| Paper 804-a | Proverbs and Peasants: The Mentalities of Cuisine in the English Countryside in the Later Middle Ages
(Language: English)
Chris Woolgar, Department of History / Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton
Index terms: Daily Life, Language and Literature - Middle English, Mentalities, Social History |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Although there is much evidence for elite attitudes to food, we know comparatively little about most other cuisines in medieval England. Proverbs offer us a window onto ways in which food was regarded in the countryside, and help us understand cooking there, its place in daily life, and its role in peasant mentalities more generally. Food is prominent in collections of sayings: we find connections between marital bliss and bacon flitches, details of the characteristics of foodstuffs, such as bread and cheese, and information about practices of gardening, stock husbandry, and agriculture, all of which influenced consumption and cuisine.
Paper -b:
Medieval English makes frequent use of French-origin lexis; scholarly debate continues on whether this should be seen as code switching from English to French, or borrowing into English (Ingham 2009, Trotter 2012, Wright 2012). We report on the first stages of a Bilingual Thesaurus project which seeks to inform this debate by taking various lexical domains of everyday life, especially artefact terms, and assessing how far these domains were populated by French-origin items, and how far the latter displaced native terms.The design and categorisation criteria of the bilingual thesaurus are foregrounded and discussed with reference to lexicological research.
Paper -c:
I present two case studies of how biographical and intellectual history can benefit from corpus-based linguistics. Using information from the PASE.ac.uk prosopography, I show that the choice of auxiliary with ofslagen 'killed' in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is related to how the killing occurred, with (wearð ofslagen) or without resistance (wæs). The syntactic choice between it happened that X Y-ed or X happened to Y in Late Middle English texts reveals whether the scribe/author believes X to be in control of what happens, providing novel evidence on medieval views of accountability levels with regard to adultery, sinning, and casualties.
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