| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is a diplomatic edition and study of three early sixteenth-century letters of complaint. All three letters are addressed to high-ranking officials from ordinary citizens. The edition is based on transcriptions following the principles of the Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (Stenroos, Thengs and Bergstrøm 2017), which will be included in the corpus.
This study takes as its starting point the assumption that late medieval letters of complaint show formal and conventional features because of the nature of their purpose, but that these are combined with more individual elements that may reflect traces of the complainant as an individual. Accordingly, the study considers these questions: To what extent do we find orality and personal voices in the letters? To what extent are the letters conventional, and how far do they represent individual compositions? And to what extent do their characteristics help us to further define the distinctions between different types of late medieval letters, in particular that between petition and complaint?
In order to address these questions, individual studies of each text are carried out. These employ the episodic structure narrative model (Fludernik 1996) as well as making use of politeness theory (Brown and Levinson 1987) and speech act theory (Searle 1979, Austin 1962).
This is a descriptive qualitative study based on a limited material: accordingly, it is not possible to make far-reaching generalizations from its findings. However, each of the texts presents an interesting and complex object of study in its own right, providing plentiful material for both sociolinguistic and pragmatic enquiries. Apart from studying the narrative structure and the politeness strategies used in the letters, the study problematises the categorisation of letter types, in particular with reference to the labels ‘petition’ and ‘letter of complaint.’
This thesis contributes to the field of historical pragmatics, and particularly to research on medieval local documents. | |
