Vernacular Writings Research Articles

Multiple Interpretation and Fragmented Texts Within a Historical Corpus: The Case of Old East Slavic Vernacular Writing

Abstract The paper presents the issue of fragmented and/or ambiguously interpreted texts within the corpora of Old East Slavic vernacular writing. One of these corpora, the corpus of the Old East Slavic birchbark letters, is already available, the other, comprising the texts of Old East Slavic inscriptions, is under preparation. Due to the fragmentary state of many birchbark and epigraphy texts, their lemmatization and grammatical tagging may be uncertain and multiple interpretations may coexist. Some lemmas survive only in fragments which are nevertheless relevant for the study of lexicon. The grammatical status of many fragments may be firmly established despite lacking lexical information. However the relevant data on these fragments is not available in the word indices and corpora that take into consideration only best-preserved word forms. In the paper, the representation and annotation of such word forms within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora is presented, and relative frequencies of such phenomena within the birchbark letter corpus are shown, with some case studies showing the relevance of the annotation of fragmented forms. The existing approaches, namely for the classical epigraphy within the EpiDoc standard and in the Hittite syntactic treebanks, are also briefly presented and compared to the solution found within the Old East Slavic vernacular corpora.

Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice by Ronnie Ferguson

Reviewed by: Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice by Ronnie Ferguson Brian Richardson Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. By Ronnie Ferguson. (Italian Perspectives, 50) Cambridge: Legenda. 2021. x+424 pp. £80. ISBN 978–1–78188–638–0. The Italian Perspectives series, founded by Zygmunt Barański and Laura Lepschy in 1998, reaches its half-century in impressive fashion with this outstanding work of scholarship, in which Ronnie Ferguson publishes an annotated corpus of 109 inscriptions in the vernacular, dating from around 1300 to the 1520s, that survive today in the city of Venice and the islands of the lagoon. Ferguson's title echoes that of Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna's Delle inscrizioni veneziane, published in six volumes between 1824 and 1853, the still invaluable but incomplete outcome of Cicogna's exhaustive and digressive research into the city's Latin and vernacular epigraphs from around the year 1000 onwards. 'Writing for public display' alludes to the concept of 'scritture esposte', theorized in the 1980s and 1990s by Armando Petrucci, who defined them as writings intended for reading at a distance by a group of people or by the public at large. Petrucci considered that their formal nature called for the highest level of written expression. At least until the nineteenth century, this factor often led to the choice of Latin as a medium, but the language spoken in the community could be preferred because such texts need to communicate their message especially clearly and widely. Ferguson suggests that in Venice the vernacular played a much more important role in epigraphy than in other Italian cities: using Cicogna's research, he estimates that it was used in some 30 per cent of inscriptions from the fourteenth century and some 19 per cent of those from the fifteenth (p. 6). Ferguson outlines and contextualizes his corpus in two substantial chapters before analysing each inscription in roughly chronological order. He considers an inscription as 'a multi-dimensional artefact' (p. 20), and his meticulous commentaries include a double transcription (one semi-interpretative, the other fully interpretative), a translation into English, and information on dating, location, the current state of the object, historical background, lettering and technique, language, and critical history. The beauty of the original inscriptions can be admired in photographs, many of them skilfully executed by Annie Ferguson. Individual catalogue entries are linked through cross-references and through indexes of persons mentioned in the inscriptions (but not of those mentioned elsewhere in the text), locations, and linguistic features. The accounts are never dry, and the Venetian cityscape is evoked with colourful touches. Most of the inscriptions in the corpus, around 70 per cent, were engraved on stone or metal, while the others were painted, printed from woodcuts, handwritten, or embroidered. About half were commemorative in function. Ferguson notes a [End Page 258] contrast in both form and content between Latin and vernacular inscriptions, the latter being 'firmly rooted in everyday realities, humble or exalted, of individuals and collectivities' (p. 7). Almost half of the corpus inscriptions were commissioned by the lay confraternities known in Venice as scuole, which were administered by the citizen class rather than by nobles and could sometimes include women, who were unlikely to know Latin. There was an 'explosion' of vernacular epigraphy between 1341 and 1370 (p. 19), but from the mid-fifteenth century the influence of humanism led to a marked preference in high-register inscriptions for texts in Latin, set out in roman rather than gothic capitals as previously (p. 3). A few texts are surprisingly lengthy, such as the testament in stone that Angelo Piarini had displayed in Murano (Corpus Inscription 8), a description of the effects of an earthquake and the Black Death of 1348 (CI 14), and a translation of a bull issued by Pope Urban V (CI 30). The vernacular used in the corpus is predominantly Venetian, in which Ferguson is a renowned expert. This language had sufficient prestige for high-status inscriptions, at least until the period around 1525, when the printing of a work by a patrician of the city, Pietro Bembo's Prose della volgar lingua, helped...

