Author: Edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson Deeply embedded in the history of Latin Europe, the vernacular (the language of slaves) still draws us towards urgent issues of affiliation, identity, and cultural struggle. Vernacular politics in medieval Latin Europe were richly complex and the structures of thought and feeling they left behind permanently affected Western culture. The Vulgar Tongue explores the history of European vernacularity through more than a dozen studies of language situations from twelfth-century England and France to twentieth-century India and North America, and from the building of nations, empires, or ethnic communities to the politics of gender, class, or religion. The essays in The Vulgar Tongue offer new vistas on the idea of the vernacular in contexts as diverse as Ramon Llulls thirteenth-century prefiguration of universal grammar, the orthography of Early Middle English, the humanist struggle for linguistic purity in Early Modern Dutch, and the construction of standard Serbian and Romanian in the waning decades of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here Latin, the common tongue of European intellectuals, is sometimes just another vernacular, Sanskrit and Hindi stake their claims as the languages of Shakespeare, African-American poetry is discovered in conversation with Middle English, and fourteenth-century Florence becomes the city, not of Dante and Boccaccio, but of the artisan poet Pucci. Delicate political messages are carried by nuances of French dialect, while the status of French and German as feminine mother tongues is fiercely refuted and as fiercely embraced. Clerics treat dialect, idiom, and gesturenot language itselfas the hallmarks of vulgar preaching, or else argue the case for Bible translation mainly in pursuit of their own academic freedom. Endlessly fluid in meaning and reference, the term vernacular emerges from this book as a builder of bridges between the myriad phenomena it can describe, as a focus of reflection both on the history of Western culture and on the responsibilities of those who would analyze it.

Author: Ronald Santoni NA

Author: Jerry D. Moore InIncidence of Travel, archaeologist Jerry Moore draws on his personal experiences and historical and archaeological studies throughout South America to explore and understand the ways traditional peoples created cultural landscapes in the region. Using new narrative structures, Moore introduces readers to numerous archaeological sites and remains, describing what it is like to be in the field and sparking further reflection on what these places might have been like in the past.

Author: Irving I. Zaretsky Contemporary religious movements in America vary greatly in their organization, goals, methods, and membership. Reflecting the striking diversity of the current religious movement, the papers in this volume consider three categories of religious movements: native American churches, recently founded religious groups, and syncretistic groups based on imported cults. The general aim is to understand the varieties of human behavior within these institutions and to point out their relationship to society in the United States.Originally published in 1977.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.