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Workshop: Sailing through Words. Maritime Technical Terminology from Antiquity to the Middle Ages TRANSMARE Institute, Trier University Overview Date: 10–11 December 2026 Location: Trier University, Universitätsring 15, 54296 Trier, Germany Abstract submission deadline: 10 October 2026 Notification of outcome: 20 October 2026 Organisers: Eleonora Selvi (Trier), Afnen Habibi (Trier) Scientific committee: Prof. Patrick Reinard, Dr. Eleonora Selvi, Dr. Afnen Habibi Contacts: sailingwords.trier@gmail.com. The workshop examines the formation and usage of naval terminology and technical language connected to maritime activities across time and between different regions of the Ancient and Medieval world. Maritime specialised languages are integral to seafaring practice. Today, Maritime English is regulated by international organisations to prevent accidents and ensure clear, fast communication. In the ancient and medieval world, communities of seafarers faced an analogous need for a technical language, both to communicate at sea and to develop and transmit their maritime knowledge. Maritime languages are thus shaped, in different ways and contexts, by the naval technology available to seafarers, by the institutional and administrative settings in which this technology operates, and by the values and beliefs of the seafaring community of practice itself; in turn, they contribute to stabilise and transmit technical knowledge. Specialised languages, or ‘technolects’, or ‘specialised discourses’ in Gotti’s (2003) terms, have been recognised as integral to technical knowledge since the seminal work of Mauss (1936) and Leroi-Gourhan (1964–65); studies of their specific features have shown that their formation follows particular lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse patterns (Gotti 2003; Čulić-Viskota & Kalebota 2013). Scholarship on ancient technical lexica has identified three main strategies through which specialised terminologies are created (Schironi 2014): the adaptation of existing terms from the common lexicon; the coining of new terms; and the borrowing of terms from other specialised fields or languages. Syntax and discourse tend to be organised around the avoidance of ambiguity, thus generating patterns that depart from everyday language (Bocanegra-Valle 2011). The supra-local circulation of such languages, especially military and maritime ones, can generate extensive chains of borrowing and adaptation, and can even drive broader linguistic change (Huitink & Rood 2024). Finally, technical languages could function as a marker of social belonging when carried over into different contexts, or contribute, through their acquisition, to transmitting the values and knowledge distinctive of the community of practice that employed them (Lave & Wenger 1991; Eckert 2000). To study these languages in the ancient world is no easy task, as they are often preserved only in documentary texts such as papyri and inscriptions, or at best in manuals that are frequently overlooked and obscure, and their study requires a good understanding of both linguistic phenomena and the relevant technological, societal, and administrative contexts. Our workshop thus seeks to compare the specialised languages of seafaring, shipbuilding, naval administration, warfare, and commerce across periods and regions, from the Aegean Bronze Age to the medieval Baltic and beyond. We aim to ask which processes govern the formation and transmission of these languages, and what role they played for the communities that developed them, offering, in doing so, the first systematic, comparative typology of maritime technical languages, and bringing papyrology, epigraphy, linguistics, philology, and the history of technology into a dialogue that has so far remained fragmented across disciplinary and period-specific boundaries. Themes and Questions We welcome proposals on any region of the ancient and medieval world, spanning from prehistory (including reconstructed languages, e.g., Proto-Indo-European) to the end of the 15th century AD.  Submissions should address one or more of the following areas: (a) Linguistic structures and features. How do naval technical languages form and develop over time? What are their defining lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse features, and how do they differ from general language? (b) Sources for reconstruction. How can epigraphic and papyrological sources help trace these processes? What is the role of manuals and other normative texts in stabilising and transmitting technical language (and its technical knowledge)? (c) Technical language and naval technology. Which technological and administrative developments trigger linguistic innovation? How do linguistic structures encode technological knowledge, and to what extent can each illuminate the other? (d) Transmission and continuity. How were technical terms transmitted across periods of political, social, and religious transformation? What mechanisms (translation, transliteration, borrowing, etc.) govern this transmission? Does terminological continuity reflect continuity in professional or institutional structures? (e) Expansion and sociolinguistic impact. How do technical languages help form communities of experts? Which elements enter general language, and how? To what extent do shifts in political or cultural power shape the diffusion and transformation of technical lexica? Submission – Please submit an abstract of around 250 words (excluding bibliography) to sailingwords.trier@gmail.com, no later than 10 October 2026. – Please include in a separate page of the same document your name, affiliation, and contact details. – Proposals will be evaluated by the Scientific Committee, and notification of the outcome will be sent no later than 20 October 2026. – Please note that accommodation for participants will be covered by the organisers; travel costs are to be borne by each speaker. References Bocanegra-Valle, A. (2011). The Language of Seafaring: Standardised Conventions and Discursive Features in Speech Communications. International Journal of English Studies 11: 35–53. Čulić-Viskota, A. & Kalebota, S. (2013). Maritime English – What Does It Communicate? Transactions On Maritime Science 2: 109–114. Eckert, P. (2000). Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Oxford. Gotti, M. (2003). Specialised Discourse: Linguistic Features and Changing Conventions. Bern.  Huitink, L. & Rood, T. (2024). Xenophon, Professional Military Vocabulary, and the Formation of the Literary Koine, in C. Monaco, R. Machado, & E. Bozia (eds.), Redefining the Standards in Attic, Koine, and Atticism (Euhormos 6), Leiden, pp. 148–170. Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1964–1965). Le geste et la parole (2 vols.). Paris. Mauss, M. (1936). Les techniques du corps. Journal de Psychologie 32(3–4): 271–293. Schironi, F. (2014). Technical Languages: Science and Medicine, in E. J. Bakker (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, New York, pp. 338–353.

