Brepols Online Books Medieval Miscellanea Collection 2018 - bob2018mime

These essays are concerned primarily with the different ways in which European writers, translators, and readers engaged with texts and concepts, and with the movement and exchange of those texts and ideas across boundaries and geographical spaces. It brings together new research on Anglophone and Latinate writings, as well as on other vernaculars, among them Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Irish, Welsh, Arabic, Middle Dutch, Middle German, French, and Italian, including texts and ideas that are experienced in aural and oral contexts, such as in music and song. Texts are examined not in isolation but in direct relation and as responses to wider European culture; several of the contributions theorize the translation of works, for example, those relating to spiritual instruction and prayer, into other languages and new contexts.

The essayists share a common concern, then, with the transmission and translation of texts, examining what happens to material when it moves into contexts other than the one in which it was produced; the influence that scribes, translators, and readers have on textual materiality and also on reception; and the intermingling different textual traditions and genres. Thus they foreground the variety and mobility of textual cultures of the Middle Ages in Europe, both locally and nationally, and speak to the profound connections and synergies between peoples and nations traceable in the movement and interpretation of texts, versions, and ideas. Together the essays reconstruct an outward-looking, networked, and engaged Europe in which people used texts in order to communicate, discover, and explore, as well as to record and preserve.

How can historical sociolinguistic analyses of Medieval Greek aid in the interpretation of Medieval Greek texts? This is the main question addressed by the papers collected in this volume. Historical sociolinguistics (HSL) is a discipline that combines linguistic, social, historical, and philological sciences, and suggests that a language cannot be studied apart from its social dimension. Similarly, the study of a language in its social dimension is nothing else than the study of communication between members of a given speech community by the means of written texts, the shared “signs” used by authors to communicate with their audiences.

This volume is divided into two parts. In the first, Cuomo’s and Bentein’s papers aim to offer an overview of the discipline and examples of applied HSL. Valente’s, Bianconi’s, and Pérez-Martín’s papers show how the context of production and reception of Byzantine texts should be studied. These are followed by Horrocks’ study on some features of Atticized Medieval Greek. In the second part, the contributions by Telelis, Odorico, and Manolova focus on the context of reception of texts by Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Pediasimos, and Nikephoros Gregoras respectively.