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by Megan Tiddeman (Editor)
The Cantelowe Accounts appear to offer the earliest evidence of an English merchant using Italian as a second language. They were written by John Balmayn, an unknown Londoner, who travelled to Tuscany to oversee the sale of a valuable wool shipment in 1450-51 on behalf of his master - the Mercer, Sir William Cantelowe. The author uses an intriguing mix of four languages, combining Middle English, Latin and Anglo-French with the administrative Tuscan that he has learnt working alongside Florentine partners, such as the Salviati company. Two other striking features of the text are the extensive use of Arabic numerals, unparalleled in fifteenth-century English accounting, and the unusually detailed descriptions of merchant marks that were used to identify the woolsacks. Overall, the accounts are unique amongst multilingual medieval sources and will interest economic historians and historical linguists alike.
Author Biography
Megan Tiddeman studied French and Italian at the University of St Andrews and completed her PhD in Historical Linguistics at Aberystwyth University, under the supervision of the late Professor David Trotter. Her thesis examined language contact in late medieval trade documents between Italian dialects and both Anglo-Norman and Middle English. She has worked as a PDRA with the Anglo-Norman Dictionary at Aberystwyth University, and as a Research Fellow on two projects led by Professor Louise Sylvester at the University of Westminster: Technical Language and Semantic Shift in Middle English and The Semantics of Word Borrowing in Late Medieval English. She has published on medieval Anglo-Italian contact, as well as on Middle English's lexical and semantic development.
