An English Teacher in Paris: John of Garland's 'Dictionarius' and Medieval Language Learning

This project examines John of Garland's Dictionarius to answer questions about the languages of everyday urban life, multilingualism, and educational practices in medieval England and France. An Englishman teaching in thirteenth-century Paris, Garland presents a snapshot of medieval urban life in the guise of teaching essential Latin vocabulary through the medium of French. His innovative text (the title is a term he coined for his wordbook; it is not a dictionary in the modern sense of the word) frames the lesson as a walk through the city, visiting shops and interacting with a range of goods, products and people. Garland supplemented his Latin text with a Latin and French commentary providing grammatical and etymological explanations. In the following centuries, copyists and readers made their own responses to the text, adapting its commentary to new learning communities in different cultural and temporal spaces, and adding multilingual glosses in medieval French, English, Dutch and Latin. The manuscripts of the Dictionarius thus reflect everyday life in an urban space and the changing vocabulary used to describe it, as well as the processes by which people taught and learnt foreign languages in England and France. While medieval Western Europe was a multilingual and multicultural space, comparatively little is known about how people learned languages during the period and this text offers a unique window onto teaching practice and its evolution between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Dictionarius survives in over 30 manuscripts scattered across 19 libraries in Britain and Europe, and its popularity and high level of adaptation by its readers results in a complex and variable text. This project will be the first to collate all manuscript versions of the Dictionarius using digital humanities techniques to create a searchable online database of the text, multilingual commentary and glosses. This resource will allow the team to interrogate the text in new ways, enabling us to compare the specialized lexis over time (the extant manuscripts reflect language use between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) and space (they capture the language used across northern France, England and the Low Countries). Lexicological and philological methods will underpin the linguistic analysis, centring on the vocabulary of specialized arts and crafts domains, and their changing lexis and languages as new multilingual audiences adapted the text.

A further focus will be the pedagogical use of the Dictionarius, through a comparative analysis of its commentary and multilingual glosses, leading to a deeper understanding of language teaching practices and the relationships between the vernaculars and Latin. Finally, a network analysis of the scribes, owners, readers and locations of the manuscripts will allow further insights into the production of multilingual texts and their reading audiences.

Results from these analyses and the completed database will be shared in a workshop hosted with the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, home to a specialized collection of medieval leatherwork and shoes. The workshop will cement cross-disciplinary relationships between academic and public audiences, fostering further avenues of research based on the database.