Zurich Open Repository and Archive University of Zurich Main Library Strickhofstrasse 39 CH-8057 Zurich www.zora.uzh.ch Year: 2015 Conflicts in Early Modern Scottish Letters and Law-Courts Leitner, Magdalena Abstract: Scottish letters and court-records from the late 16th and early 17th centuries give access to a rich variety of conflicts, ranging from international disputes to everyday spats. This thesis investigates verbal offences reported by correspondents or recorded as legal evidence. Current models of (im)politeness (Culpeper, 2011a, Spencer-Oatey, e.g. 2005), which have rarely been tested on historical data, are syn- thesized with insights from historical pragmatics. The aims are to create qualitative reconstructions of how participants communicated their period- and situation-specific understandings of verbal offences, and how their expressed perceptions were shaped by private and public dimensions of different contexts. This thesis thus addresses three comparatively understudied aspects of (im)politeness research: historical impoliteness, Scottish (im)politeness, and the examination of private-public aspects of social interac- tions. Regarding the third point, a multi-dimensional framework is developed for systematic descriptions of private-public dimensions of conflict-situations, remodelling an existing pragmatic approach to news discourse (Landert and Jucker, 2011). Letters are drawn from the Breadalbane Collection, 1548-1583 (Dawson, 2004/2007) and James VI’s correspondence. Court-records are selected from editions of Justice Court papers and Kirk Session minutes. Case studies reveal that the vocabulary and discursive structure of conflict-narratives in letters is largely distinct from reported offences in court-records. Differences are presumably influenced by the genres’ contrasting contextual functions of more private versus more public conflict-settlement. However, the language of conflict-letters and court-records also shows shared moral and religious dimensions. Furthermore, verbal offences in the investigated letters and lawsuits refer primarily to collective identity-aspects of group-membership and social roles, while purely individ- ual qualities appear to have been marginal. The perceived gravity of offence could be intensified by participants’ notions of private and public in multiple ways. Posted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of Zurich ZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-120758 Dissertation Published Version Originally published at: Leitner, Magdalena. Conflicts in Early Modern Scottish Letters and Law-Courts. 2015, University of Glasgow, Faculty of Arts. CONFLICTS IN EARLY MODERN SCOTTISH LETTERS AND LAW-COURTS Magdalena Leitner lic.phil. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of PhD in English Language School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow © Magdalena Leitner, May 2015 To my parents, who were the first to teach me that disparaging words hurt more when uttered in front of others Abstract Scottish letters and court-records from the late 16th and early 17th centuries give access to a rich variety of conflicts, ranging from international disputes to everyday spats. This thesis investigates verbal offences reported by correspondents or recorded as legal evidence. Cur- rent models of (im)politeness (Culpeper, 2011a, Spencer-Oatey, e.g. 2005), which have rarely been tested on historical data, are synthesized with insights from historical pragmat- ics. The aims are to create qualitative reconstructions of how participants communicated their period- and situation-specific understandings of verbal offences, and how their ex- pressed perceptions were shaped by private and public dimensions of different contexts. This thesis thus addresses three comparatively understudied aspects of (im)politeness re- search: historical impoliteness, Scottish (im)politeness, and the examination of private- public aspects of social interactions. Regarding the third point, a multi-dimensional framework is developed for systematic descriptions of private-public dimensions of con- flict-situations, remodelling an existing pragmatic approach to news discourse (Landert and Jucker, 2011). Letters are drawn from the Breadalbane Collection, 1548-1583 (Daw- son, 2004/2007) and James VI’s correspondence. Court-records are selected from editions of Justice Court papers and Kirk Session minutes. Case studies reveal that the vocabulary and discursive structure of conflict-narratives in letters is largely distinct from reported offences in court-records. Differences are presuma- bly influenced by the genres’ contrasting contextual functions of more private versus more public conflict-settlement. However, the language of conflict-letters and court-records also shows shared moral and religious dimensions. Furthermore, verbal offences in the investi- gated letters and lawsuits refer primarily to collective identity-aspects of group- membership and social roles, while purely individual qualities appear to have been mar- ginal. The perceived gravity of offence could be intensified by participants’ notions of pri- vate and public in multiple ways. Concerning comparisons within genres, the Scottish king’s epistolary language in conflicts shows similarities to that of Scottish upper-rank correspondents; nevertheless, it also has some distinct features reflecting James VI’s un- derstanding of his royal status. Criminal and ecclesiastical court-records had largely differ- ent, yet semantically related, inventories of verbal offence terms. Table of contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................. v List of tables ......................................................................................................................... xi List of figures ..................................................................................................................... xiii Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. xv List of abbreviations .......................................................................................................... xvii 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 1.1. Conflicts ...................................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Aims and scope ........................................................................................................... 1 1.3. Scotland in the late 16th and early 17th centuries ......................................................... 3 1.4. Theoretical and methodological framework ............................................................... 6 1.5. Why correspondence and court-records? .................................................................... 9 1.6. Editorial principles .................................................................................................... 10 1.7. Outline of this study .................................................................................................. 11 2. Impoliteness past and present, and the dimension of private-public ............................... 13 2.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 13 2.2. Major trends in theorising (im)politeness ................................................................. 13 2.3. What is (im)politeness? ............................................................................................. 19 2.3.1. Underlying notions of (im)politeness................................................................. 19 2.3.2. Production- and perception-oriented definitions of (im)politeness ................... 21 2.3.4. Placing (im)politeness in a wider framework .................................................... 23 2.4. Key elements of (im)politeness ................................................................................. 24 2.5. Factors shaping notions of (im)politeness................................................................. 28 2.5.1. Social factors ...................................................................................................... 29 2.4.2. Situational factors............................................................................................... 30 2.6. Historical (im)politeness ........................................................................................... 32 2.7. Private and public ...................................................................................................... 35 2.8. Summary and conclusions ........................................................................................ 38 3. Investigating verbal offences in private and public conflicts ........................................... 41 3.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................... 41 3.2. The pragmatic space of verbal offences .................................................................... 41 3.3. Indicators of verbal offences ..................................................................................... 45 3.4. Mapping meanings with the Historical Thesaurus ................................................... 48 viii 3.5. Constituents of verbal offences ...............................................................................