Medical language – like all forms of living language – is subject to change. The ‘scientific currency’ (de Almeida 1991: 13) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries differs from our own. One word in English that had special meanings at the time, as identified by Professor Alberto Tanturri, is excitability, and the linked terms excite, excitant, and so on, which in the late eighteenth century came to develop specifically physiological meanings. This usage seems to derive from the writings of John Brown (1735–88), an Edinburgh physician of the Scottish Enlightenment whose biography is conveniently available in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Lawrence 2004; see also Beddoes 1795; Bynum & Porter 1988). Brown, the founder of an eponymous innovative nosographic system known as Brunonianism, held that excitability was the fundamental feature of living bodies, being triggered by interaction with the environment to produce excitement; that is, the life force. Brunonianism thus pointed forward to Vitalist and Romantic notions of the operation of the body, going beyond the dominant earlier eighteenth-century conception that living bodies could be understood as the outcome of mathematical or physical laws alone.

This introductory chapter discusses the contents of the volume with its focus on genres and text traditions of medical discourse in a diachronic perspective. Variability of medical language with its conventions and traditions of writing is a leading theme in several chapters and surfaces in others as well. The social and cultural contexts of production and use as well as meaning-making processes of written texts as communicative events receive attention. All contributions take context in textual production and use into account. Another point of emphasis is variation in discourse forms in texts that were removed from the original settings and repurposed for new readerships. Texts circulating in Britain are at centre stage, but medical discourses reflecting common ideological assumptions had a broad currency and English writers shared profoundly in the pan-European medical culture.

New resources have led to new insights into the history of English vocabulary. The appearance of machine-readable corpora has made it possible to contextualise particular idiolectal usages much more comprehensively than was possible until recently. Such developments have allowed, through the harnessing of the large bodies of data to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary and other resources, a much better understanding of intertextual engagement: what might be called authorial invention, the focus of this chapter. The chapter focuses on authorial invention during the Romantic period, with reference to three writers whose imaginative outputs drew profoundly on their understanding of medicine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Mary Shelley (1797–1851), and John Keats (1795–1821). As Richard Holmes has argued, Romanticism drew profoundly on its scientific inheritance, in the cases analysed here derived from direct or indirect encounters with thinkers such as Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808), Astley Cooper (1768–1841), William Cullen (1710–1790), and Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). However, they transformed this inheritance through what Holmes terms ‘imaginative intensity’.

Charles d’Orléans used English at a time when the language was becoming elaborated, that is, beginning to be used across a range of linguistic registers. The object of this chapter is to ‘place’ Charles in relation to his contemporaries in terms of language, with a view to identifying what he learned from his fellows and where he was fresh and innovative. In doing so the overall issue to be addressed will be: how did Charles deploy the linguistic resources available to him? Or, in other words, what kinds of invention (in the classical and medieval sense of ‘finding’) did Charles practise? Such questions lead us to a robust definition and understanding of Charles's style in relation to that of his contemporaries, and allow us moreover to assess the nature of his stylistic achievement within the culture in which he wrote, and in which his work was potentially received.

The English Voice of Charles d’Orléans

Mary-Jo Arn has urged us to resist ‘the attempt to read a detailed biography out of [the] poetry’ of Charles d’Orléans, and any reader of the English poems of London, British Library, MS Harley 682 will quickly realise that the poet has taken a delicately conventional approach to the love relationship. Although there is no reason to doubt that Charles – by all accounts ‘a very sociable, playful man’ – harnessed his own experience for his self-fashioning as a captive lover, the phraseology he deploys in his verses would have had a more generalised significance for his English- speaking contemporaries, allowing for broader, refined reflexions on amour courtois by a doubtless sympathetic audience of like-minded readers or listeners. In doing so, Charles clearly drew on the increasingly elaborated linguistic registers that fifteenth-century English supplied him with. But, as I will argue, he also found his own distinctive English ‘voice’, a voice that we can – albeit in many aspects only through the lens of a scribal intermediary – at least in part reconstruct.

The English Lexicon of Charles d’Orléans

Charles wrote, of course, at a time of considerable experimentation in the writing of English verse. In the previous generation of writers Geoffrey Chaucer had led the way in the development of the five-stress iambic line, whose extra foot allowed more easily for enjambment, but subsequent changes in English grammar, most notably inflexional loss, meant that later writers had to find new ways to deploy handy unstressed syllables.

In 1489, John Ramsay, a ‘notary public’ in Fife, copied a manuscript for the use of Symon Lochmalony, vicar of Auchtermoonzie in the same county. This book, now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.2, contains the two principal epic-romances of Older Scots literature: John Barbour’s Bruce, a poem originally presented to Robert II, King of Scots, in 1375, and ‘Blind’ Hary’s Wallace, which dates from a century later.Ramsay had already completed a copy of The Bruce two years before, although this earlier manuscript, now Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23, seems to be drawn from a different exemplar; the Cambridge manuscript is moreover much damaged, the first three books of the poem being missing.