The Importance of Being English: A Look at French and Latin Loanwords in English
This essay examines twenty six synonym pairs in English, looks at their etymology and briefly explains where they come from and how they work in a sentence.
The Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Medieval Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (from the State Foundation to the End of the Sixteenth Century)
The aim of my thesis is to reveal and understand processes behind the appearance and dissemination of literacy in the medieval principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. I will focus on the social and cultural factors that contributed to the adoption and use of writing from the appearance of the state until the end of the sixteenth century.
Flowers for the Book-binder’s Wife: An Investigation of Florilegia and Early Modern Women’s Writing
To an early modern, nothing could be fully learned through a “hands off” approach. Heidi Brayman Hackel corroborates this with her book, Reading Material. Critical to early modern thoughts on comprehension was “taking note,” a phrasing that carried the double implication of both noticing and annotating…
Writing Land in Anglo-Saxon England
In using writing as a means to contain dispute over time, the Anglo-Saxons repeatedly inscribed the troubling evidence of past dispute and anticipated loss into their thinking about land.
The Ars Moriendi: An examination, translation, and collation of the manuscripts of the shorter Latin version
The Ars Moriendi is a Mediaeval Christian death manual that appeared around the middle of the fifteenth century. Though no-one is certain who the author was, there is no doubt that Jean Gerson was the major inspiration through his Opusculum Tripartitum.
Love, Marriage, and Happiness: Changing Systems of Desire in Fourteenth-Century England
It is my intention not only to explore the discourse of love and desire in the fourteenth century, but also to examine how the ideas have been altered from those present in the Anglo-Norman and Latin material that was written or widely read in twelfth-century England and what pressures and influences may have brought about these changes.
‘Low’ culture, laymen, and what we can learn from history
Historical evidence shows strong interaction between philosophy and the emancipation of the common man or the rise of popular culture in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity
The Cipherment of the Franks Casket
The content carved on the Franks Casket has remained as obscure as its origin. No-one has managed to properly interpret the artwork and the runic inscriptions, though the piece has often passed under the scope over the 150 years since its discovery; with a range of lenses, which at times have passed the flaw to the thing seen.
The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography
Take a foreign language, write it in an unfamiliar script, abbreviating every third word, and you have the compound puzzle that is the medieval Latin manuscript.
The emergence of the English language as an educational medium in Medieval England
To better understand the relationship between linguistics, literature and education in Medieval England, some general background information is necessary to understand how these subjects intertwine…