A BRIEF OUTLOOK: SAADAT HASAN MANTO AS A PROGRESSIVE WRITER

In the nineteenth century, Indian novels were more directed towards the social interest with political consciousness as the younger generation was more aware of social and political happenings. Indian novels in English originated from different regions of the country by different vernacular writers. Despite geographical, cultural and social differences, themes depicted in the novels shared a common thread of nationalism, colonial rule and post-colonialism. The Progressive Writers’ Movement was majorly instrumented by authors like Mulkraj Anand, Syed Sajjad Zahir, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jehan, Attia Hosain and Mahmuduz Zafar etc. They were the trendsetters for modern writers in Indian writing in English. This current paper discusses briefly the literary contribution of Saadat Hasan Manto, a noteworthy Progressive writer.

Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Ronnie Ferguson. Italian Perspectives 50. Cambridge: Legenda, 2021. x + 424 pp. £80.

Venetian Inscriptions: Vernacular Writing for Public Display in Medieval and Renaissance Venice. Ronnie Ferguson. Italian Perspectives 50. Cambridge: Legenda, 2021. x + 424 pp. £80. - Volume 76 Issue 1

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods, New Theories and The Synagogue in Ancient Palestine: Current Issues and Emerging Trends

Kathy Cawsey. 2020. Images of Language in Middle English Vernacular Writings. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 210 pp., £ 75.00/$ 99.00.

Article Kathy Cawsey. 2020. Images of Language in Middle English Vernacular Writings. Cambridge: Brewer, xii + 210 pp., £ 75.00/$ 99.00. was published on June 1, 2022 in the journal Anglia (volume 140, issue 2).

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams by Megan G. Leitch

Reviewed by: Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams by Megan G. Leitch Jamie K. Taylor Megan G. Leitch. Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $130.00. We all know that sleep governs our lives. Too little and we cannot function; too much and we become lethargic. In Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature, Megan G. Leitch shows that sleep was also a central preoccupation throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval sleeping was not only an embodied practice investigated by medical and regimental texts; it was also an important literary resource for Middle English writers. Working at the nexus of affect theory, ethics, and sense theory, this book outlines a "hermeneutics of sleep" (95) that can gather together the somatic, social, and spiritual experience of sleeping in the service of tracking it as an important and mobile trope in a wide range of Middle English texts. Although the book asserts that there is a peculiarly Middle English investment in sleep, it moves across centuries, languages, and genres to demonstrate just how ubiquitous depictions of sleepers are in medieval literature more broadly. The range of examples is both the book's strength and its weakness. On one hand, it offers an enormous bibliography and intriguing readings, many of which draw our attention to easy-to-overlook moments and subjects. On the other hand, the stretch of texts dilutes the clarity of its argument. Throughout the book, linkages among texts and writers are more gestural than causal, resulting in a compilation of examples rather than a clearly legible analytical line. Moreover, although the book persuasively argues that sleep was a matter of both emotions and ethics, neither affect theory nor ethical theory appears very prominently. More direct examination of how medieval sleep both reflects and reframes these theoretical vocabularies would have provided much-needed definition of terms. [End Page 412] Chapter 1 compiles an astonishing number of texts to demonstrate just how ubiquitous the trope of the sleeper is. It begins by tracing the medicinal and regimental precepts around sleeping, focusing on humoral medicine to show how influential Hippocratic and Galenic vocabularies were to vernacular literary depictions of sleep. Whereas medical texts asserted that good sleep could restore humoral balance, vernacular writers took sleep's central role in bodily and emotional health as an opportunity to explore the ways the sleeping body might register unexpressed emotions. For example, Ywain's sleep in Ywain and Gawain permits a maiden to "read" his sorrow even when he does not articulate it himself; likewise, in the play Joseph's Trouble about Mary, Joseph's unmanageable and incommunicable despair culminates in falling asleep at the base of a hill. This first chapter thus establishes the broad parameters of sleep in vernacular literature, which draws from and then complicates medical and regimental understandings of it. The next three chapters focus on specific kinds of sleeping subjects to demonstrate how one might perform a hermeneutics of sleep. Chapter 2 focuses on those who engage in "untimely sleep"—that is, nappers—to show how daytime sleep functioned as an admonitory trope that warns against intemperance as unethical. The "politics of daytime sleep" (93) are especially pronounced in conduct manuals, pastoral texts, and romances, and reading across these disparate genres demonstrates the flexibility of regimental vocabularies to provide moral and ethical analysis of napping. Thus, for example, managing sleep hygiene (by resisting a nap) can function as a defense against sloth in Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne. Likewise, the fifteenth-century treatise "How the Wise Man Taught His Son" can present appropriate nighttime sleep as a bulwark against the ethical pitfalls of idleness. More surprisingly, romance nappers are repeatedly depicted as upending assumed structures of chivalric masculinity by presenting the knightly napper as vulnerable to attack. In exposing those breaches via napping knights, Middle English romance depictions of napping work to uphold the ethical and gendered requirements of the genre. In Chapter 3, we see that paying attention to where one sleeps can expose the emotional and social expectations of the sleeping subject. But sleep spaces...

