The use of Latin alongside Greek in Roman soldiers’ private documents on papyrus or tablet has already been approached by modern scholarship. However, new evidence allows a further exploration of this topic and a reassessment of some of the results reached so far. Therefore, this chapter investigates three case studies based on this new evidence: the use of the tribal designation, the use of Latin in marriage agreements, and the use of Latin in Roman testaments. The following questions are addressed: What kind of Latin did Roman soldiers and veterans use? Under what circumstances? And why? What can we learn from new evidence? Does it strengthen or challenge traditional hypotheses? The investigation contributes to our understanding of the significance of written documentation in the daily lives of Roman soldiers and veterans and of the usages of the Latin language, script, or culture in their private documents. The new evidence considered sometimes strengthens and at other times challenges traditional hypotheses, showing how complex the relationship was between the Latin and Greek languages, scripts, and cultures in the Graeco-Roman eras.

The twelfth century witnessed an unprecedented scholarly effort to access and assimilate new corpora of knowledge by translating Greek as well as Arabic sources into Latin. This chapter surveys the various translations, discusses the role of those who mediated them to the Latin tradition, and finally focuses on the reception of the texts at the University of Paris during the first decades of the thirteenth century.

The Latin mistakes in a tenth-century papal document converge with other evidence for the abysmal education of the papal staff.

The numerous multilingual texts from medieval to modern times have only recently received the recognition as serious linguistic data that they deserve. They provide important testimony of medieval and early modern multilingualism and have increasingly been seen as written records of early code-switching and language mixing, which can be analysed on the basis of modern code-switching theories. This chapter discusses this assumption with historical data from England, addressing questions like syntactic, functional and visual approaches to the data, the distinctiveness of languages in multiligual texts. A related, but special type of multilingualism is attested in medieval mixed-language administrative texts which show a principled but variable use of Latin, French and English. Other issues are the increasing use of manuscripts and electronic corpora as data for linguistic analysis. The chapter finishes with a small selection of multilingual historical texts from England with brief comments to illustrate some of the issues discussed.

The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English vocabulary witnessed a sort of revolution due to the massive influx of new words and coinages primarily from classical languages. They were largely introduced by scholars to supply English with an appropriate terminology for fields traditionally dominated by Latin, but also to provide the richness of vocabulary (copia verborum) considered the hallmark of a literary language and Renaissance rhetoric as well as a sign of education or social superiority. Their ‘artificiality’ and ‘abstruseness’ provoked a fierce debate among purists and innovators, and made necessary the production of dictionaries that explain such ‘hard words’, and often attest them for the first time. A sign of the creativity of these centuries, most of them remained in the language and contributed to shaping the structure vocabulary, thanks also to the role played by monolingual dictionaries. A text-corpus analysis of new coinages derived from ‘hard words‘ dictionaries in a so-far neglected genre – namely early modern street literature texts (pamphlets, broadsheets and ballads) devoted to monstrous births – will shed light on the mechanisms of their diffusion.

This chapter explores the link between education and linguistic innovation in the early history of English, by looking at the evolution of the school system and the languages of school instruction. Varieties of spoken and written Latin and Latin as a second (and third) language are among the other sociolinguistic anchors of this chapter. The turning points are located at about 650 CE, the spread of Christianity and formal schooling in Latin among the Anglo-Saxons, at 1066, the introduction of French as a second vernacular and language of school instruction, and at 1349, the reversal of the latter situation in the wake of the socio-demographic changes caused by the Black Death. The survey starts on the eve of the Germanic migration to Britain and ends around 1500; it is illustrated with a selection of lexical and structural features introduced into English through contact with Latin.

This chapter presents one of the most recent additions to the historical sociolinguistic toolkit, a community of practice (CoP). The discussion of definitions and delimitations of this concept places it in the ‘three waves’ of sociolinguistic research and builds comparisons and contrasts with two neighbouring frameworks: social networks and discourse communities. The focus moves on to the applications of CoPs in historical sociolinguistics. The dimensions of practice – joint enterprise (or domain), mutual engagement, and shared repertoire – are redefined for the purpose of historical sociolinguistics and illustrated with examples from studies which engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication. We show how language change – or, indeed, resistance to change – may be observed through a CoP lens. Prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been fruitfully employed include letter writing, the production of manuscripts and early prints, professional discourse, trial proceedings, multilingual practices and online blogging.

This chapter provides an overview of the language of religious texts in Old, Middle and Early Modern English. We divide religious language into three spheres: Bible language, the language of prayers and the language of texts of religious instruction and discussion. We then discuss the language of religious texts against the background of the impact of the language of the vernacular Bible, particularly before 1500. We argue that, prior to the publication of the King James Bible, there was no specific ‘religious register’ in Old and Middle English, and even in Early Modern English a typically ‘religious style’ is found only as an additional layer in religious texts, which, by and large, follow the general standardising tendencies of the language at the time.

While borrowing from most languages does not affect the structure of English word-formation, the number of Greek and Latin loans and new words based on them is so overwhelming that new types of word-formation are created. Because loans and English (or other European) uses of the patterns do not always provide the same outputs, and because classical elements can be added to English elements, the neoclassical formations are difficult to describe.

John Malalas had access to an expanded version of the chronicle of Eusebius, which included also a different Christian era (probably AM 5967). Most of the fragments cannot be traced back to Eusebius, and add material drawn from other works of Eusebius, Latin literature and from the Book of Jubilees.

