Meaning-making practices in the history of medical English

Abstract

AbstractGenres work through conventions of communicative patterns. Variation in them is related to sociolinguistic parameters of writers and readers as well as situational and contextual factors, including culture. Conventions of writing change slowly and there are elements that remain constant throughout centuries but acquire new connotations. I shall first discuss genre theories and methods of studies at the interface between language and literature, and then provide a case study. The top genre of scholastic research was the commentary with a distinct genre structure. It was first introduced in Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became established in Early Modern English, as my examples will show. The transition period is particularly intriguing as the old thought style began to give way to new ideas, and observation proved inherited wisdom erroneous. Commentaries had an afterlife in spurious writings, providing an empirical example of genre dynamics and proving the usefulness of the notion of genre script as applied in this case study.1