Modern Indian Literature in Translation

The translation is essential to communicate the meaning of one language into another without disturbing the originally felt emotions. It has been noticed that translation has always been primary to Indian literature, and especially Indian English literature. Encouraging translation talent in India is also a relatively new and interesting space. Since the vernacular writings have been translated into English, it’s getting easier for the audiences to understand the point of view of the writers. It is the strength of this vernacular pen that makes writings so dynamic in Indian languages. In the Indian context translation to English is also an act of harmony as it brings voices of protest and those of the subaltern as well, to the advantaged and the powerful challenging them in their space. This research will focus on Marathi subaltern writings translated into English and their impact on the readers, especially the literature created by Dalits (formerly referred to as Untouchables), one of the most exploited and silenced communities in India.

The Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Spiritual Instruction for Laywomen, 1250–1500 by Pinder Janice

Reviewed by: The Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Spiritual Instruction for Laywomen, 1250–1500 by Pinder Janice Thomas A. Fudge Pinder, Janice, The Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Spiritual Instruction for Laywomen, 1250–1500 (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 21), Brepols, Turnhout, 2020; cloth; pp. x, 219; 1 b/w illustration, 2 b/w tables; R.R.P. €75.00; ISBN 9782503586816. Vernacular writings for the spiritual instruction of women in late medieval Europe were not isolated phenomena. Ideas of spiritual direction took many forms. Janice Pinder argues that the Abbaye du Saint Esprit likely emerged in northern France or the southern Netherlands from a 'context of experimentation with new forms of religious life among the laity where features of beguinal life and prayer were familiar and viewed with approval' (p. 8). One should not misjudge the force and influence of female spirituality between the Atlantic and the deeper reaches of central Europe. One cannot read the Abbaye without thinking of related texts addressed to communities of women elsewhere. Around 1413 the Czech priest [End Page 246] Jan Hus composed a similar text, Dcerka: O poznání cěsty pravé k spasení (The Daughter, or How to Know the Correct Way to Salvation), for a Beguine-like community of women living together in Prague. Running to about 13,000 words and consisting of ten chapters, Hus focuses his spiritual instruction with the repeated declaration 'slyš, dcerko' ('hear, O daughter'). This is not the place to compare those texts, but the analysis might be fruitful. The Abbaye also uses a similar device, employing the French fille to address the readership. Following Bernard McGinn, Pinder suggests that vernacular theology was a result of conversations surpassing simplistic readings of Scripture, rote catechetical memorizations, or the hearing of formal sermons. We have lost the gist of those conversations, but texts like the Abbaye provide hints. Based on thirteen extant manuscripts and with plenty of discussion about those manuscripts, their history, modification, striking omissions, and additions, Pinder succeeds in demonstrating several things: there is no single edition of the text; the transmission history is complex; it endeavours to communicate to a lay audience the idea of the spiritual quest; and it relies upon a variety of sources to achieve that aim. Importantly, Pinder understands the Abbaye as depicting a struggle between vices and virtues, a contest in which the daughters of the Holy Spirit oppose the daughters of the Devil. The context for this battle is the cloister. Allegorically, the holy spaces of the religious house are signposts for the pilgrim who must navigate the minefields of adversity created by the daughters of the Devil. The architecture of the convent parallels the cloister of the soul. Spiritual aid and instruction are encountered in cellars, chapter houses, chapels, dormitories, granaries, infirmaries, refectories, and in the stone walls, to say nothing of the foundations. Conscience is where the Holy Spirit desires to dwell. The ladies of truth, purity, humility, and poverty are active. The fortress against sin and temptation is buttressed by Lady Obedience and Lady Mercy, while Patience and Fortitude provide reinforcement. Truth is encountered by means of Lady Preaching in the refectory where souls are fed. Lady Contemplation fits out the dormitory, Prayer the chapel, Compassion the infirmary, Devotion the cellar, and Meditation the granary, while Lady Charity is abbess, Wisdom the prioress, Humility the sub-prioress. Lady Discretion is treasurer, while Lady Prayer is the choir-mistress supported by Lady Jubilation. Lady Penance works in the kitchen, Temperance serves food and drink in the refectory, and Sobriety reads at table, while the ladies Pity, Mercy, Fear, Honesty, Courtesy, Simplicity, Reason, Loyalty, Generosity, and Zeal perform other functions. The spiritual life attracts deadly enemies, namely the four daughters of the Devil—pride and presumption; murmuring and detraction; envy; and false judgement—who seek to thwart the progress of the female seeking spiritual maturity. The Abbaye shows women actively engaged and not passive recipients of spiritual instruction. A major thematic thread in the Abbaye is the soul's ascent to God and the practices that enable and enhance that goal. The ethos of the Beguine is apparent throughout, and the world of the Beguine appears to constitute the...

