Research project
Strangers: Migration and Multilingualism in Early Modern London
- Start date: 1 August 2024
- End date: 31 July 2026
- Funder: Leverhulme Trust
- Primary investigator: Dr John Gallagher
Description
The London Exchange by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77). Part of the Wenceslaus Hollar Collection – Box 9, folder 18. Image courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.
Early modern London was a city of many languages. At a time before English had become a global language, the city thrummed with the languages of travellers, traders, and immigrants. This project, funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, uses the multilingual archives of the the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century city’s migrant communities to explore how urban life was shaped by linguistic diversity.
Using sources ranging from records of insults in the streets to the last words of migrant women making their wills, and drawing on the archives of courts, churches, companies, and city, this project will explore how multilingualism structured social relations between migrants and their English neighbours, how the linguistic makeup of English urban communities changed in response to heightened immigration, how religious and political authorities sought to manage multilingualism, and what the meanings of multilingual life were in multilingual marriages, households, churches, workshops, and streets.
This is an interdisciplinary project which aims to make contributions to urban history, histories of migration, and the social history of language, while drawing on and speaking to an exciting range of recent scholarship across a number of disciplines on language and translation in historical perspective.
This project’s focus is on London, but its ambitions are much broader: it argues that linguistic diversity shaped the modern city at a crucial phase in its development. So, alongside an academic monograph on early modern London, this project will also make a broader argument about linguistic diversity and the emergence of the modern city.
As such, my work on London will also prompt an exploration of the role of linguistic diversity in shaping social relations, city spaces, and structures of urban authority in cities such as Lima, Amsterdam, Manila, New York, and Lisbon – the first steps in a new, global research direction.
The Leverhulme Trust
Since its foundation in 1925, the Leverhulme Trust has provided grants and scholarships for research and education, funding research projects, fellowships, studentships, bursaries and prizes; it operates across all the academic disciplines, the intention being to support talented individuals as they realise their personal vision in research and professional training. Today, it is one of the largest all-subject providers of research funding in the UK, distributing approximately £100 million a year. For more information about the Trust, please visit www.leverhulme.ac.uk and follow the Trust on X @LeverhulmeTrust.
