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Latin Literatures of Medieval and Early Modern Times in Europe and Beyond: A millennium heritage
Edited by Francesco Stella
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIV] 2024
► pp. 704–731

Chapter 34
The conquest of literacy

The vernacular disintegration of Latin hegemony in medieval Europe

| Ghent University

This contribution attempts to problematize the concept of vernacularization during the Western Middle Ages. Taking modern research on endangered languages as its point of departure, it distinguishes between two periods of vernacularisation, the earlier one determined by the desire to standardize vernacular writing (literization), the other one by a factor of literarization, i.e., creating a literary language and field. In both periods, Latin as the hegemonic language constitutes the catalyst for these processes as they develop within the vernacular field.

Keywords: Latin, vernacularisation, grammaticalization, literization, literarization, standardization
Article outline
  • Introduction: Concepts and themes
  • Standardization
    • Outside and inside classical space
    • The conquest of the book
    • The conquest of form
    • The pursued conquest
    • First recapitulation
  • Literarization
    • A new start
    • Schools of the Empire
    • Dialectical poetry
    • From scholarly vernacularization to vernacular literature
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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