Marcela K. Perett. Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement.

M<scp>arcela</scp> K. P<scp>erett</scp>. <i>Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement</i>.

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. By Marcela K. Perett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 290 pp. $85.00 cloth.

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. By Marcela K. Perett. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 290 pp. $85.00 cloth.

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement, by Marcela K. Perett

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement, by Marcela K. Perett

Masculine Vernacular Histories of Travel in Colonial India: The Writings of Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’

This article focuses on vernacular travel writings on America and Europe by Swami Satyadev ‘Parivrajak’ (1879–1961), one of the first persons to systematically write travelogues in Hindi. I argue that Parivrajak’s travel literature was part of a colonised nation’s attempt to reclaim a space of freedom, forged through the carving of ‘perfect masculine bodies’, which embodied his ideals of beauty and pleasure. It was a performative, political act that inscribed gendered landscapes with a dialogue between East and West, slavery and freedom. The Hindu male’s subaltern masculinity had to be overcome through diverse means, all of which metaphorically interacted to shape Parivrajak’s writings.

Marcela K. Perett, Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement

Marcela K. Perett, <i>Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement</i>

Extracomunitario?

AbstractThis essay uses Bruno Latour’s model of diplomacy from An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (AIME), alongside the networks/worknets of actor-network theory, to discuss how the medieval Italian writers Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri explore experiences of political exile in their vernacular writings. It examines how the two authors reflect on the pluralities of language and community that connect them to readerships both at home and in exile, focusing especially on Brunetto’s Rettorica and Dante’s Convivio. The essay investigates Brunetto’s rhetorical doctrine and Dante’s models of vernacular knowledge sharing by drawing on AIME’s notion of the diplomat, whose measured speech helps “renegotiate the new frontiers of self and other.” It is especially concerned with the modes of engagement Latour labels as the beings of politics [POL], law [LAW], and fiction [FIC].

Marcela K. Perett Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 290.

Marcela K. Perett Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 290.

