̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Medieval and Renaissance Literature

'Bawdy bard' manuscript reveals medieval roots of British comedy

ta385 — Wed, 31 May 2023 05:00:00 +0000

An unprecedented record of medieval live comedy performance has been identified in a 15th-century manuscript. Raucous texts – mocking kings, priests and peasants; encouraging audiences to get drunk; and shocking them with slapstick – shed new light on Britain’s famous sense of humour and the role played by minstrels in medieval society.

Lost Irish words rediscovered, including the word for ‘oozes pus'

ta385 — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 07:00:00 +0000

If you were choosing where to live in medieval Ireland you might insist on somewhere ogach which meant ‘eggy’ or ‘abounding in eggs’, but in reference to a particularly fertile region. By contrast, you would never want to hear your cook complaining brachaid, ‘it oozes pus’. And if you were too boisterous at the dining table, you might be accused of briscugad (making something easily broken).

All three words have been brought back to life thanks to a painstaking five-year research project involving a collaboration between Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��team has scoured medieval manuscripts and published texts for words which have either been overlooked by earlier dictionary-makers or which have been erroneously defined.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at Cambridge says: “ ̽��ֱ��Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world. ̽��ֱ��project extends our understanding of the vocabulary of the time but also offers unique insights into the people who used these words. They reveal extraordinary details about everyday lives, activities, beliefs and relationships, as well as contact with speakers of other languages.”

̽��ֱ��revised dictionary spans the development of the Irish language over a thousand years from the sixth century to the sixteenth, from the time just after the arrival of St Patrick all the way down to the era of Elizabeth I. ̽��ֱ��team has amended definitions, presented evidence to show that some words were in use much earlier than previously thought, and even deleted a few fake words. One of these is tapairis which had been taken to be some kind of medicinal substance but in effect is not a word at all, since it arose from an incorrect division of two other words literally meaning ‘grains of paradise’, the term for Guinea grains.

Lost words

̽��ֱ��rediscovered lost words include a term for ‘becomes ignorant' – ainfisigid, based on the word for knowledge: fis. Other words have been shown to have been attested hundreds of years earlier than was previously thought, such as foclóracht meaning vocabulary. Yet, other examples emphasise that the medieval world continues to resonate. One of these is rímaire, which is used as the modern Irish word for computer (in its later form ríomhaire).

Professor Ní Mhaonaigh explains: “In the medieval period, rímaire referred not to a machine but to a person engaged in the medieval science of computistics who performed various kinds of calculations concerning time and date, most importantly the date of Easter. So it’s a word with a long pedigree whose meaning was adapted and applied to a modern invention.”

̽��ֱ��historical dictionary on which the electronic one is based was originally published by the Royal Irish Academy in 23 volumes between 1913 and 1976. “Advances in scholarship since the publication of the first volume had rendered parts of the dictionary obsolete or out of date,” says Greg Toner, leader of the project and Professor of Irish at Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast. “Our work has enabled us to resolve many puzzles and errors and to uncover hundreds of previously unknown words.”

̽��ֱ��online Dictionary serves up a feast of information on subjects as diverse as food, festivals, medicine, superstition, law and wildlife. One of the newly added phrases is galar na rig, literally the king's disease, a term for scrofula which is known in English as king's evil.

Outlaws and turkeys

̽��ֱ��project sheds new light on Ireland’s interactions with foreign languages, cultures and goods in the medieval period. ̽��ֱ��Dictionary points out that útluighe, meaning an outlaw, ultimately goes back to the Old Norse word útlagi, though the term was perhaps borrowed into Irish through English or Anglo-Norman. Its use appears to have been limited – the researchers have only found it once, in a thirteenth-century poem by Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe.

Another loanword in Modern Irish is turcaí (turkey) but before this was borrowed from English, this bird was known as cearc fhrancach (turkey hen) or coilech francach (turkey cock). Strictly speaking, the adjective Francach means 'French' or 'of French origin'. This usage to denote a bird native to the Americas may seem odd but in other languages, it is associated with various countries including France, for reasons which remain unclear.

Spreading the word

Professor Toner says: “A key aim of our work has been to open the Dictionary up, not only to students of the language but to researchers working in other areas such as history and archaeology, as well as to those with a general interest in medieval life.”

In a related project, the researchers have been developing educational resources for schools in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

̽��ֱ��Dictionary launched on 30 August 2019 at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. A History of Ireland in 100 Words, drawing on 100 of the Dictionary's words and tracing how they illuminate historical changes will be published in October 2019 by the Royal Irish Academy.

For more on the newly discovered words, see a piece by Dr Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher on the project, in the Brainstorm series on National Irish Television (RTÉ).

Researchers from Cambridge and Queen’s ̽��ֱ�� Belfast have identified and defined 500 Irish words, many of which had been lost, and unlocked the secrets of many other misunderstood terms. Their findings can now be freely accessed in the revised version of the online dictionary of Medieval Irish (www.dil.ie).

