Persona Management and Identity Projection in English Medieval Society: Evidence from John Paston II

Abstract

Historical Sociolinguistics has favoured the interest in tracing heterogeneity and vernacularity in the history of language, reconstructing the sociolinguistic contexts and directions of language change as well as socially-based variation patterns in remote speech communities. But this treatment of language variation and change macroscopically, longitudinally, unidimensionally and focused on the speech community as a macro-cosmos can be revealingly complemented with other views microscopically, cross-sectionally, multidimensionally and privileging individual and their community of practice as a micro-cosmos. This conveys a shift from the study of collectivity and inter speaker variation to that of individuality, intra-speaker variation and authenticity. The aim of this paper is to show results on the microscopic investigation of the mechanisms and motivations for style-shifting within the micro-cosmos of late Medieval England applying current multidimensional models of intra-speaker variation as persona management to historical corpora of written correspondence. The study is carried out through the analysis of the behaviour of the orthographic variable (TH) in members of the Paston family from the Paston Letters. The data obtained show that letters may shed light onto the motivation(s) for variability in individuals and their stylistic choices for the construction of identity, in addition to tracing language change. This would therefore provide us with the possibility of reconstructing the sociolinguistic values in medieval times, and of accounting for the social meaning of inter- and intra- speaker variation in the sociolinguistic behaviour of speakers at the individual level as a resource for identity construction, representation, and even social positioning in interpersonal communication