The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal by Tobias Warner

Reviewed by: The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal by Tobias Warner Brian Valente-Quinn Tobias Warner. The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, 320 pp. Tobias Warner's book, The Tongue-Tied Imagination: Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal, begins by proposing a new approach to a familiar topic in the study of post-colonial literatures that is also one of its thorniest. The author addresses the so-called "language question," or the frequently heated debates that once ignited regarding the language in which post-colonial authors chose to write. In his introduction, Warner revisits two major events in the early framing of such discussions: the 1962 conference of African Writers of English Expression at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and a similar event held in the following year in Dakar for African writers of French expression. Through the archival traces of discussions held at the Dakar event, Warner recounts how the Senegalese author Birago Diop pointedly asked his compatriot Ousmane Sembène if he could repeat in his native Wolof, rather than in French, a spoken intervention in which Sembène had voiced a biting criticism of the privileging of colonial languages in African literary institutions. Sembène conceded that he could not, and their exchange appears, in retrospect, to highlight the endless contradictions and entanglements that have since caused the language question to fall from prominence in contemporary critical discussions. It is as though, Warner points out, the debate has since come to a close but with no clear winner, or as though its terms and assumptions might easily be relegated to a bygone era of predominantly nationalistic sentiments. Warner's brilliant and timely intervention serves to point out how such discussions aimed not only to interrogate the institutionalization of African literature, but also to explore the terms of literary modernity. The language question, he points out, has always been of an untimely nature due to its implicit "refusal to inhabit the given conditions of a literary present" (4). [End Page 365] Rather than attempt to revive or resolve the tensions raised by the language question, Warner meticulously examines the myriad entanglements that have come to constitute such a literary present. The image of the knot serves as a fitting metaphor throughout the book. The language question may present itself as a hopelessly entangled knot, given that colonial European languages and institutions are difficult to dislodge from post-colonial literary practices. However, attempts at disentanglement can also produce "unexpected attachments that bind together elements in new configurations" (6). The knot metaphor is made all the more fitting by Warner's recourse in his theorizing of the act of translation to the Wolof term tekki, which can mean "to translate," but implies a process of unwinding rather than a simple transmission from one language to another. This conceptual framework allows Warner to explore translation through its internal complexities, or, as Warner states, through the processes of "knotting and unknotting by which literary institutions are held together and by which they can be pulled apart" (8). In its exploration of major works of Senegalese literature in both Wolof and French, The Tongue-Tied Imagination engages extensively with the field of world literature studies, whose models, Warner argues, tend to privilege spatiality by focusing on the distances (material, geographic) that separate authors from their potential readers. To complement such a spatially rooted framework, Warner foregrounds the temporal aspect by considering how "vernacular writers" might address an imagined reader cast in futures near or far, doing so in ways that serve to constitute textuality and/or literarily. Indeed, one of this book's many strengths stems from its close attention to the means by which different forms of writing are made into "texts" or "literature." This approach is used to explore, in the first chapter, the writings of the nineteenth-century Franco-Senegalese abbot and scholar David Boilat. Warner frames Boilat's studies and text-collecting practices as a form of "entextualization," which he then considers in relation to the "literarization" carried out much later by Léopold Sédar Senghor through a little-known anthology titled Les Plus beaux écrits de...

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. Marcela K. Perett. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. viii + 290 pp. $85.

Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement. Marcela K. Perett. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. viii + 290 pp. $85. - Volume 73 Issue 3

Hinduism and Women Religious Beliefs and Practices

Religion plays a significant role in structuring and maintaining a society by enforcing certain morals and norms. Like any other religion, Hinduism has guided the Hindus to live in a particular way since time immemorial. India is predominantly a Hindu society and Hinduism has had a huge impact on the structure, function and culture of Indian societies. Ancient Hindu scriptures like the Vedas and Upanishads show profound respect for the feminine principle. It is the Supreme Being, from who all emanate. A woman is a Goddess to be worshipped. During ancient times, the condition of women was in conformity with the religion and they enjoyed freedom, equality and liberty in all spheres of life. However, subsequently, the emergence of texts like the Epics, Smritis, Sastras, vernacular writings and oral traditions, redefined an ideal woman and led to the practices where women were subservient to men. This dissonance and conflict between religious beliefs and practices has strengthened in present times, and has witnessed a steep rise in the number of crimes against women. Increasing domestic violence, sexual violation, female feticide, dowry deaths, declining ratio of women and men and the taboos (arising from having a female body, such as, menstruation) are causing not only distress but also widespread criticism and revolt among women and society at large. Despite the Indian Constitution rejecting any kind of discrimination against women and deeming it unlawful, these inhuman atrocities against women are on the rise. More than ever, there is a need to take refuge in the religion (early Vedic period), not to be too staunch, but to be flexible, democratic and liberal in our outlook with dynamic times and ever shifting contexts. This paper proposes to study (with particular reference to India), the religious beliefs in Hinduism concerning women, and the gradual discord between the beliefs and practices leading to discrimination against women in many spheres today.