When a Lexical Borrowing Becomes an Ideological Tool: The Case of Saint Erkenwald

The nature of Middle English lexicon is characterised by the import of a massive number of loanwords, due to the high social and cultural prestige of French and Latin and the intimate contact between English and Old Norse as well as to lexical gaps. Therefore, lexical borrowings have traditionally been studied in terms of register, style and dialect. Based on the observation that literary texts (even if medieval) are the results of literariness, the present paper aims to investigate the rhetoric usage of foreign words. In particular, the usage of French and Scandinavian borrowings and their occurrence in binominals in Saint Erkenwald will be examined in order to establish whether the author’s choice of a particular word can be accouted for as a means to convey special meanings or obtain special rhetoric effects.