Louise Sylvester

Medieval romance and the construction of heterosexuality

Constructing the Heterosexual Contract Romance and Rape The Sadistic Hero Dynamics of Consensual Heterosex Romance Debased

Dress, Fashion, and Anti-Fashion in the Medieval Imagination

Louise Sylvester discusses notions of stasis in fashion discourse from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, considering sumptuary legislation, wills, Royal wardrobe accounts, and anti-fashion diatribes. Sylvester seeks to explore the place of clothing and fashion in the social imagination of the medieval period, illustrating the way in which clothing was a kind of chattel to be handed on to heirs as well as part of regular livery. However, in discourses around fashion, many writers crave stasis. The ever-changing fashion system is a cause of great anxiety because it collapses class distinctions, making social rank less legible. This anxiety is most powerfully conveyed in sumptuary legislation of the period, which attempts to codify in law the concerns displayed by the authors of anti-fashion diatribes.

Blunder, Error, Mistake, Pitfall: Trawling the OED with the Help of the Historical Thesaurus

The paper considers the lexis of error and examines its use across time in relation to the writing and spelling of English, to grammar and pronunciation. Discussion focuses first on the earliest records of notions of correctness in English language usage, from AElfric forwards to the emergence of standard English, from the sixteenth century’s growing worries about copiousness and purity of diction to eighteenth-century concerns to prescribe and rule the language. The historical overview is complemented by consideration of the data drawn together by the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus project, its evidence taken from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. For earlier centuries, there are by far fewer relevant citations, often buried within words wide in reference. With the help of the Historical Thesaurus we drill down to view how views of language mistakes and errors have changed over the centuries of the recorded history of English.

Teaching the Language of Chaucer

When this book was in its earliest planning stages, my co-editor suggested that, since my work has been largely on Middle English lexis, I should contribute a chapter on teaching Chaucer’s language. At the time, this seemed a reasonable suggestion; what emerged from my investigation, however, is that Chaucer is rarely approached via the language or in a linguistics context, and that teaching Chaucer’s language is generally mentioned only in passing in the descriptions of the most innovative teaching projects that were described in the session at the New Chaucer Society congress and are described in this volume. All this has led me to believe that the idea of teaching the language of Chaucer in British universities in the twenty-first century is one that needs to be problematised rather than described.