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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 95–112

Chapter 7
Godly vocabulary in Early Modern English religious debate

 | University of Glasgow
The English Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century was characterised by a vigorous public discourse of controversy, mediated by the still-novel printing press. On the one side were those – the godly – who favoured reformed religion; on the other were those – generally exiles – who held to increasingly embattled Roman Catholicism. This chapter compares the outputs of two communities of practice – one Protestant, one Catholic – from a key period in the Reformation’s history: the 1560s. It demonstrates how both sides developed distinctive, ideologically-charged lexicons of theology and insult. It also shows how reformers in particular deployed a coded English vocabulary, including words not usually seen as part of the semantic field of religion, to mark their distinctive discourse community.
Keywords: codes, keywords, religion, community of practice, discourse community
Article outline
  • 1.Godly folk in the 1560s
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • Evangelical texts
    • Roman Catholic texts
  • 3.Textual analysis
    • 3.1Reformed texts
    • 3.2Roman Catholic texts
    • 3.3Theological differences
    • 3.4The vocabulary of insult
      • Idolatry*
      • Massmonger
      • Romish
      • Sodomical
      • Superbious
      • Synagogue*
    • 3.5Some further differences
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.07smi
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Smith, Jeremy J.
2021. Lexical choices in Early Modern English devotional prose. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 22:2 ► pp. 263 ff. DOI logo

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