Middle English Texts Research Articles

"A translator is not free": J.R.R. Tolkien's Rules for Translation and Their Application in Sir Orfeo

"A translator is not free":J.R.R. Tolkien's Rules for Translation and Their Application in Sir Orfeo Curtis A. Weyant Amidst a description of many difficulties related to the translation of the Middle English poem Pearl, J.R.R. Tolkien complained in a letter to his aunt, Jane Neave, that "a translator is not free" (Letters 317). While he did not delineate a set of rules by which translators are shackled, over the years of his career as a professor, author, language inventor, and, indeed, translator, Tolkien occasionally offered thoughts about what constitutes a good translation, and in some cases he even prescribed rules—or at least guidelines—which translators should follow to produce a worthy translation. Some of these thoughts are revealed in letters like the one to his aunt, while others are found in the notes of his translations of texts in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and other languages. Still others can be discovered in the narrative and apparatus of his fictional works, such as Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings. Pulling together these diverse thoughts on translation scattered throughout Tolkien's writings affords an opportunity to better understand his varied works, both popular and academic, in a new light. It should be stated up front that Tolkien did not write a single set of instructions or rules for translation. The translation guidelines which he did formulate were penned at different periods of his life, often while pursuing disconnected projects. Nonetheless, regardless of the audience, there is some consistency among these disparate statements about translation. While Tolkien made no known attempt to codify a grand unified theory of translation, he nonetheless seems to have worked from a common set of translating principles that changed little, if at all, throughout his life. This paper pulls together Tolkien's various statements of advice, practice, and occasional criticism related to the work of translation into three broad subject areas: archaic words, nomenclature, and style. Following the discussion of these subject areas is an analysis of Tolkien's application of these rules, pulling examples from his translation of the Breton-derived Middle English lay Sir Orfeo. [End Page 63] Tolkien the Translator It is possible to view Tolkien's career and writings, both academic and popular, holistically as a lifelong engagement in various aspects of translation. As Joan Turville-Petre has noted, Tolkien "showed his pupils that the prime purpose of edition and commentary is to free the text from obscurity" (vi); translation is in a sense both edition and commentary wrapped in a single package, since it provides a version of a text along with an interpretation of that text inherent in the translation choices made along the way—even when notes or other information about those choices are not readily available to the reader. The combination of edition and commentary can be observed in Tolkien's translations of Anglo-Saxon poems like Exodus and Beowulf ; his translations of Middle English texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo ; and of course, the translations of works written in his own invented languages and scattered throughout the various editions and posthumously published drafts of his legendarium. The work of the translator starts well before the final published translated text, as it requires the serious consideration of individual words and phrases, the assimilation of new developments and ideas about the source material, and deliberation over how best to preserve the sense and style of the original work while also making its content accessible to readers who otherwise are unable to decipher it. As such, various phases of Tolkien's career can be viewed as focusing primarily (though never solely) on particular aspects of translation. His early work as a lexicographer, writing definitions for the Oxford English Dictionary and assembling a glossary for use with Kenneth Sisam's compilation of Middle English texts, demanded an in-depth study and understanding of etymologies and the nuances of how word forms, definitions, and connotations changed over time. As a professor at Leeds and Oxford, his lectures, academic articles, and commentaries on the finer points of language in texts like the Finnesburg Fragment, Ancrene Wisse, and The...

Dijahronijski aspekt morfologije složenih prideva

This paper focuses on a diachronic study of compound adjectives found in the Old and Middle English texts of the Helsinki Corpus. The compound adjectives of both periods are analysed, and further classified into types on the basis of the word class their constituent elements belong to. The aim of the research is to follow the development courses of compound adjective types in the two language periods and to investigate what happened to them in Modern English. The comparison of the types results in the description of the character of these changes, illuminating which Old English types survived into the subsequent periods, which were lost from the language, and what were the new ones introduced in the Middle English period.

Intertextual Variation in Old and Middle English

ABSTRACT The existence of word order differences between individual authors in Old and Middle English is well known. Nevertheless, many empirical investigations of earlier English word order have focused on just one or two texts from each time period. In the early part of the Middle English period, subordinate clause word order changed from a mix between verb-final and subject–verb to overwhelmingly subject–verb. In the transition period between the old and the new order, synchronic variation is expected. In this paper, 2400 subordinate clauses from four late Old English texts and six early Middle English texts are analysed for word order variation between different texts with different authors. The analysis reveals a high degree of variation between texts from the same period, seemingly independent of dialect and genre. The analysis also indicates that the change in English word order must have been slow and gradual.

