Mark Faulkner. A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English

Abstract

Mark Faulkner’s book is a milestone in the study of early English, and essential reading for any scholar engaged with England’s literary and linguistic landscapes in the High Middle Ages. As he notes, scholarly treatments of the evolving language and writing of the period between securely ‘Old’ and safely ‘Middle’ English have suffered from a traditional perception of rupture, loss, and absence in the record, resulting from the (literal and figurative) marginalization of English during an efflorescence of Latin and French literature. This apparent literary scarcity following the Norman Conquest has led scholars to offer ideological readings of English writings and their relative absence alike, as assertions or failures of English identity embodied in a newly subaltern language; the earliest Middle English works have been described as fundamentally isolated and deracinated. Faulkner’s substantial achievement, quietly and painstakingly traced through a seriously impressive weight of written evidence and close analysis, is to show that both of these perceptions are incorrect.