Vernacularisation of medical writing in english: A corpus-based study of scholasticism

Early Science and Medicine

Volumn 3, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 157-185

  Taavitsainen, Irma ^a   Pahta, Päivi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI   (Finland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HISTORY; LANGUAGE; LITERATURE; MEDICINE; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE; UNITED KINGDOM;

GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORY, EARLY MODERN 1451-1600; HISTORY, MEDIEVAL; HISTORY, MODERN 1601-; LANGUAGE; MEDICINE; PHILOLOGY; PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE;

EID: 0032059333     PISSN: 13837427     EISSN: 15733823     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157338298X00266     Document Type: Article

References (40)

1. The dominant role of Latin in learned medical writing lasted in England to the middle of the seventeenth century. Before that time Latin prevailed, but 207 out of the 238 medical works published between 1640 and 1660 were in English. C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660 (London, 1975), 267.
2. R. Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge, 1991)
3. and N. F. Blake, "Translation in the history of English," History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations in Historical Linguistics, eds M. Rissanen, O. Ihalainen, T. Nevalainen and I. Taavitsainen (Berlin and New York, 1992), 3-24.
4. The situation will improve in the future with the Missouri-Cambridge electronic revision of L. Thorndike and P. Kibre, A Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (rev. and augmented ed., London, 1963 and supplements 1965, 1968)
5. under the supervision of L. E. Voigts and P. Jones. The Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English: An Electronic Reference, compiled by L. E. Voigts and P. Kurtz, is forthcoming on CD-ROM, University of Michigan Press, 1998.
6. F. Getz, "Archives and Sources, Medical Practitioners in Medieval England," Social History of Medicine 3 (1990), 246-283, 279.
7. This classification was originally outlined by L. E. Voigts in "Medical Prose," in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1984), 315-335.
8. It has proved useful in empirical studies on linguistic variation. The scientific texts in the late Middle English part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (see note 15) were selected by Taavitsainen according to this new classification in the mid 80's. The same division has also been applied to lexical studies by J. Norri, Names of Sicknesses in English 1400-1550: An Exploration of the Lexical Field. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae. Dissertationes Humanarum Litterarum 63. (Helsinki, 1992). He reported considerable differences in terminology between the three types.
9. M. Görlach, "Text-types and Language History: The Cookery Recipe," in Rissanen et al., History of Englishes, 736-761, 747.
10. Different layers of writing and compilation going on from various sources is evident in lunary materials, e.g. in MS. Sloane 297, ff. 111, in which the language changes from Latin into English, or the lunary in MS. Sloane 213, which combines materials from various sources. I. Taavitsainen, Middle English Lunaries: A Study of the Genre, (Diss. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki XLVII. Helsinki, 1988).
11. Recipes are a debated area of Middle English, see K. A. Rand Schmidt, "The Index of Middle English Prose and Late Medieval English Recipes," English Studies 75 (1994), 423-429. A new research project has been launched by Tony Hunt.
12. L. E. Voigts, "Scientific and Medical Books," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, eds J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), 345-402,
13. and P. Slack, "Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England," in Health, Medicine and Mortality in Sixteenth Century, ed. C. Webster, (Cambridge, 1979), 237-273, 237, 273,
14. and studies of individual owners, e.g. J. K. Mustain, "A Rural Medical Practitioner in Fifteenth-century England," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 46 (1972), 469-79,
15. D. E. Rhodes, "Provost Argentine of King's and His Books," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 2 (1956), 205-212.
16. A. C. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition: The History of Argument and Explanation Especially in the Mathematical and Biomedical Sciences and Arts (London, 1994), 6 and passim.
17. W. Chafe, "Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing" in Evidentiality, eds. W. Chafe and J. Nichols, (Norwood, New Jersey, 1986), 261-312.
18. I. Taavitsainen, "On the evolution of scientific writings from 1375 to 1675: Repertoire of emotive features," in English Historical Linguistics 1992, eds F. Fernandez, M. Fuster and J. Calvo (Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, 1994), 329-342,
19. and I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta, "Scientific thought-styles in discourse structure: Changing patterns in a historical perspective," in Organization in Discourse, eds S. K. Tanskanen, B. Wårvik and R. Hiltunen, (Publications of the English Department, University of Turku, 1995), 519-529.
20. I. Taavitsainen, "Subjectivity as a text-type marker in historical stylistics." Language and Literature 3 (Oxford, 1994), 197-212,
21. and R. Gläser, "Emotive Features in Technical and Scientific English," in Style and Text: Studies Presented to Nils Erik Enkvist, ed. H. Ringbom (Stockholm, 1975), 190-201.
22. D. Biber, Variation across Speech and Writing (Cambridge, 1988),
23. D. Schiffrin, Approaches to Discourse (Oxford, 1994),
24. G. N. Leech and M. Short, Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose, (London, 1981); see note 18.
25. For an application to historical material see I. Taavitsainen, "Genrel Subgenre Styles in Late Middle English?" in Early English in the Computer Age, eds M. Rissanen, M. Kytö, M. Palander-Collin (Berlin and New York, 1993), 171-200
26. and "Genre conventions: Personal affect in fiction and non-fiction in Early Modern English," in English in Transition: Corpus-based Studies in Linguistic Variation and Genre Styles, eds M. Rissanen, M. Kytö and K. Heikkonen (Berlin and New York, 1997) 185-266. See note 19.
27. The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts is a first-generation multipurpose multigenre corpus of some 1.5 million words in computer-readable form covering the time from OE up to 1710. It includes medical and scientific texts (see note 5). Recent work in diachronic corpus compilation focuses on one-genre corpora or varieties of English, see "Tracing the Trail of Time." Proceedings of the Diachronic Corpora Workshop, Toronto (Canada), May 1995, eds R. Hickey, M. Kytö, I. Lancashire and M. Rissanen (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, 1997).
28. N. G. Siraisi, Medieval and Eaxly Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990). The year 1543 begins a new stage as two important books came out: Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelesticum, which was to undermine the basis of astrological medicine, and Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica, which abandoned the obscure astronomical analogies. Galen and Hippocrates continued to dominate teaching at the universities, and the change was gradual.
29. C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982), 5.
30. nd ed. (Cambridge, 1969), 97-109.
31. The selection of texts for the second part of the corpus is not complete yet, but we plan to include various types of medical writing so that both continuity with the medieval part and the new subgenres are taken into account, see I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta, "The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing," ICAME Journal 21 (1997), 71-78.
32. The variationist approach was first outlined by U. Weinreich, W. Labov and M. Herzog in "Empirical foundations for a theory of language change," in Directions for historical linguistics, ed. P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel (Austin, 1968), 95-189,
33. and then in S. Romaine, Socio-historical linguistics: Its status and methodology (Cambridge, 1982),
34. and in J. Milroy, Linguistic variation and change: On the historical sociolinguistics of English (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992).
35. See e.g. Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition, vol. 1, p. 23ff.
36. and Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine.
37. See e.g. A.J. Minnis, Medieual Theory of Authorship. Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984)
38. and B. Vickers, English Science, Bacon to Newton (Cambridge, 1987).
39. P. Pahta and I. Taavitsainen, "Authorities in Medieval Medical Treatises," The New Courant 3, Publications of the Department of English, University of Helsinki (1995), 97-107.
40. A preliminary version of the use of prescriptive phrases in Middle English medical treatises is included in I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta, "The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing: Linguistic Variation and Prescriptive Collocations in Scholastic Style," in To Explain the Present. Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, eds T. Nevalainen and L. Kahlas-Tarkka, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki LII (Helsinki, 1997), 209-225