37.1892, Books: The Multilingual Lexis of the Medieval English Manor: Mambelli (2026)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1892. Tue May 26 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1892, Books: The Multilingual Lexis of the Medieval English Manor: Mambelli (2026)

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Date: 26-May-2026
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: The Multilingual Lexis of the Medieval English Manor: Mambelli (2026)


Title: The Multilingual Lexis of the Medieval English Manor
Subtitle: A trilingual thesaurus
Series Title: World Histories of Lexicography and Lexicology
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/524

Author(s): Gloria Mambelli

Abstract:

Despite decades of scholarship on lexical borrowing in post-Conquest
England, the vocabulary of the medieval countryside has remained
largely outside the lens of contact linguistics — an oversight shaped
by the long-standing assumption that French influence was confined to
elite domains. At the same time, the multilingual reality of medieval
England has made monolingual lexicography an increasingly inadequate
tool: the Anglo-French, Medieval Latin, and Middle English lexicons of
the period cannot be studied in isolation, yet no single trilingual
resource has existed to study them together.
This book provides that resource. Drawing on the historical
dictionaries of all three languages and grounded in cognitive
semantics, it constructs an onomasiological thesaurus of the
vocabulary associated with the medieval English manor — concepts and
referents attested from 1100 to 1500, arranged in conceptual groupings
modelled on the structure of the \textit{Historical Thesaurus of
English} and the \textit{Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in
Medieval England}.
The findings reframe received assumptions. Language contact shaped the
rural lexicon far more deeply than the literature has claimed: French-
and Latin-origin vocabulary dominates the terminology of manorial
society, while native English holds its ground in the vocabulary of
familiar locations. The asymmetry illuminates the social mechanics of
borrowing in non-elite environments and carries implications for the
history of English into the present day.
This book will be essential reading for specialists in the history of
the English language, the history of linguistics, historical
lexicology and lexicography, and medieval studies, as well as for
historical linguists and advanced students of language contact and
multilingualism.

Linguistic Field(s): Lexicography

Written In: English (eng)



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