Patrick J. Geary, Language and Power in the Early Middle Ages. University Press of New England 2013
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The eminent historian Patrick
J. Geary has written a provocative book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical
Society of Israel about the role of language and ideology in the study and
history of the early Middle Ages. He includes a fascinating discussion of the
rush by nationalist philologists to rediscover the medieval roots of their
respective vernaculars, the rivalry between vernacular languages and Latin to
act as transmitters of Christian sacred texts and administrative documents, and
the rather sloppy and ad hoc emergence in different places of the vernacular as
the local administrative idiom. This is a fascinating look at the weakness of
language as a force for unity: ideology, church authority, and emerging secular
power always trumped language.
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