Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 11:2 (2010) ► pp.194–218
Supplica la mia parvidade…
Petitions in medieval society — a matter of ritualised or first reflexive politeness?
Published online: 18 June 2010
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.11.2.02hel
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.11.2.02hel
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.
Keywords: requesting, letter-writing, politeness, ritual, politic behaviour, facework
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Held, Gudrun
Calvo Cortés, Nuria
2024. Filled-in petition forms and hand-drafted petitions to the Foundling Hospital. In Unlocking the History of English [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 364], ► pp. 198 ff.
Constantinescu, Mihaela-Viorica
2018. A perspective on “impoliteness” in early modern Romanian court and diplomatic interactions. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19:1 ► pp. 92 ff.
Constantinescu, Mihaela-Viorica
2023. Ritual and modern “politeness” in the Romanian Principalities during the Phanariot period. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 24:1 ► pp. 124 ff.
Doty, Kathleen L.
2018. Chapter 1. Pleading for life. In Legal Pragmatics [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 288], ► pp. 21 ff.
Terkourafi, Marina & Dániel Z. Kádár
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2015. Nineteenth-century institutional (im)politeness. In Transatlantic Perspectives on Late Modern English [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 4], ► pp. 153 ff.
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2017. Initiating contact in institutional correspondence. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2 ► pp. 271 ff.
Laitinen, Mikko & Anita Auer
2014. Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835). In Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English [Studies in Language Companion Series, 159], ► pp. 187 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
