Twelfth-Century Rise of Spelling Reforms: The Ormulum and the First Grammatical Treatise

Abstract

The twelfth-century renaissance was a new stage in European intellectual life. This paper examines the works of two distinguished medieval phonologists and spelling reformers of the time, namely Orm’s Ormulum and the so-called First Grammatical Treatise, which mark a significant step in medieval grammatical theory and show a number of similarities in the intellectual background, governing principles, and sources of their orthography.