Shannon McSheffrey is Distinguished Research Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. Her publications over the last three decades have concerned the social, legal, and cultural history of England between the Black Death and the mid-sixteenth century, most recently focused on socio-cultural histories of crime and migration. Her 2017 Oxford University Press book, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550, considered the legal processes and broader socio-political ramifications of English churches’ offering asylum. She has also developed several major online projects, such as Consistory: Testimony in the Late Medieval London Consistory Court and Sanctuary Seekers, and contributes to blogs and podcasts, including a recent appearance discussing sanctuary on the Gone Medieval podcast.  Towards the end of October 1452 Thomas Kendale, an English labourer, fled to the parish church in Norton, Hertfordshire. There he confessed to having stabbed one Thomas Whitemore in the heart with a dagger, killing him. We might naturally assume that as he was in a church Kendale made his confession to a priest, looking for religious absolution. In fact, however, he made his admission of the crime to a royal official. This was a formal step in a procedure of the English criminal law between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, available to accused felons. In a form of sanctuary, a criminal could flee to any parish church or churchyard to escape arrest. This was a venerable practice in Christianity from its early centuries, but its later medieval English version had several quirks. Though nothing in Christian theology or canon law set a time limit on such asylum, in England sanctuary in parish churches was limited to forty days. Within those roughly six weeks, the sanctuary seeker either had to leave the church, risking arrest and execution, or to “abjure the realm,” to go into exile. The latter process was part of the king’s justice, not the church’s mercy. The first step in a sanctuary seeker’s abjuration of the realm was to ask for the coroner, who acted for the crown (hence the name) in various legal procedures. When the local coroner appeared, the felon confessed the crime before him. The coroner recorded the details on his coroner’s roll, creating an official legal record that the sanctuary seeker had admitted the felony. Such an admission of guilt was normally a death sentence: hanging was the punishment for felony. If the sanctuary-seeking felon did things right, however, they would never have to face the court, for from long-standing common law practice, he (or much more rarely she) could “abjure the realm”. When the felon had confessed and taken the oath to leave the king’s dominion a standard procedure ensued: the coroners gave the felon a white cross to carry so that all would know them as an abjurer, assigned them a port from which to find a ship to cross the Channel, and sent them on their way. In English legal practice the land border with the kingdom of Scotland was only very rarely held to count as going into exile: it had to be “in partibus transmarinibus,” to parts across the sea. In theory – though not always in practice – the abjurer was accompanied by a relay team of constables to ensure they did not deviate from the road to the port. If caught off the road, they were subject to summary execution, as their guilt had already been legally acknowledged before the coroner. Yet it was not always easy to find a ship to take overseas, as Kendale was to find. Once Kendale had confessed the murder to the Hertfordshire coroner in the parish church at Norton, the coroner assigned him the port of Portsmouth. That was a long walk from Norton, about 100 miles or 160 km, but it made some sense: Portsmouth is as close to Norton as any of the ports on the south coast of England (the shortest passage to “parts across the sea”). By the time Kendale got to Portsmouth, however, it was November and the weather had turned ugly. He waited there for several days, but no one was crossing “owing to the great violence of the sea.” We don’t have the details, but evidently after he failed to find a ship Kendale was taken into custody as an abjurer who had not quitted the realm as he had sworn to do. He was in danger of swift execution even though (he claimed) he had made every effort to go into exile. Something (again, not recorded) interrupted Kendale’s direct trip to the gallows. We can infer that he was somehow able to make a plea directly to the king, asking his monarch to use the royal powers of mercy to deal with his problem. By this point, however, Kendale’s story had shifted: it was no longer about his blamelessness for his inability to find a ship, but instead a claim that he had not, in fact, committed the murder at all. He said that he had fled to the church and made a false confession only to save his life, as the accusation of murder had been untrue, maliciously made. He feared nonetheless that his enemies would procure his conviction and execution. This avowal of innocence sounds suspiciously convenient at this stage, but it is true that allegations of corruption in the mid fifteenth-century English criminal justice system were all too believable. Henry VI evidently believed Kendale’s story and in March 1453, the king granted Kendale his mercy and the accused murderer walked free. Kendale was, ultimately, a very lucky man, whether fairly or unfairly accused. But let’s go back to his time in Portsmouth harbour. He must have been very anxious for the few days he sought a passage across the channel. He was not the only abjurer for whom it was difficult to find a ship. Here’s one similar story, for example, and let me briefly tell you another, with some telling details. In 1530, one Henry Danby, a baker from London, confessed to having […]

The following was researched and written as part of Interco(a)stal: Reading Between the Ribs of Maine’s Maritime History, a yearlong, place-based project that uses monument reinterpretation as a frame...

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