Search

The focus of this article is on interaction in Middle English and Early Modern English herbals. In the Middle Ages, herbals were mainly instructive aids for producing medicines of the plants described in the text. Later, in the Early Modern English period, the herbal genre split into two, retaining the genre called herbals and giving birth to systematic botanical texts. The interaction established in texts can be studied through the use of pronouns (involvement markers) and the use of imperatives. This study shows that the strategies employed in the Middle English period are very different from the strategies in the Early Modern English period: the use of second-person pronouns and imperatives prevails in the Middle English period, whereas the use of first-person pronouns was preferred in the Early Modern English period. In addition to this, another division, irrespective of the time of writing, is observed in the material: the first group includes handbooks and practical herbals, and the other group learned and empirical herbals. Factors which explain these differences in interaction strategies are the purposes for writing and the education of the intended audience.

1. Preface & Acknowledgments 2. Editors' introduction 3. Part I. The evidence of place-names 4. Celts in Scandinavian Scotland and Anglo-Saxon England: Place-names and language contact reconsidered (by Hough, Carole) 5. The colonisation of England by Germanic tribes on the basis of place-names (by Udolph, Jurgen) 6. Ancient toponyms in south-west Norway: Origin and formation (by Saerheim, Inge) 7. Part II. Code selection in written texts 8. On vernacular literacy in late medieval Norway (by Hagland, Jan Ragnar) 9. Four languages, one text type: The neighbours' books of Bryggen 1529-1936 (by Nesse, Agnete) 10. On variation and change in London medieval mixed-language business documents (by Wright, Laura) 11. Part III. Linguistic developments and contact situations 12. Old English-Late British language contact and the English progressive (by Killie, Kristin) 13. The Old English origins of the Northern Subject Rule: Evidence from the Lindisfarne gloss to the Gospels of John and Mark (by Cole, Marcelle) 14. For Heaven's sake: The Scandinavian contribution to a semantic field in Old and Middle English (by DiSciacca, Claudia) 15. North Sea timber trade terminology in the Early Modern period: The cargo inventory for the White Lamb revisited (by Lorvik, Marjorie) 16. 'Nornomania' in the research on language in the Northern Isles (by Melchers, Gunnel) 17. Index of subjects, terms & languages