Gallagher, J. orcid.org/0000-0001-7797-2762 (2024) Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560–1600. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. ISSN 0080-4401
Abstract
Early modern London was multilingual, and early modern urban life was shaped by linguistic diversity. This article draws on the multilingual archives of Elizabethan London's ‘stranger churches’ – Protestant congregations which catered to the needs of French-, Dutch- and Italian-speaking migrants (among others) – to explore how linguistic diversity shaped social relations. These sources offer insights into the everyday multilingualism of the early modern city. They demonstrate London's migrant communities’ intense interest in what people said and why, and show how different languages and their speakers interacted on the streets and in the spaces of later sixteenth-century London. By charting how linguistic diversity was part of the lives of ordinary Londoners in this period, including close examination of incidents of multilingual insult, slander, and conflict, this article argues that the civic and religious authorities relied on the stranger churches’ abilities to carry out surveillance of speech in languages other than English, and that urban social relations and urban spaces were shaped by multilingualism. It ends by arguing that linguistic diversity played an essential but understudied role in the social history of early modern cities.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s), 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | multilingualism; migration; London; strangers; orality; insult; scandal; polyglossia; translation; urban history |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of History (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 19 Aug 2024 10:14 |
Last Modified: | 19 Sep 2024 08:46 |
Status: | Published online |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0080440124000069 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:216197 |
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