Saxon and Roman become equivalent languages in gowers text. Constance only matters until cultural reproduction of Christianity happens (with her son assending to Roman throne).
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Sign languages have just as much of a claim to vernacularity. Many sign languages. A Deafnicity.
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Teresa’s account (1475) defines deafness as an “island” of isolation. She says she no longer wishes to hear or speak. She turns deafness into a divine gift. Defines suffering in visual terms.
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Redefining meanings of solitude. Converting memory into a visual rhetoric. Monastic life lends a thickness to this. Silence and gesture language common. Limited gestures used to communicate.
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She anticipates a modern idea of Deaf gain. New literary grammar of embodied gesture. God makes a signal with his hand to her that she be quiet. A gesture that corresponds to 15th-c Iberian Cistercian gesture meaning “be silent.”
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Interested in the narrative gesture of a shared community of practice. Even if deafness is isolating, she notes that it also provides some forms of social critique.
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Before becoming deaf, she had access to university education, despite her gender. She uses a closed-ear metaphor (another known gesture). Willful silence is a way to enact a mode of resistance (to speaking culture).
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Modern deaf scholars read Teresa as precursor to modern deaf writers. Many see her book as the first deaf autobiography.sees herself as part of a community of infirmos, which could include many forms of disability, not just deaf.
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Claimed by some as first writer to be both Spanish and deaf. Bond between past and present. A queer engroupment. Then reclaiming of Teresa can get us to think about how gender, deafness, and ethnicity can intersect l.
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She came from the most prominent converso family in the area. We must think about intersections of identity with ethnicity. Could be a coded discussion of converso identity (she mostly cites OT sources, etc). Deafnicity is a new coinage by deaf indigenous scholars.
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Deaf studies should@join hands with medieval scholarship. Contemporary deaf literary reception reframes her. Attend to dispersals of language and cultural belonging in deaf cultures today.
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Now
@AdrienneBoyarin on medieval English jews. Spoke French among themselves, while Hebrew was language of authority. No evidence that they spoke English.Show this thread -
Latin a language of contact. Anglo-Norman spoke. Lived in close quarters with English. Would French have remained primary in such a context?
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Some suggest that they must have developed good English. Evidence of Anglo jewish women helps us tell a new story.
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Various kinds of evidence for Hebrew use among Jewish women in England. Evidence of their use of Hebrew writing, books, and legal documents. Woman sought control of household Hebrew books in one case.
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Another woman went to court to get her dead husbands books. Her daughter later did tried to do so as well through her grandfather. Women understood to have strongest claim on books.
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Also made claims on Latin and Anglo Norman books. Legal cases suggest a trade in books between Jewish women and universities such as Oxford.
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Hebrew a major language of record in England. Evidence of Englishing of Jewish names. Naming practices give some slight sense of linguistic culture. Names of French, Hebrew, German, English, Norse, Breton origin for Jewish women attested. Many translations of Hebrew names
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Men consistently used their hebrew names, so Jewish women’s names provide more linguistic evidence. Anglo Jews adapted Hebrew for vernacular sounds, transliterated characters for French and English words and descriptions. Not clear that French was dominant.
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Many words transliterated were both French and English, but also specifically English words like “House.” Consistent usage that suggests immersion in both French and English. Who did women speak to? Who did they need to speak to? What languages did their children hear?
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Many points of contact between jewish and Christian women. Christian women worked in jewish households, despite official rulings. They worked as wet nurses in Jewish households, etc. concern over this persisted among Christian and Jewish authorities.
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If we consider what languages would be spoken in such environments, we MUST include English. Linguistic diversity almost certain. Significant to our understanding of anti-Jewish polemic literature.
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Women’s ability to speak and understand multiple languages key to these tales. Code-switching is consistent among women in anti-Jewish literature, an English Christian stereotype of jewish women as “multi-tongued.”
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This evidence suggests scholarly ideas of Jewish linguistic “otherness” in England are incorrect.
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