Quacktrap: Glosses and multilingual animal contact in the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth

Lewis, Liam 2020. Quacktrap: Glosses and multilingual animal contact in the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth. Turner, Victoria and Debiais, Vincent, eds. Words in the Middle Ages / Les Mots au Moyen Âge, Vol. 46. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 161-179. (10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.120727)

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Abstract

In the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth, the words used to refer to animals and the sounds that they make, some of which express an interest in onomatopoeia, homophony, repetition, and rhyme, offer tantalising examples of the types of contact and encounter between humans and animals in the Middle Ages made possible through sound description. Readers of this text, composed in the thirteenth century, are encouraged to question what they consider to be ‘natural’ language and noise, through comparisons made between French words and English glosses of these words in the same text. In turn, conceptualisations of animals, shaped in some cases through nonsensical wordplay and word association, destabilise medieval notions of what exactly constitutes a ‘word’. In this chapter are considered the ways that glosses in the Tretiz bring to our attention textual forms of contact between humans, animals and birds, inviting readers to consider sound from the perspective of the non-human. Reading the text as a form of contact zone between the human and the non-human, the author draws on parallels between linguistic forms of dominance, hierarchy, and mastery in English and French contexts to highlight the ways that words describing non-humans and their sounds destabilise fixed notions of what constitutes language, as well as fixed preconceptions about the distinction between humans and non-humans.

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Brepols
ISBN:	9782503587950
Last Modified:	22 Jan 2025 10:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/175241

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