Languaging and Irruptions in a Medieval Latin Charm: A Case Study on Poetics, ‘Weirdness’, and Sense in Non-Sense

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of languaging and explores its relevance to charm research through the case of a little-studied eleventh-century Latin text for healing fever. The concept of languaging was developed in linguistics for the analysis of people’s use of multiple languages in interaction. Here, the concept is adapted to the study of folklore registers and genres. Irruption is introduced as a complementary concept to describe a distinct phenomenon in languaging. The text of the case study is approached as representing a metadiscursive genre that verbally communicates how to perform a ritual. The verbal components of this performance include two Old Germanic words as well as words from Greek and Hebrew, and an irruption of an etymologically opaque stretch of text or voces mysticae. A close look at the voces mysticae reveals contrasts in the semantics or associations of its constituents, which suggests syntax and that this part of the text was somehow interpreted or interpretable to users.