the English language and to the writing of Church history in English. The paper will be three-fold: it will briefly explain the centrality of historiography in the wake of the Reformation; it will present selected evidence of the translators’ own description of the scope, purpose and significance of their activity; and it will exemplify the impact of their work on the English language
Two early modern Celtic-English glossaries
Full text linkEven before a systematic study of the Celtic languages began, Tudor scholars were collecting lexicographical, phonological and etymological information about them. The evidence that has survived indicates the currency of the arguments in favour of the relatedness of Irish and Welsh, something which bears implications for their relationship to English. The paper considers two relatively unknown lists or tables of Celtic-English equivalents to understand their scope, purpose and authorship
The Jesuit mission in early modern Ireland, 1560–1760. Edited by Mary Ann Lyons and Brian Mac Cuarta. Pp. 269 incl. 5 ills. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022. £50. 978 1 80151 025 7
Full text linkMetalinguistic labelling in Florio’s A Worlde of Words (1598)
Full text linkThe paper aims to contribute a historical linguistics and lexicographical perspective on John Florio as an observer of language and linguistic phenomena, informed by the rising interest in bilingual vernacular lexicography as a source for the study of the history of linguistic ideas and terminology. The contribution examines the nature of metalinguistic labelling in Florio's dictionary and its consistency, and it explores the extent to which awareness of language variation (whether regional, diastratic, diaphasic or other) in both English and Italian is displayed
Two English Translations of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical Histories: A Lexical Analysis
Full text linkWith over three hundred quotations, Meredith Hanmer’s translation of Eusebius' "Auncient Ecclesiastical Histories" (London, 1577, STC 10572) is one of the top 1000 sources of the Oxford English Dictionary. Hanmer was not the first translator of the Church history, however. The first five books survive in a manuscript translation by the niece of Sir Thomas More, Mary Roper Clark Basset, which has been dated between 1547 and 1553. No study of the relationship between Hanmer’s and Basset’s translations has been undertaken so far, a gap in the state of the art that this note intends to remedy starting from a comparison of their vocabulary
False “cacographees” and “correct” English names: the quest for perfect botanical naming in early modern England
No full textThe chapter addresses a specific historical moment of the development of botanical nomenclature in England between the 16th and the 17th centuries. Selecting from the terminology used in the most important herbals and catalogues of the period, i.e. Turner (1548 and 1568), Lyte-Dodoens (1578), Gerard (1597), Gerard-Johnson (1633), Parkinson (1640) and Ray (1670), I will show that these compilations constitute a rich repertoire of neologisms, equivalents, regionalisms, and compounds that can be used to examine variation, continuity and change in terminology in this stage of the English language. To a certain extent, the nomenclature to designate plants represented a means to establish some order in a field that saw considerable, and often chaotic, expansion in the Renaissance. At the same time, close analysis of some of these terms suggests that explaining the lexical and semantic processes implicit in plant naming can contribute to reveal aspects of the early modern understanding of the vegetal world
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