Bilingual Strategies in Fourteenth-Century Latin Sermons from Catalonia

Abstract

This article discusses the phenomenon of bilingualism in medieval sermons by focusing on one of the most understudied areas of sermon studies – fourteenth-century Catalonia and Aragon. Specifically, I concentrate on Latin sermons, which remain largely underexplored, partly due to a certain historiographical bias that favours »national« languages over Latin. The main focus is on Dominican sermons from the Aragonia Province (which included Catalonia and Aragon). The main argument is that bilingualism in sermons was an editorial communicative strategy acquired and developed in an educational context, i.e. in how language was approached and learnt by bilingual users. To make my case, I first discuss the language training of the Dominicans from Aragon and briefly review some bilingual grammatical works in order to place the bilingualism of the sermons within a wider context of written (and spoken) multilingualism. Second, I address bilingualism and code-switching in sermons by analysing texts in which Latin is the matrix language, the most common type of sermon evidence preserved from this area. As in better studied areas, such as France, England, or Italy, the linguistic intermingling in fourteenth-century sermons from Catalonia covers all types of »macaronicity«, as categorised by Siegfried Wenzel. Thus, the paper will add to current debates that seek to understand medieval bilingualism (written and spoken) as a late medieval Europe-wide phenomenon by discussing hitherto unstudied and underexplored evidence in manuscripts that remains largely unknown to scholarship.