Project Title: Formulaic Language in an Early Modern Scottish Community of Practice:
The Stewart Erskine Correspondence, 1600–1644
What was your research about?
This thesis investigates an early modern Scottish epistolary Community of Practice (CoP), analysing how its members established and maintained social relationships through the shared
communicative resource of formulaic language. The materials are drawn from the Papers of the Family of Erskine of Alva, held at the National Library of Scotland and National Records of
Scotland. The dataset comprises 183 letters sent or received between 1600 and 1644 within the
correspondence network of Marie Stewart, countess of Mar, and her husband, John Erskine, 2nd earl of Mar. By adopting the dual designation Stewart-Erskine letters, the thesis intentionally centres Marie Stewart and brings her into greater scholarly visibility.
The thesis argues that the correspondents whose ideologies, confessions, social positions,
and linguistic practices both aligned and diverged, formed a cohesive and functional multilingual CoP. It demonstrates that the strategic use of formulaic language was central to effective communication within the CoP, which operated against a background of profound religious, political, and linguistic upheaval. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogism, the thesis treats formulae as remembered linguistic ‘chunks’ through which influence, alignment, and shared practice can be traced. In doing so, it highlights the communicative adaptability of the Stewart– Erskine CoP and contributes to broader understanding of how formulaic language reflects ideological and social dynamics in early modern Scotland.
Chapter 1 introduces the Stewart-Erskine correspondents, outlines the research questions,
and contextualises the materials. It also provides a reader apparatus that overviews the StEr CoP members, biographical details, interpersonal relationships, and patterns of correspondence within the corpus.
Chapter 2 sets out the interdisciplinary methodological framework, reflecting the need to situate historical documents within their conditions of production and reception. It reviews relevant work in historical pragmatics, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, manuscript studies, and social history, and establishes a pragmaphilological toolkit combining sociolinguistic variation analysis, discourse analysis, politeness theory, and Magnusson’s (2004) theory of linguistic scripts.
Continuing this contextual emphasis, Chapter 3 examines the sociocultural and sociolinguistic environment in which the CoP operated, with particular attention to the complexities of confessional identity, linguistic and cultural contact, and how disruptions, from changes in personal status to the broader upheavals of war, shaped epistolary practice. This contextual grounding provides the interpretive framework necessary for analysing formulaic choice in the chapters that follow.
Chapter 4 addresses Research Question 1 ‘How can we assemble and digitally encode a corpus of the epistolary writings of an early modern Scottish CoP that enables both computational analysis and public access?’ By detailing the workflow used to compile StErCor2, a novel 61,000- token TEI–encoded corpus, and its accompanying sociolinguistic metadata framework stored in an MS Excel workbook, the chapter establishes the empirical foundation on which the subsequent analyses depend.
Chapters 5–7 address Research Question 2: ‘How did members of the StEr CoP use the following three types of formulaic language in their correspondence to construct and negotiate
relationships, exert mutual influence, and reflect sociolinguistic identities: (a) religious formulae, 3 (b) epistolary formulae (address forms, subscriptions, and superscriptions), and (c) symbols?’ Each chapter advances the argument by examining these distinct but interrelated components of the CoP’s communicative repertoire in turn.
In conclusion, Chapter 8 synthesises the thesis’ overall findings, arguing that religious and epistolary formulae, and symbols, collectively formed a single integrated, multimodal communicative repertoire.