̽��ֱ��Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

National Library of Ireland, Manuscript G11 403a10. Image, Irish Scripts on Screen

National Library of Ireland, Manuscript G11 403a10

Funding

Work on the Dictionary has been supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. ̽��ֱ��related project developing schools’ resources is funded by a grant from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, School of Arts and Humanities Impact Fund.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Conquering a continent: how the French language circulated in Britain and medieval Europe

sjr81 — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 11:36:40 +0000

An important manuscript of the Lancelot-Grail, it lay forgotten and unopened for five centuries until its rediscovery in North Yorkshire and its sale in 1944. Detailing the search for the Holy Grail, it goes on public display for the first time alongside the only existing fragment of an episode from the earliest-known version of the Tristan and Isolde legend. Also on display is an early example of the kind of guide familiar to thousands of today’s holiday-makers: a French phrasebook.

A free exhibition, ̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge, looks at the enormous cultural and historic impact of the French language upon life in England, Europe, the Middle East and beyond at a time when French – like Latin before it and English today – was the global language of culture, commerce and politics.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, curated by Bill Burgwinkle and Nicola Morato, is part of a wider AHRC-funded research project looking at the question of how knowledge travelled in manuscript form through the continent and into the Eastern Mediterranean world, freely crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries at a time when France was a much smaller political entity than it is today.

Burgwinkle, Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature at Cambridge, said: “French may have been brought to England by the Normans in 1066 but it was already here well before then as a language of knowledge and commerce. It served as the mother tongue of every English king for almost 400 years, from William the Conqueror to Richard II, and it was still in use as a language of royalty, politics and literature until the Tudor period, when we see Henry VIII writing love letters in French to Anne Boleyn.

“Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is home to one of the world’s finest collections of medieval manuscripts of this kind. This exhibition not only gives us a chance to display the Library’s treasures, but also reminds us how the French language has enriched our cultural past and left us with a legacy that continues to be felt in 21st century Britain.

“Medieval texts like the ones we have on display became the basis of European literature. ̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition. People may not realise it, but many of the earliest and most beautiful versions of the legends of Arthur, Lancelot and the Round Table were written in French; ̽��ֱ��Moving Word is a celebration of a period sometimes unfairly written out of literary history.”

̽��ֱ��early phrasebook, a guide to French conversation for travellers, is the Manières de language (1396). Composed in Bury St Edmunds and one of four in existence, it provides a series of dialogues for those travelling in France that inform readers how to trade with merchants, haggle over prices, secure an inn for the night, stop a child crying, speak endearingly to your lover or insult them. It also has instructions for singing the ‘most gracious and amorous’ love song in the world.

Elsewhere, perhaps some of the most impressive exhibits on display are huge medieval manuscripts that acted as compendiums of knowledge. One such example is a multilingual encyclopaedia from the 1300s featuring more than fifty texts of historical, cosmographical, literary and devotional interest. A heavily decorated volume, it is unusual for its thickness, and deals with, among other subjects, the roundness of the Earth and the force of gravity – centuries before Newton defined its laws.

In contrast, the fragment of Thomas d’Angleterre’s Roman de Tristan (Tristan and Iseut) may appear small in comparison, but its size belies its importance to the Cambridge collections. Thomas’s Tristan romance is the oldest known surviving version of the tragic love story. His work formed the basis of Gottfried von Strassburg’s German Tristan romance of the 13th century, which in turn provided the chief source for Wagner’s famous opera Tristan und Isolde. ̽��ֱ��fragment on display, detailing King Marc’s discovery of his wife Iseut and nephew Tristan sleeping together in a wood, is the sole witness of this scene from Thomas’s text to survive into the present.

̽��ֱ��Moving Word: French Medieval Manuscripts in Cambridge runs from January 22 to April 17, 2014, in the Milstein Exhibition Centre, Monday–Friday 09.00–18.00, Saturday 09.00–16.30 Sunday closed. Admission free. For further information, see https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk.

Inset images: Top, detail from a multilingual compendium of knowledge (UK, first half of 14th century). Bottom, detail from the breviary of Marie de Saint-Pol, Paris 1330-1340

A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

̽��ֱ��idea that post-classical Western literature really begins with the Renaissance is completely false. It begins right here, among the very manuscripts and fragments in this exhibition.

Bill Burgwinkle

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library

Image from a 14th century manuscript of the Romance of the rose, one of the best-known texts of the Middle Ages

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

CS Lewis: 50 years after his death a new scholarship will honour his literary career

sj387 — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 12:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��author CS Lewis, best known to the general public for his children’s classics ̽��ֱ��Chronicles of Narnia, died 50 years ago on 22 November. He was much more than a children’s author: he was also a brilliant scholar, holding prestigious academic positions first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, as well as an influential Christian thinker.

In 1954, Lewis was awarded the chair in Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a post that was founded with him in mind. In order to support research in that broad field of Lewis’s interests, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� is in the process of establishing a CS Lewis Scholarship that will help to fund an outstanding graduate student.

