The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity - Paperback

by Fiona Somerset (Editor), Nicholas Watson (Editor)

These essays offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llull's prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Author Biography

Nicholas Watson is a Professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He is the author of Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991) and co-editor of The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (Penn State, 1999).

Fiona Somerset is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (1998).