Published June 27, 2026
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Concepts as Carrier of Cultural Memory: The Soul from Beowulf to the King James Bible
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Yıldız Technical University
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Abstract: This study traces the main shadows of meaning the word soul, as an intrinsically religious concept, acquired throughout its history from the Middle Ages to early modernity. The article examines the usage of the word through six texts spanning Old English to Early Modern English: Beowulf (c. eighth–eleventh century), The Vespasian Psalter (c. eighth century), The Paston Letters (1465), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), John Donne’s Holy Sonnets (c. 1609–1617), and King James Bible (1611).
Theoretically, the study draws on cultural memory as conceptualised by Jan Assmann (2008). Methodologically, the research draws on conceptual history, connecting literary usage to broader religious and political history, integrating approaches from historical linguistics (orthographic and semantic change), cultural history and discourse analysis (usage in specific contexts).
The results demonstrate that ‘soul’ started its semantic journey in Old English as a pagan Germanic word that was – together with other entities – an intrinsic part of a fourfold model for human psychology. It then acquired more comprehensive semantic layers after the Christianisation of Britain and was integrated – under the influence of theological translations from Latin – within a Scholastic bipartite model that combined the different human psychological and intellectual functions in a unitary soul.
It was not long before the soul began to integrate a holistic sense, referring to the whole person during the 1300s. As Christianity became more institutionally and socially established in the Late Middle Ages, ‘soul’ took on another shade of meaning that made it more closely tied to domestic care and one’s personal welfare. However, as the Reformation shook many of the older religious and social tenets, ‘soul’ acquired yet a new layer of meaning as a psychological entity that was both a subject to and an active agent in the social, theological and personal turmoil of the time. During this semantic trajectory, different institutions maintained the preservation and transmission of the word’s cultural memory. The article identifies the ones that were prominent in each period.
Keywords: Soul, cultural memory, conceptual history, Old English, Middle English, paganism, Christianisation.
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Additional titles
- Translated title (Turkish)
- Kültürel Hâfızanın Taşıyıcısı Olarak Kavramlar: İngilizce Soul Sözcüğü Beowulf'tan King James Bible'a
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References
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