Christ [157.G], the Virgin (δέσποινα) [157.A], or an unspecified saint, presumably the one depicted adjacent to the relevant text [157.I, K].65 With very few exceptions, the supplicants identify themselves as “servants” (δούλοι) of the Lord, just as they did in Latin. The only other devotional formula is “Lord, help your servant” (Κύριε βοήθει) [53.C, 64.A, 66.G, 71.A(?), 94.D, 143.C–E, 154.A, 155.B (only 154.A is a dedicatory text)].66 The overwhelming popularity of Μνήσθητι Κύριε is not paralleled in other regions where abundant Greek inscriptions are found, including Cappadocia, Greece, and the Balkans.67 There the usual invocation is either Κύριε βοήθει or δέησις τοῦ δούλου τοῦ Θεοῦ, “petition of the servant of God,” and the latter is nonexistent in the Salento. The verb μιμνήσκωμαι rarely appears in public texts outside of Italy, where its popularity probably derives from its use in the liturgy. Salentine diptychs of the dead endlessly repeat the formula “Remember, Lord, your servant(s),” and from the mid-fourteenth century onward the local euchologia (service books) were supplemented by an amplification of the anaphora unknown in other regions that also begins with Μνήσθητι Κύριε.68 There may also be a connection with the identical Latin phrase “Memento Domine,” used in the Roman-rite canon of the mass.
The majority of funerary texts in Greek also use a repetitive formulation, Ἐκοιμήθη ὁ δούλος (ἠ δούλη)
Unlike the liturgical diptychs, which often commend the deceased to the bosom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,71 very few epitaphs in Greek add such injunctions as “help your servant” or “pray for him.” They do, however, supplement the declarative statement of death with multiple details about the date. In this they resemble Greek and Latin dedicatory inscriptions more than devotional texts.72 The year of death is always given according to the Orthodox calculation from the beginning of the world. Only a few epitaphs cite the indiction, but more give the month and date and some even the day of the week or the precise hour of death [37, 99.A, 114.A, 137.A, 156.A].
The Greek used in all types of inscriptions and graffiti ranges from excellent to crude. Every possible iotacism is found: η–ι, η–ε, η–ει, ει–ι, ι–οι, and others (for example, μη for μοι [143.D]), and much exchanging of other vowels (ω–ο, ω–ου) and consonants (θ–τ) as well. The large number of undeclined names in public texts—Βενεδίτους at San Vito dei Normanni in the late twelfth century [109.A], Μαργαρίτα at Vaste in the fourteenth [157.I]—suggests vernacular influence.73 Some of the damned in the Last Judgment at Santo Stefano in Soleto are identified in Greek (Ο ΠΛΟΥΟΙΟ, NECTOPHO) but consistently omit the final S [113.B].74 In the late fourteenth-century hospital dedication from Andrano, where ξενόνας ίτη σπητάλη is a vulgarization of the classical ξενών (hostel), it was necessary to signal its equivalence (ἤτοι, “that is” or “in other words”) to the Italian spitali (from Latin hospitale) [4.A], which must have been the more familiar term.75 At the same time, the Greek epigraph over the right door at Santa Caterina in Galatina identifies the church, or part of it, as a kappella, Italian for “chapel” but with the more Greek-looking orthography of k instead of c [47.A].
In a devotional text from Vaste, the priest George is identified as son of Lawrence, and either he or his father is an ὁβφέρτος, probably an oblate,76 of Saint Stephen, to whom the rock-cut church was dedicated [157.G]. In the elegant inscription by George of Gallipoli for a liturgical candelabrum [49], the Latin “patron” (πάτρωνος) is used, probably for metrical reasons, in lieu of available Greek terms.77 Perhaps the best example of vernacular impact in a Greek linguistic context is the sundial outside Santa Maria della Strada at Taurisano [145]. It has a Greek caption, Αί ὥραι τής ἡμέρας, but these “hours” are the Latin liturgical ones—Prime, Terce, and so on—identified here by their first letter rendered in Greek.78 The language of this sundial is bilingual, both literally and metaphorically.
Bilingualism
When Hebrew and Latin texts are juxtaposed in a single Jewish tombstone, the information in each text may differ minimally or substantially. In one stela at Taranto [123.A–B] the two epitaphs are very similar; they share the desire to highlight the important names, ensuring that they appear at the beginning or end of a line. Yet in another example from the same city, only the Latin side communicates the dead man’s age and his father’s name, while the Hebrew side combines excerpts from a psalm and a proverb [124]. The stela from Oria is similar [81]: the Hebrew face quotes from the ancient funeral liturgy, praises Hannah as a wise woman, and affects literary pretensions with its rhyming lines and initial acrostic that reveals the author’s name, Samuel. Only in the Latin text on top is the deceased woman given a title (“Lady”) and her father named with an abbreviated honorific (“R,” for “Rabbi”). It seems clear that this information was directed toward different audiences, not only in terms of literacy but also in content: titles in Latin, liturgy and poetry in Hebrew.
Hebrew bilingualism seems to end before the ninth century, but different types of Greek-Latin bilingualism are much more numerous and of longer duration. The absence of visual bilingualism except by Jews before the twelfth century indicates a high degree of language exclusivity by the people involved in commissioning and executing wall paintings and inscriptions. I have identified three major types of bilingualism in the public monuments of the later medieval Salento: intrasentential language mixing, which occurs within a single sentence or text; intramonumental mixing, in which a minority of texts are rendered in a language different from the one used extensively in a single monument; and fully bilingual monuments.79 Linguists have shown that such “code switching”—embedding a syntactic unit (a letter, morpheme, word, or sentence) in one language in a different matrix language—was a socially meaningful act.80
A handful of monuments exhibit intrasentential language mixing, in which an inscription, or titulus, begins in one language and ends in, or is interrupted by, another.81 An example is the titulus that identifies John Chrysostom in the apse of Santo Stefano in Soleto in the fourteenth century [113.sc.2]. It reads “S,” the Latin abbreviation for “Sanctus,” and “Ιω,” the beginning of John in Greek.82 A longer intrasentential text is the dedicatory inscription at Acquarica del Capo [1.A]: the eight-line paragraph begins in Latin but concludes with the painters’ names in Greek. The artists shifted to their native tongue to record their statement of authorship once the text assigned to them by the patron was complete. Code switching of the modest intrasentential sort may be unplanned, but it is not uninformative: it