In the Greek, Latin, and Armenian traditions, there are dispersed references to a chronicle by Epiphanius of Salamis (fourth century). This is certainly a sixth-century work that probably was created in the late sixth-century controversy about the date of Christmas. It defended, like Annianus, a start of the Christian era in AM 5500.

The Epilogue draws together the various threads of the book by evaluating the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, a thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid which claims to be written by Ovid in exile. The Epilogue asks whether, in the light of this book’s previous chapters, De vetula constitutes an ‘authentically exilic Ovid’. Menmuir shows that Ovidian exile facilitates the forgery of De vetula, underpinning its very existence and authenticating an array of blatantly medieval features as genuinely Ovidian. However, having used Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry as a springboard, the poem subsequently departs from Ovid in exile, framing the Ovid of the last book of the poem as a thirteenth-century scholar and a budding Christian to boot. Each chapter of the book is relevant to this fraudulent Ovidian transformation. De vetula is framed as the first response to both Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry, fictitiously bridging the gap between Ovid’s responses (discussed in Chapter 1) and the scholarly and literary responses covered in Chapters 2 and 3. As a forgery of Ovidian exile, the author ‘becomes the exile’ but pushes the second part of this book to extremes by replacing the genuine Ovid’s exilic poetry and life.

The fourteenth-century poet John Gower was a prodigiously Ovidian author, especially throughout his Latin Vox clamantis and English Confessio amantis. It is in the Vox clamantis, and its first book the Visio Anglie, where Gower fully engaged with Ovid in exile, and where he became the Ovidian exile in the ways theorised in Chapter 4. While Gower did not experience exile or marginalisation in real life, in the Visio he inhabits Ovidian exile to respond to the 1381 Uprising. Menmuir firstly speculates how Gower might have read Ovid’s exile poetry. She also considers different theoretical approaches to Gower’s use of Ovid, including cento. Thereafter, the chapter progresses sequentially through the Visio, charting Gower’s range of approaches to the exilic Ovid. At the opening of the Visio, Gower compresses prevailing themes of the exile poetry. Chapter 16 of the Visio is the height of Gower’s Ovidian exilic inhabitation, where Gower shifts to speaking in a first-person voice. The storm at sea in the Visio is drawn from Ovid in exile. Finally, a voice from Heaven speaks to the Gowerian narrator but is in fact a mouthpiece for Ovid in exile.

The Introduction establishes the primary arguments and scope of the book. It defines ‘Ovidian exile’ in two related ways: firstly, as the poetry written by Ovid in exile, namely the Tristia, Epistulae ex Ponto and Ibis; and secondly, as Ovid himself as the figure of the exiled poet. Ovidian exile in these terms had a vast influence across medieval culture, informing teaching, preaching, reading and writing – among a host of activities Menmuir terms ‘responses’ – in the later Middle Ages, offering a mode of voicing exile, marginalisation and poethood itself. After describing the circumstances of Ovid’s exile and the primary concerns of the exile poetry, Menmuir introduces the Ovid, or Ovids, of the Middle Ages, including the common perception of Ovid as the tripartite mythographer, lover and exile. Ovid and his works were deemed ethical, and even Christian, in medieval exegesis: the fact of his exile created a penitential arc which enabled Ovid’s transformation into Ovidius ethicus. Menmuir defines ‘responses and respondents’, where ‘response’ comprises a more active expression of ‘reception’. The book’s scope primarily includes responses between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries and focuses on England, albeit as linked to the continent in several ways.

Chapter 2 explores the influence of the exilic Ovid in medieval scholastic contexts by examining three types of medieval forms. Firstly, accessus (introductions to authors) shaped how Ovid’s poetry would be interpreted: their heavy reliance on Ovid’s exilic self-fashioning and biographising meant that Ovidian exile came to frame Ovid’s entire corpus. Secondly, manuscripts of Ovid’s exile poetry and their paratexts, especially glosses and marginal annotations, provided a framework for teaching and learning through Ovid’s exile. Finally, florilegia and excerpted forms of Ovid’s exile poetry posed a challenge to that life–work connection formed by the exile poetry, ostensibly withdrawing the context of Ovid’s full output; but they nevertheless retained enough order for Ovid’s exile to be recognisable. Examining these forms illustrates two key aspects of medieval responses to Ovid’s exile. Accessus, glosses and florilegia are all deeply connected to pedagogy and to a medieval ‘scholastic sphere’ – monastic and secular places of learning in which Ovidian exile could be used to teach and preach. Further, the proliferation, diversity and sheer quantity of these different types of exilic Ovidiana are evidence for the popularity and widespread knowledge of Ovid and his exile in the later Middle Ages.

Chapter 1 presents Ovid in exile as a highly self-conscious, reflexive figure whose ironic turns perforate a real desire to effect both an imperial pardon and poetic immortality. Moreover, the chapter situates Ovid as the first respondent to his exile, finding many points of commonality between the ways that Ovid and medieval respondents reacted to his exile (in other words, medieval audiences used Ovid as a model for their responses). This chapter makes these arguments from three perspectives. Firstly, it characterises Ovid’s response, focusing especially on his desire to control the narrative being relayed both to Augustus in Rome and to posterity. Secondly, it explores Ovid’s tendency to revise his works. He edits and revises his pre-exilic poetry from the perspective of his exile and reworks his exile poetry over the course of his relegation. Finally, it argues that Ovid’s depictions of his exile as severe are another vehicle for modelling a flexible response. Overall, Ovid constructed an authoritative hold over his life and works but nevertheless formed a response which allowed for ambiguities that could be embedded into that authority. This double model allowed medieval respondents to incorporate both equivocation and authority into their own poetic self-presentation.