Writing in Britain and Ireland, c. 400 to c. 800

No abstract available

Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history

Is it all guesswork? Translating colour terms across the centuries

Addressed to non-semanticists, this article discusses the means by which colour semanticists strive to pursue their research with as much objectivity as possible. Three functions of colour terms are presented: descriptive, classificatory and connotative, showing that colour expressions operate differently in various semantic environments. In addition, lexical meanings can change over the years, as a result, for example, of semantic shift or contact with other languages, and this is likely to render inappropriate the application of modern colour-term definitions to their historical antecedents. Finally, a connotative case-study of hair-colour descriptors in English across the centuries reveals that words operating in restricted contexts can convey more than colour