Supplica la mia parvidade…

Abstract

This paper studies the public communication act of petitions made in the Middle Ages by subjects to their governors in situations of high personal need. Analysing an edited corpus of correspondence in Anglo-Norman and Italian chancelleries of the early thirteenth to the late fifteenth century, I attempt to identify verbal means that are related to what is today defined as “face” and “facework”, and to discuss this evidence in the tension modern pragmatics establishes between common “politic” and marked “polite” behaviour. Parting from the three-fold conception where all speech events have to be considered in their whole as social, discursive and textual practices, I briefly retrace the social and legal conditions of petitions and describe their particular discursive character on the threshold of two transitions: from orality to literacy and from Latin to vernacular. The data analysis is concerned with the textual cues bound to structural, syntactic and semantic constraints. Pointing out the most striking features of these three aspects and listing the most frequent forms that are cross-culturally congruent, I identify medieval facework as a ritual, but consciously iconic shaping of a power ideal at the intersection of political, juristic and religious implications. As formality is a shared value based on social position and role, no sign of reflexive politeness behaviour can be verified in this early period. Variations are simply attributed to the habits of the different chancelleries and their scribes. Though identified as unmarked politic behaviour, the common procedures in the medieval petition letters can nevertheless be seen as general face-saving strategies in response to the threatening character of requests. Thus the historical data shed light on the conception of linguistic politeness in the first-order and the second-order senses of the term and are useful to advance new hypotheses in the pragmatic discussion since Brown and Levinson’s classical study.

1820 Settler petitions in the Cape Colony

“…Fitzmaurice 2002;Nevalainen 2009;Palander-Collin 2009). Similarly, Held (2010: 194) claims that common procedures in medieval petitions count as unmarked politic behaviour and that no sign of reflexive politeness -understood as "willingly polite behaviour" (Held 2010, 211) -can be verified for the period. In other words, the belief that historical letters do not provide direct evidence for the writers' genuine motivations underpins research into epistolary facework.…”

“…However, as more recent approaches to epistolary facework show (e.g. Kohnen 2008;Bax 2010;Held 2010), historical (im)politeness may also be addressed within a framework based on the Wattsian distinction into the "politic" (what is appropriate in a given context) versus the "polite" (beyond what is appropriate; first proposed in Watts 1989;cf. Vilkki 2006;Kádár and Culpeper 2010;Bax and Kádár 2011;cf.…”

“…Therefore, the question to be addressed below is: what reasons are there for some users to realise the petition through this structural model? The issue is addressed with reference to traditional Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson 1987; Section 6.2) and more recent approaches to politeness (Chen 2001;Bax 2010;Held 2010; Section 6.4). The politeness-based explanations are further integrated with some material aspects of genre (Section 6.3) and insights into genre literacy (Sections 6.4 and 6.5).…”

Convention and Ritual (Im)politeness

“…In addition, ritual politeness has been a topic of study in historical politeness research (e.g. Bax and Streekstra 2003;Held 2010;Kádár and Culpeper 2010). This latter interest is due to the fact that certain forms of historical pragmatic data are highly ritualistic, and also that the above formalised and sequential features (see Section 1) facilitate the reconstruction of ritual in historical data, compared to other interactional politeness phenomena.…”

Supplicatory Voices: Genre Properties of the 1692 Petitions in the Salem Witch-Trials1

“…Here the research of Thomas Kohnen (2001) on the text-typological development of parliamentary petitions and statutes in English has pinpointed some areas where linguistic change has taken place in these documents. That one should ideally also take into account the influence of international chancellary models on the generic similarities of petitionary texts is convincingly demonstrated by Gudrun Held's (2010) comparison of medieval Anglo-Norman and Italian petitions in the pragmatic framework of politeness theory. Recognising these broader concerns and constraints in the analysis, the present case study focuses on the genre properties of a very limited set of texts within the petitionary colony: the petitions submitted to the authorities during the Salem witchcraft episode in the year 1692.…”