The editorial board of the journal Vox medii aevi invites submissions for a thematic issue devoted to the historical dynamics of words and concepts in medieval culture.
Historical semantics – a discipline that examines the meanings of words and their changes over time – began to take shape in the late nineteenth century. Owing to the dominance of biological terminology in the scholarly discourse of this period, the new discipline came to be described in terms of the “life of words”. This “life” proved so dynamic and diverse that several approaches to its study soon emerged. Among them are the history of concepts, variously developed within the framework of R. Koselleck’s conception of historical semantics and the “Cambridge School” (J. Pocock; Q. Skinner), intellectual history, and numerous language approaches (N. E. Koposov; G. V. Durinova; B. Maslov & Yu. V. Kagarlitsky).
The Middle Ages, as a period marked by the formation of new social institutions and political concepts that require new terminology, are of particular interest for the study of words. It is a time when, in theological disputes, legal formulas, and ritual practices, words acquire a specific ontological force; it is also an era of translations and borrowings, when Greek and Arabic concepts were adapted to the Latin tradition, and Latin scholarship penetrated vernacular languages. By tracing the destiny of an individual term or concept, we can observe how different cultural traditions interacted, how the classical heritage was reworked, and how new conceptual categories were formed.
We wish to devote this issue to how changes in word meanings reflect cultural shifts, transformations of social roles, value systems, and political categories in the Middle Ages. We propose to pay special attention to the question of the role of words in historical and cultural processes – the interrelation between lexical changes and historical experience. We are interested in how lexicon can become a well-established analytical tool in medieval studies, allowing us to penetrate the logic of medieval culture.
The interdisciplinary character of the history of words determines its methodological flexibility. We welcome studies employing different approaches: from classical philology and linguistic semantics to the history of concepts, intellectual history, and historical anthropology. We are interested both at the macro (i.e., long-term transformations of concepts from Antiquity to the early modern period) and micro level (i.e., the history of an individual term in a specific text or corpus of texts).
We propose addressing the following topics:
- The history of individual words, collocations, phrases, and set expressions in medieval texts: the emergence, transformation, and disappearance of concepts.
- Marked vocabulary of historical periods and epochs: how certain words become emblems of their time; lexical indicators of cultural and political changes.
- Multilingualism and semantic differences: how the same concept functions across languages; problems of translation across cultural contexts.
- Word and thing: the connection between lexical changes and changes social realities.
- The role of translation in redefining concepts and categories in medieval culture.
In addition to articles, the editorial board accepts reviews of books related to the issue’s topic. Book reviews are accepted for books in Russian published within the last three years, and for books in other languages published within the last five years. The journal also considers translations of medieval texts into Russian. Proposed reviews and translations must be approved by the editorial board in advance.
DEADLINE – 1 OCTOBER 2026
Issue editor Ksenia Kostomarova
voxmediiaevi@gmail.com