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 indicates that artists had some familiarity with a second language.
Monuments that manifest intramonumental mixing are the largest group. In these, one or two discrete texts are written in a language different from the one that dominates in that site. This group can be divided into three subtypes according to the kind of texts involved: didactic tituli; devotional and dedicatory inscriptions; and sacred speech acts. In the first subset, one or two short tituli interrupt an otherwise monolingual pattern of figural identification. Nicholas, who scarcely needed identification, received a double titulus more often than any other saint, although in the crypt church dedicated to Michael at Li Monaci it is the archangel and John the Evangelist who received the double label, done by the same hand [43.st.1]. As in this case, only rarely is the saint with the extra titulus the titular saint,83 so the double name is not warranted by communal significance; nor is the doubly labeled figure the name saint of any patrons or supplicants or artists whose inscriptions survive (there is a low correspondence in the Salento between supplicants and homonymous saints).84 Most likely the special tituli were connected with an individual’s desire to advertise personal devotion by visual means: more text attracted more attention because of the power of script itself. Sacred figures were made more powerful and more insistently present by graphic and epigraphic means.
A second type of intramonumental language mixing occurs when the lessused language is employed for a devotional or dedicatory text. Hence a layman and a Latin text are inserted into the otherwise entirely Greek program at the Orthodox monastery of Santa Maria di Cerrate [114.E–G; Plate 15]. Clearly, the Lord accepted prayers in both Greek and Latin, and language did not preclude someone from patronizing a church of a different Christian confession. The third type occurs when code switching indicates a speech act by a holy person. In the thirteenth-century Annunciation scene in San Pietro at Otranto, the titulus for the archangel Gabriel is in the church’s dominant language, Greek, but his salutation to the Virgin is rendered in Latin.85 The open Gospel book held by Christ at several sites displays text in a language different from the majority inscriptional language in the church. It serves to distance him from the local speech community, and a few individuals likely reaped social benefits from this change of code: the local priest may have been seen as bridging the gap between sacred and secular because of his (relative) scriptural literacy, and the patron’s status would only increase if the language of the sacred citations were also his own public language. This was certainly the case with John of Ugento at Acquarica [1.A].
Only a few sites in the medieval Salento can be termed “bilingual monuments.” In these cases there is no dominant language; both Greek and Latin are used extensively and contemporaneously. Perhaps the best example is the dated crypt at Li Monaci, where the long dedicatory inscription is in Greek [43.A], two saints are identified in both Greek and Latin [43.st.1], the protagonists in the Annunciation and the Crucifixion are labeled only in Latin, and the Crucifixion scene in the apse has the titulus “VICT[OR] MORTIS” [43]. The date in the dedicatory text (1314/15) applies to all of the extant images on stylistic and paleographic grounds. The French-surnamed patron employed a father-and-son team of painters, one of whom used artistic models intended for Roman-rite places of worship even though this site was intended for Orthodox use: it contains an exclusively Orthodox saint, Onouphrios, in the left corner. In the left apse niche, an elderly John the Evangelist—the Byzantine type, not the youthful evangelist favored in European art—holds a Gospel book that has around its edge Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος (“In the beginning was the Word,” John 1:1) [43.st.1]. Above him, a partly preserved fragment of a fish is the one that swallowed Jonah, identified by the letters omicron plus a superimposed pi and rho, the beginning of ho prophetos, “the prophet,” in Greek. The connection between Jonah and John is both liturgical and textual. In the Orthodox liturgy the book of Jonah was read at Vespers on Holy Saturday while John 1:1 was read the next morning, Easter Sunday. The text of Jonah begins “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah” and John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word.”86
Adjacent to Jonah and John at Li Monaci is the Annunciation, done by a