Abstract
The most recent edition of the Ormulum by Robert Holt (The Ormulum, with the notes and glossary of Dr. R. M. White, OUP, Oxford, 1878) pays little or no attention to its seventeenth-century readers and owners: the philologists Jan van Vliet (1622–1666) and Francis Junius (1591–1677). This study aims to fill this lacuna in the reception history of the Ormulum by analysing the study of the Ormulum in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The results show a vivid and imaginative approach to the Ormulum by its first active student, Jan van Vliet, who discovered its metrical qualities and studied its lexicon. Despite a declining interest in the Ormulum by later scholars, the activities and ideas of its early readers have been a lasting influence on the reception of this unique text.
Highlights
In 1852, the reverend Robert Meadows White (1798–1865) published the Ormulum in a two-volume edition produced by Oxford University Press.1 A fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and a former Rawlinson professor of Anglo-Saxon, White had worked from 1832 to 1852 on his Ormulum edition plus glossary, harvesting admiration and criticism, both at home and abroad (Carlyle 2009)
This study aims to fill this lacuna in the reception history of the Ormulum by analysing the study of the Ormulum in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
The results show a vivid and imaginative approach to the Ormulum by its first active student, Jan van Vliet, who discovered its metrical qualities and studied its lexicon
Summary
Van Vliet’s Ormulum transcripts preserved material from columns lost, but they inform us about his assessment and appraisal of the text. Van Vliet must have opined to Junius that the Ormulum was a verse text, and almost certainly this information was passed on to Thomas Marshall, Junius’s closest collaborator on the publication of the Old English Gospels and early mentor of George Hickes.. Van Vliet must have opined to Junius that the Ormulum was a verse text, and almost certainly this information was passed on to Thomas Marshall, Junius’s closest collaborator on the publication of the Old English Gospels and early mentor of George Hickes.42 On account of his political views Hickes, as a non-juror, was effectively barred from inspecting the manuscript, but, instead, depended on the services of the Oxford antiquary Edward Thwaites to supply him with text fragments for his 1705 Thesaurus (Niles 2015: 149–151; Harris 1992: 36–39).. These contrasting arguments illustrate that in the nineteenth century the religious dimensions of texts such as the Ormulum were still playing a role in polemic discourse and were a reason printed the Ormulum in half lines, similar to those of van Vliet, a custom followed by Thomas Wright (1846: 436–438), and by White
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