Lewis will be honoured with a memorial in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey at a ceremony on the anniversary of his death. His memorial will join those of some of the most famous names in English literature including poets Milton, Eliot and Wordsworth, playwrights Marlowe, Shakespeare and Wilde, and novelists Austen, Lawrence and Thackeray.

̽��ֱ��CS Lewis Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey will take place at noon on Friday, 22 November and will be open to all those who have requested tickets. A collection at the service will be dedicated to the CS Lewis Scholarship.

̽��ֱ��current chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge is Professor Helen Cooper. Like Lewis’s, her work emphasises the continuity of literature across the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Early in her career she studied pastoral literature from the late Classical period to Milton. Her more recent books include one on romance, from its invention in the 12th century to the death of Shakespeare, and another on Shakespeare’s debt to the Middle Ages. She has also published extensively on the Canterbury Tales.

“Scholarship – reading, lecturing, critical writing and teaching – was CS Lewis’s day job. He came to devotional writing and fiction, whether for children or adults, quite late in his life, and although he is now more widely known for those than for his critical work, it’s not because they are necessarily better or more important,” said Professor Cooper.

“From the moment of its publication in 1936, Lewis’s Allegory of Love transformed how medieval studies might be approached. ̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

“Lewis described his empathy with such lost ways of thinking by casting himself as ‘Old Western Man’, the equivalent of a surviving dinosaur who embodied what the age of the dinosaurs was like, and so could teach things that more conventional academic processes could not.”

As a child growing up in Northern Ireland, Lewis was enthralled by the myths and legends of Norse, Greek and Celtic literature. ̽��ֱ��young Lewis (known as Jack throughout his life) and his brother Warren invented a make-believe world called Boxen which was ruled by animals. Lewis fell in love with the landscape of the Mountains of Mourne which he said later inspired him to write the Narnia books.

Lewis’s deep interest in the bold universal themes that are woven into ancient, medieval and early modern literature endured throughout his life. His novels and poems draw on his extensive knowledge of texts such as ̽��ֱ��Voyage of St Brendan (which underlies ̽��ֱ��Voyage of the Dawn Treader) and the early Grail romances (which inspired That Hideous Strength). At Oxford ̽��ֱ��, where he read English Literature, he proved to be an outstanding student and, on graduating with a triple first, went on to teach there for more than 30 years.

Much of Lewis’s non-fiction writing deals with broad religious and spiritual questions, from the problem of evil to miracles. He was brought up in the Church of Ireland but as a teenager became an atheist. At Oxford, where he remained for most of his adult life, Lewis was part of a literary group nicknamed the Inklings, which included Tolkien. During this time, and influenced by his friends, he reluctantly re-embraced Christianity. In 1949 he wrote his first children’s novel, ̽��ֱ��Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which can be read as a fantasy adventure story and as an allegory for Christ’s crucifixion.

Professor Cooper commented: “ ̽��ֱ��power of myth and legend that Lewis had discovered as a child helps to drive the Narnia books. ̽��ֱ��myths might be Greek or Norse or Christian – the last a myth that ‘really happened’, as he came to believe – and the legends might be Arthurian; but he had the gift of conveying something of their deep imaginative hold through his stories of children travelling in strange worlds, of talking animals and of battles against evil.”

̽��ֱ��year that Lewis became the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge saw the publication of his third (originally fifth) and eagerly awaited Narnia novel, ̽��ֱ��Horse and His Boy.

“At Cambridge Lewis was taken to represent a diametrically opposite mode of criticism from that of his contemporary FR Leavis, and undergraduates often aligned themselves behind one or the other. But despite their disagreements, Lewis expressed his admiration for Leavis’s powers as a critic,” said Professor Cooper. “Lewis’s belief in the importance of historical contextualisation was in many ways ahead of its time. That alertness to context included his recognition of the centrality of God in the medieval and early modern world. His lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene, like his earlier work on Milton, demanded that even atheist readers should start by understanding what each poet was attempting to do, and that included their reflection of, and on, the religion of their own age.”

Lewis worked in Cambridge for nine years. In August 1963, having discovered that he was terminally ill, he resigned his chair. He died in his home in Oxford and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington. News of his death was overshadowed by the assassination of JF Kennedy.

Professor Helen Cooper is the sixth scholar, and second female scholar, to hold the chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Like Lewis, she holds it in conjunction with a fellowship at Magdalene College.

Inset images from top: Magdalene College, jefurii (via Flickr), Keir Hardie (via Flickr)

CS Lewis, creator of some of the most-loved children’s stories and also a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, died half a century ago on 22 November. A scholarship to be set up in his name will support an outstanding graduate to study at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

̽��ֱ��finest of his books, ̽��ֱ��Discarded Image, based on a series of his lectures, appeared after his death and remains the best short introduction there is to how people used to imagine the universe they inhabited.

Professor Helen Cooper

GeeJo via Wikimedia

̽��ֱ��Searcher, a statue of CS Lewis by sculptor, Ross Wilson, at Holywood Arches Library in Belfast

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes