One of the most important lessons to be learned from examining linguistic choices is that language, like names, is not a secure indicator of cultural or ethnic background. Speaking, reading, writing, and commissioning texts are learned behaviors whose use is socially determined. As numerous sociolinguistic studies have shown, different languages might be appropriate in different situations, and a person might have many reasons to commission or execute a text that was not in his or her ancestral tongue. In the medieval Salento, the relevant languages of inscription were Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; Aramaic, Old French, and pseudo-Kufic script also make an appearance. Griko, the local dialect of Greek, and Romanzo, the Romance vernacular that became modern Italian, were spoken languages that, before the end of the fourteenth century, very rarely intrude into written texts. The contemporaneous use, juxtaposition, and combination of these languages are among the features that gave (and continue to give) the Salento a unique regional character. While Jews and Christians could look back to a golden age of linguistic unity before the Tower of Babel was built (Gen. 11:1), postbiblical languages had long since become an index of diversity, a criterion for belonging to or being excluded from certain groups. In what follows, I argue that texts in the public domain were visible social statements that contributed in meaningful ways to the construction and communication of individual and communal identity.
Information about languages comes from a variety of public texts, some carefully planned and formally carved or painted, others informally incised or painted ad hoc. For Hebrew, this material evidence is supplemented by manuscript data. I discuss each language group in turn and consider linguistic patterns found in different types of texts. By “types of text” I refer not to medium but to the primary function of the inscription or graffito: hortatory, dedicatory, didactic, devotional, or funerary. Certainly there is overlap between these categories, but if a devotional text also asks readers to pray for the author, I consider it hortatory. Dedicatory and devotional texts can be very similar; in assigning an inscription to the former group, I look for verbs that stake a personal claim to such notable action as building or rebuilding a church or paving an entire floor. I include fieri fecit texts (so-and-so “had made”) in this group only if they demonstrate extensive patronage and include additional information. Simpler claims of patronage, artist’s signatures, deictic texts that designate or identify something, labels or captions that instruct, inform, or merely indicate the writer’s presence are all considered under the rubric of didactic texts. Devotional texts, or supplications, either request divine help or ask that the person named be remembered by God or, less commonly, by the Virgin or a saint. These are usually termed “votive” texts, but I want to remove the implication that a vow has been promised or fulfilled because of a complete lack of evidence that this was the case: “vow” is nowhere used in public texts in the Salento in any language.1
Language Distribution
Although the types of medieval public texts are more or less the same everywhere, the linguistic map of the Salento is very different from that of the rest of Italy (it most closely resembles Calabria). The majority of the peninsula did not have ancient Greek colonies, two centuries of Byzantine rule, and an influx of medieval Greek speakers. Other regions of Italy do not contain a microregion of towns in which a Greek dialect is still spoken.2 No other Italian province can claim so many medieval public texts in Greek.
The Salento also has a significant number of texts in Hebrew, and this does have parallels elsewhere in Italy. Nevertheless, even expanding the geographical and temporal parameters to offset the paucity of Jewish remains yields less than a handful of synagogue dedications and epitaphs from only five sites. From other sources we know of many more Jewish communities in the Terra d’Otranto, especially in the late medieval and early modern periods.3 There is no doubt that these communities maintained Hebrew as their sacred tongue and continued to produce religious and scientific manuscripts until the sixteenth century, but they are both geographically and materially underrepresented here.
The southern Salento (the province of Lecce) preserves more than twice as many Greek texts as Latin ones, whereas in the northern Salento (most of the provinces of Brindisi and Taranto) Latin inscriptions outnumber Greek ones by a ratio of approximately three to one. (The south also had two-thirds of the sites known to have a Jewish presence.) If my inscriptional and graffiti evidence is an accurate indication of a larger truth about spoken Greek and Latin, we would conclude that there were relatively more Greek speakers in the southern part of the Salento and relatively more Latin in the north. Indeed, some scholars have made more sweeping claims about the precise borders of a Greek-speaking south and a Latin-speaking north.4 But inscriptional language is not the same as speech and the surviving material evidence may not be representative of larger communities of speakers. Even a modest painted inscription or a poorly carved tombstone denotes a certain level of social or financial means and depends on the availability of skilled craftsmen and other factors. When language is a product of sociolinguistic choice, a patron might choose a less common tongue to reach a particular subset of his potential audience.5
Dominant and alloglot (minority) languages probably could be found in most sizable communities in the Salento, even if it is not possible to document this archaeologically. Considering only the precisely dated material evidence, we see an increase in the use of Latin for formal texts beginning in the twelfth century, particularly after midcentury, and Latin texts continue to outnumber Greek ones in the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, however, the two languages are evenly distributed over the extant dated texts. In other words, while we might have expected the proportion of Latin texts to rise on pace with its increasing value as a language of power and administration—an increase that is apparent from documentary sources—dated Greek texts remained just as abundant. By contrast, the limited evidence for Jewish sites indicates that these were razed or reused by the tenth century (when Hebrew epitaphs disappear) or the thirteenth century (when synagogues are converted to churches at Trani) or later (late fifteenth century, when the synagogue of Lecce is destroyed). Such actions resulted in the loss of most Hebrew inscriptions even though manuscript and documentary evidence for continuous Jewish cultural activity survives.6
The proportions in which the various types of texts are preserved in Greek and Latin reveal some surprising differences. There are more Latin dedicatory inscriptions, perhaps because the latter tend to be epigraphs carved in stone and often still in situ in Roman-rite churches. On the other hand, there are three times as many devotional texts in Greek as in Latin, which may reveal something about differing expressions of piety—not that users of Greek were more pious, but perhaps that their public piety was more likely to be recorded in written form while Latin (actually Romance) speakers may have offered objects or images to their churches instead. Perhaps later Greek speech communities, such as that at Vaste in 1379/80 [157], had a greater need for visible public prayers than their neighbors because of the ever-declining numbers of Orthodox clergy and the infiltration of non-Orthodox church practices (see Chapter 6). If the early bilingual Hebrew-Latin epitaphs are excluded, there are eight times as many funerary texts in Greek as in Latin. Such a great disparity surely is due to multiple factors that probably include Orthodox funerary customs and local habits of display and imitation. Given the size of the sampling and absence of corroborating evidence, it is not possible to make claims about greater Greek literacy or financial clout. In the end, we cannot even be sure that differences in linguistic proportion are meaningful, as both absolute and relative numbers of texts are products of what has survived and what has been published or made accessible.
In addition to the texts in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that figure in the Database and are discussed below, other languages were occasionally used for public texts. The former pavement of the Norman cathedral at Brindisi illustrated the story of Roland and labeled those scenes in French (Rollant, l’arcevesque Torpin) [21.sc].7 Kufic or pseudo-Kufic script is used to evoke Arabic at San Pietro at Otranto, Santa Maria di Cerrate near Squinzano, and elsewhere, but the comprehensibility of these texts was probably nil and their
