Everyday English 1500-1700

Everyday English 1500-1700

Author: Bridget Cusack

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780472066865

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A rich compendium of historical texts that reflect the English spoken by ordinary citizens of the early modern period


Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700

Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500-1700

Author: Adam Fox

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 526

ISBN-13: 0191542296

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This book explores the varied vernacular forms and rich oral traditions which were such a part of popular culture in early modern England. It focuses, in particular, upon dialect speech and proverbial wisdom, "old wives' tales" and children's lore, historical legends and local customs, scurrilous versifying and scandalous rumour-mongering. Adam Fox argues that while the spoken word provides the most vivid insight into the mental world of the majority in this semi-literate society, it was by no means untouched by written influences. Even at the beginning of the period, centuries of reciprocal infusion between complementary media had created a cultural repertoire which had long ceased to be purely oral. Thereafter, the expansion of literacy together with the proliferation of texts both in manuscript and print saw the rapid acceleration and elaboration of this process. By 1700 popular traditions and modes of expression were the product of a fundamentally literate environment to a much greater extent than has yet been appreciated.


Outlaw Rhetoric

Outlaw Rhetoric

Author: Jenny C. Mann

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-02-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0801464579

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A central feature of English Renaissance humanism was its reverence for classical Latin as the one true form of eloquent expression. Yet sixteenth-century writers increasingly came to believe that England needed an equally distinguished vernacular language to serve its burgeoning national community. Thus, one of the main cultural projects of Renaissance rhetoricians was that of producing a "common" vernacular eloquence, mindful of its classical origins yet self-consciously English in character. The process of vernacularization began during Henry VIII’s reign and continued, with fits and starts, late into the seventeenth century. In Outlaw Rhetoric, Jenny C. Mann examines the substantial and largely unexplored archive of vernacular rhetorical guides produced in England between 1500 and 1700. Writers of these guides drew upon classical training as they translated Greek and Latin figures of speech into an everyday English that could serve the ends of literary and national invention. In the process, however, they confronted aspects of rhetoric that run counter to its civilizing impulse. For instance, Mann finds repeated references to Robin Hood, indicating an ongoing concern that vernacular rhetoric is "outlaw" to the classical tradition because it is common, popular, and ephemeral. As this book shows, however, such allusions hint at a growing acceptance of the nonclassical along with a new esteem for literary production that can be identified as native to England. Working across a range of genres, Mann demonstrates the effects of this tension between classical rhetoric and English outlawry in works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, Jonson, and Cavendish. In so doing she reveals the political stakes of the vernacular rhetorical project in the age of Shakespeare.


A Day at Home in Early Modern England

A Day at Home in Early Modern England

Author: Tara Hamling

Publisher: Association of Human Rights Institutes series

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300195019

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This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic space in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound influence that the domestic material environment had on structuring and expressing modes of thought and behaviour of relatively ordinary people. With a multidisciplinary approach that takes both extant objects and documentary sources into consideration, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how a family's investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to define not only their status, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art


Early Modern English Dialogues

Early Modern English Dialogues

Author: Jonathan Culpeper

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-02-18

Total Pages: 503

ISBN-13: 0521835410

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This book analyses speech-related genres in Early Modern English, providing ideas of what spoken interaction in earlier times might have been like.


Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues

Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues

Author: Terry Walker

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9789027254016

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This book is a corpus-based study examining thou and you in three speech-related genres from 1560–1760, a crucial period in the history of second person singular pronouns, spanning the time from when you became dominant to when thou became all but obsolete. The study embraces the fields of corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and historical sociolinguistics. Using data drawn from the recently released A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760 and manuscript material, the aim is to ascertain which extra-linguistic and linguistic factors highlighted by previous research appear particularly relevant in the selection and relative distribution of thou and you. Previous research on thou and you has tended to concentrate on Drama and/or been primarily qualitative in nature. Depositions in particular have hitherto received very little attention. This book is intended to help fill a gap in the literature by presenting an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of pronoun usage in Trials, Depositions, and, for comparative purposes, Drama Comedy.


Introduction to Late Modern English

Introduction to Late Modern English

Author: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2009-05-12

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0748631305

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Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that forms the tail end of the standardisation process (codification and prescription), during which important social changes such as the Industrial Revolution are reflected in the language. Late Modern English is currently receiving a lot of scholarly attention, mainly as a result of new developments in sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics. By drawing on such research the present book offers a much fuller account of the language of the period than was previously possible. It is designed for students and beginning scholars interested in Late Modern English. The volume includes: * a basis in recent research by which sociolinguistic models are applied to earlier stages of the language (1700-1900) * a focus on people as speakers (wherever possible) and writers of English* Research questions aimed at acquiring skills at working with important electronic research tools such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography* Reference to electronically available texts and databases such as Martha Ballard's Diary, the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.


Varieties of English in Writing

Varieties of English in Writing

Author: Raymond Hickey

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2010-10-28

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9027287783

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This volume is concerned with assessing fictional and non-fictional written texts as linguistic evidence for earlier forms of varieties of English. These range from Scotland to New Zealand, from Canada to South Africa, covering all the major forms of the English language around the world. Central to the volume is the question of how genuine written representations are. Here the emphasis is on the techniques and methodology which can be employed when analysing documents. The vernacular styles found in written documents and the use of these as a window on earlier spoken modes of different varieties represent a focal concern of the book. Studies of language in literature, which were offered in the past, have been revisited and their findings reassessed in the light of recent advances in variationist linguistics.


The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics

Author: Merja Kytö

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 1092

ISBN-13: 1316472914

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English historical linguistics is a subfield of linguistics which has developed theories and methods for exploring the history of the English language. This Handbook provides an account of state-of-the-art research on this history. It offers an in-depth survey of materials, methods, and language-theoretical models used to study the long diachrony of English. The frameworks covered include corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, historical pragmatics and manuscript studies, among others. The chapters, by leading experts, examine the interplay of language theory and empirical data throughout, critically assessing the work in the field. Of particular importance are the diverse data sources which have become increasingly available in electronic form, allowing the discipline to develop in new directions. The Handbook offers access to the rich and many-faceted spectrum of work in English historical linguistics, past and present, and will be useful for researchers and students interested in hands-on research on the history of English.