Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English

Medical and scientific writing in English has evolved over more than a millennium, from its genesis in the Anglo-Saxon era to its present-day position as the lingua franca of science. This volume focuses on its development as a register in late medieval English. During this period it emerged in the vernacular, as its Graeco-Roman conventions were modified in a new sociohistorical context. Seven experts discuss the various linguistic and textual processes involved in vernacularising science, and how they related to communicative practices and to the writers and readers of medical and scientific texts. Referring to authentic medieval texts, they show how discourse communities adopted scriptorial ‘house-styles’, how vocabulary and code-switching patterns reflect the multilingual context of the period, and how intertextuality featured between shared materials. Bringing together several perspectives on this new research area for the first time, this book will be welcomed by linguists and historians of science alike.

The idea of this book comes from the work done by the Scientific thought-styles project team in the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. Three of the contributors are members of the team and compilers of the electronic Corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (Taavitsainen, Pahta, and Mäkinen).

STUDIES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

General Editor
Merja Kytö

Editorial Board
Bas Aarts, John Algeo, Susan Fitzmaurice, Richard Hogg, Charles F. Meyer

Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English

STUDIES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The aim of this series is to provide a framework for original work on the English language. All are based securely on empirical research, and represent theoretical and descriptive contributions to our knowledge of notional varieties of English, both written and spoken. The series will cover a broad range of topics in English grammar, vocabulary, discourse, and pragmatics, and is aimed at an international readership.

Already published

Christian Mair
Infinitival complement clauses in English: a study of syntax in discourse

Charles F. Meyer
Apposition in contemporary English

Jan Firbas
Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication

Izchak M. Schlesinger
Cognitive space and linguistic case

Katie Wales
Personal pronouns in present-day English

Laura Wright
The development of standard English, 1300–1800: theories, descriptions, conflicts

Charles F. Meyer
English Corpus Linguistics: theory and practice

Stephen J. Nagle and Sara. L. Sanders (eds.)
English in the Southern United States

Anne Curzan
Gender Shifts in the History of English

Kingsley Bolton
Chinese Englishes

Forthcoming

Elizabeth Gordon et al.
New Zealand English: its origins and evolution

Raymond Hickey
Legacies of Colonial English

Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English

Edited by
Irma Taavitsainen
University of Helsinki

and

Päivi Pahta
University of Helsinki

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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© Cambridge University Press 2003

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2003

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface EhrhardtMT 10/12 pt.      System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Medical and scientific writing in late medieval English / edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta.
     p. cm. – (Studies in English language)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 83133 4
1. English language – Middle English, 1100–1500 – Medical English. 2. English prose
iterature – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism. 3. English language – Middle
English, 1100–1500 – Technical English. 4. Scientific literature – England – History – To
1500. 5. Medical literature – England – History – To 1500. 6. Medicine, Medieval – England.
7. Science, Medieval. I. Taavitsainen, Irma. II. Pahta, Päivi. III. Series
PE664.3.M44 2003
427′.02′02461 – dc21

ISBN 0 521 83133 4 hardback

Contents

Illustrations

Tables

Preface

To understand the characteristics of present-day scientific writing, we need to know about the earlier stages of language use. This book deals with the early phases of the development that was to lead to the present situation where English has a global position as the lingua franca of science. The first steps of writing about medical and scientific matters in English were taken more than a millennium ago in the Anglo-Saxon era, and from the later Middle Ages there is an unbroken chain of texts covering more than six hundred years. Vernacular scientific writing in the late medieval and early modern periods is still an understudied area, though more attention has been attached to it recently. New data have been discovered, and new methods of linguistic research make new insights possible and enable researchers to pose questions that would have seemed unanswerable a generation ago. The evolution of scientific writing shows interesting shifts from more detached to more involved style and back again, and from an abundant use of foreign phrases and Latinate vocabulary to more native and plain style. Surprisingly, late medieval scientific writing has several features in common with characteristics of present-day scientific writing.

   This book is an outcome of the research project ‘Scientific thought-styles: The evolution of English medical writing’ in the Research Unit for Variation and Change at the University of Helsinki, with invited chapters by international scholars working in the field. We wanted to contribute to the discussion on vernacularisation processes, and transfer and establishment of genre conventions and special languages; our future work will focus on developments in a diachronic perspective.

   We wish to thank the Academy of Finland for granting us research funding for a three-year period 1999–2001 (project number 37930). Most of the work for this book has been carried out at the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki, and our corpus work has partly been funded by the Research Unit. We are grateful for this support. We would like to thank our research assistants Carla Suhr and Turo Hiltunen for their unfailing spirit and help in editing this book. We are also grateful to the other members of our project team Alpo Honkapohja, Martti Mäkinen and Maura Ratia, and our former project members Paula Korhonen, Noora Leskinen and Minna Vihla for their help and collaboration. Irma Taavitsainen visited King’s College Cambridge during the Michaelmas term 2001, which is gratefully acknowledged. We would also like to thank the scholarly libraries mentioned in this book for letting us consult the manuscripts. We are indebted to several people for inspiring discussion, advice and encouragement. Our special thanks are due to Peter Murray Jones, Teresa Tavormina, Michael Benskin, George Keiser, Linda Voigts, Ronald Waldron, and Kari Anne Rand Schmidt.

Helsinki, February 2003
Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta

Abbreviations