Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More y la lengua inglesa estándar de su época

Abstract

The analysis, with regard to 31 variable items, of a score of holograph letters both by Th. More and Th. Wolsey, and the study of their behaviour vis-á-vis the official language of the Statutes of the Realm inrolled in Chancery, throw some interesting light on the process and progress of linguistic standardization in the early 16th century. The letters show signs of their writers' idiosincratic evolution towards (but also incomplete accommodation to) Chancery Standard. Both groups of texts exhibit some dialectal traits which, though they tally with More's and Wolsey's known local origins, are not quite enough in themselves for precise identification of provenance. The official language, on the other hand, is not free from some of the variations we observe in the private documents. The Statutes reflect in some points the individual preferences of the clerks who copied or drew them up. But public documents also lead the way in many respects towards modern forms. On the whole, the situation in the early 16th c. does not seem radically different from that described by N. Davis regarding the Paston Letters of the late 15th c.