СВЕТЪТ НА МОНАХИНИТЕ ПО ЛЕКСИКАЛНИ ДАННИ / THE WORLD OF NUNS ACCORDING TO LEXICAL DATA

Abstract

The article aims at comparing the data on female monasticism in two types of sources – hagiographic works and canon law – in order to bring forward monastic everyday life as an object of cultural conceptology and study of the diachronic linguistic picture of the world. Examples are taken from the Life of St. Eupraxia in the 1359–1360 copy of the Bdin Collection and selected rules from penitential collections. Everyday life in the monastery can be presented by means of distinct thematic areas defined by specific ranges of concepts (mental constructs) and the respective linguistic nominations. The lexical data addressed in the article refer to: food, clothing, education, labour, customs and regulations in the monastery, relations between nuns. The data on female monasticism in the Middle Ages are more limited than those available for monks. This corresponds with scarce information from other types of sources, such as iconographic and archaeological sources. The nuns’ habits and some positions in the monastery are denoted predominantly by masculine gender lexemes due to commonalities in the way of life and the moral norms. The comparison of lexical data from texts of different genres remains a promising task towards the reconstruction of the medieval way of life in the monastery.