These definitions of terms relating to ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘vulgar’ are taken from the learned Latin–French dictionary which Firmin Le Ver compiled at the Carthusian house of St Honoré at Thuison, near Abbeville, in the first half of the fifteenth century. Public, popular, common, manifest … such are the concepts deemed crucial here. Publicus should be understood as appertaining to people in general (ad omnes generaliter), while popularis has the sense of ‘belonging to or fit for the common people’, ‘available to, directed towards the whole community, public’. Publicatio has the pre-print culture sense of the transmission of information into ‘a public sphere of discussion, debate, news, gossip, and rumour, in which things were generally spoken of and generally known’. The various ways in which these ideas were negotiated in different medieval European languages (in official, learned Latin and in demotic ‘vulgars’ or vernaculars) and in both ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural situations, are the subject of this book.