Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The century and a half between the Norman Conquest and Magna Carta ushered in a period of enormous change in the legal culture of England, change that by most accounts went largely unrepresented in English vernacular writing.While Anglo-Saxon England possessed a well-developed legal vernacular, after the Conquest its loss of social and institutional authority to Latin and French seems to have placed restraints on new writing in English, legal or otherwise.1 When English reemerged as a common literary medium in the thirteenth century, its relationship with the vernacular legal language of the past was wholly changed.In an important collection of essays on literature and the law in later medieval England, Bruce Holsinger argues, ''The decades after 1200 stage an extended conflict
Source: Modern Philology
DOI: 10.1086/661955
Author: Scott Kleinman
Institution: California State University, Northridge
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W468060465