Revertere! Attention and focus in macaronic devotional poems

Florence Bourgne (1)

1 CEMA - Centre d'Etudes Médiévales Anglaises

The Late Middle English period has left us with a considerable macaronic/mixed language/code-switching literary corpus. The syntactic integration of Latin and vernacular languages, both insular French or Middle English, appears to be at its strongest at the beginning of the period, when trilingual anthologies are produced mostly in monastic contexts, and during the fifteenth century—despite the contemporaneous decline in the production of trilingual legal and business documents at the end of the Middle English period. The issue of the intelligibility of Latin phrases must be further pursued to confirm their code-switching nature, but this initial foray suggests that these tags and their signalling may contribute to heightening the focus of the silent and aloud readers/singers/hearers of this macaronic devotional material.

Keywords: Middle English macaronic poems; code-switching; documentary culture; focus; Middle English devotional poems; Middle English literature

Domains: Art and art history; History; Literature

Florence Bourgne. Revertere! Attention and focus in macaronic devotional poems. Journée d’étude - L’Attention et la distraction dans la culture médiévale, Katherine Zieman (CESCM); Centre d'Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, Dec 2022, Poitiers, France. ⟨hal-04006472⟩