Discourse analysis methods: Applicability to the research of late antique and early medieval texts

The article deals with the problem of the formation of a syncretic approach to the analysis of the discourse in the late antique and early medieval sources. The existing methods of analyzing the discourse of historical sources have proven their heuristic efficiency in providing the identification of new information about the motivations and goals of text creators, the perception of texts by readers, the ideological continuity and transformation of a specific space of meanings. However, all these techniques were created and tested on the material of the texts of the Modern Age. Researchers of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, although regularly turning to the analysis of discourse in a way of criticism of historical sources, did not formalize their approaches as special methods. Moreover, there was a position that the linguistic turn in the humanities did not affect antiquity and medieval studies, since these disciplines already widely used linguistic research methods. However, the achievements in research of discourses of the ModernAage proved the possibility of revealing a new level of information about texts and provided additional verification of research results. The author of the article proposes a generalized model for the analysis of antique and medieval texts, taking into account the limitations imposed by the peculiarities of their creation and existence. To create this model, the most significant and resonant concepts of the discourse analysis of historical and political texts were selected and compared in terms of their heuristic mechanics and capabilities - the history of concepts by R. Koselleck, the analysis of discursive formations by M. Foucault, the Cambridge School of the history of political thought by K. Skinner, J. Dunn and J. Pocock, and critical discourse analysis by N. Fairclough and R. Wodak. The first three concepts are correlated and complementary, which has already been discussed in the historiographic literature. They demonstrate the development of discourse in a long time dimension. Critical discourse analysis, on the other hand, provides a detailed study of an individual specific text. These approaches were analyzed in order to identify methodological tools relevant to the tasks of studying antique and medieval sources, and are compatible with each other. As a result, a sequence of analytical actions was proposed to identify the features of the discursive practices of the period of creating a text and the intentions of its author: identifying the discourse frame of the emergence of the text (the context of the emergence of the text as an author's statement among other comparable statements); determining the discursive formation within which the text emerged (as a response, question, comment); defining the semantic content of key concepts of the text in a historical context; identifying the discursive topoi used by the author - which makes it possible to draw a conclusion about the social practice of the text's existence and the possible system of interaction between the author and the reader.

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