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

A Middle English Text on Phlebotomy

espanolEste articulo persigue un doble objetivo. El primer es la edicion del texto en Wellcome Library, MS5650, ff. 58v-61v, y el segundo se refiere al estudio del estudio de su lengua y de su organizacion textual. Hasta donde es posible indagar, no hay informacion de que este manuscrito no haya sido editado. Pertenece a un volumen de textos medicos del siglo xv, aparentemente, no hay relacion entre los documentos del compendio, y su unico hilo conductor es la naturaleza practica de los textos. El analisis de los rasgos linguisticos me permitira ubicar el texto dialectalmente. Esto, junto con el analisis de las caracteristicas fisicas del texto, me permitiria proporcionar una fecha mas exacta de produccion del MS5650, ff. 58v-61v. Para un estudio mas exhaustivo del texto, se ofrece una caracterizacion del mismo desde una perspectiva de genero. Las conclusiones de este trabajo incluyen todos los resultados parciales y, al hacerlo, una imagen completa de MS5650, ff. 58v-61v, como objeto social y linguistico. EnglishThis paper has a twofold objective. The first one is the edition of the text in Wellcome Library, MS5650, ff. 58v-61v, and the second one concerns the study of its language and its textual organisation. To my knowledge, this manuscript has not been edited before, and belongs to a volume of fifteenth-century medical items bound together. There is apparently no relationship among these items, and the only connecting thread is the practical nature of these texts. The analysis of the language will allow me to tentatively locate the text from a dialectal perspective. This detail along with the analysis of the physical features of the text will help me to provide a more exact date of production of MS5650, ff. 58v-61v. For a more comprehensive study of the text, its characterisation from a genre perspective is offered. The conclusions of this paper comprise all the partial findings, and in so doing a complete picture of MS5650, ff. 58v-61v as both a social and a linguistic object is presented

Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris

Reviewed by: Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain by Carissa M. Harris Amanda Joan Wetmore carissa m. harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii, 285. isbn: 1–5017–3040–1. $42.95. Harris analyzes a selection of Middle English and Scots texts in a compelling and relevant monograph. Sexual obscenity’s didactic power to agitate and provoke thought connects her readings of literary sexual encounters. Obscenity reinforces medieval patriarchy by deigning women corporeal, sexually gluttonous objects. Many of Harris’ female speakers, however, adopt the language of their debasers and turn it around on them in a feminine heteroglossia. Harris’ first two chapters explore how men perpetuate rape culture and misogyny in same-sex environments, even as they petition for and against sex with women. In Chapter One, ‘Felawe Masculinity,’ manhood is established through narratives of sexual conquest among the ‘mercantile-artisan’ Canterbury pilgrims. Focusing primarily on the Reeve’s Tale, in which two clerks rape a mother and daughter based on the projected reaction of their peers, obscene talk among men mutually authorizes and encourages sexual aggression toward women. Harris brings in evidence from the North Wales Ched Evans rape trail (2016), showing similar discourses among modern same-sex peers in their justification of rape. Chapter Two, ‘With a Cunt,’ introduces poetry battles of the sixteenth-century Scottish court. In the context of Mary Stuart’s rumored adultery and young James V’s series of illegitimate children, these texts present a misogynist disgust with female bodies as inherently destabilizing for the male body politic. Instead, libidinal energies are turned inward as poetic prowess substitutes for the sexual act. Harris relates this rhetoric to modern freestyling, in which a rapper insults his opponent by degrading the women close to him. The final three chapters focus on women’s fictive voices and examine their ability to teach men about their pain and pleasure, and other women about navigating the sexual world: negotiating desire, obtaining pleasure, and avoiding rape and its effects. Chapter Three’s ‘Pastourelle Encounters’ presents idyllic debate poems between men and women over a typically forced sex act. Although the narrator is usually male and first and last to speak, women voice their non-consent, fear, and pain. Some resist through verbal sparring, some eventually succumb but protest systemic inequality, others are brutally raped and decry their injuries. Chapter Four, ‘Pedagogies of Pleasure,’ focuses on understudied English women’s songs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, helpfully placed in the Appendix. After the Black Death, young single women’s rise to the urban working class left them [End Page 72] especially vulnerable. Women’s objectification in the workplace was often expressed in the language of capital, which women seized upon as a model for negotiation. Harris then compares the same-sex education these sexually explicit lyrics offered to modern abstinence-only education, which, by limiting knowledge, limits the possibility of female agency. Finally, Chapter Five, ‘Songs of Wantonness,’ offers a selection of lyrics from two early Tudor anthologies, MS Ashmole 176 and the Ritson Manuscript. Polite and obscene lyrics about consensual and forced sex acts register meaningfully together as they are juxtaposed, exposing courtly ideology’s violent distortions—especially in the fiction of women’s power and men’s pain. Fictive women’s voices offer narratives that evoke ‘educational empathy’ for sexual victims, portraying the emotional, physical, social, and psychological repercussions of rape. Harris is a delicate close-reader, employing etymology and colloquial usage to bolster her vivid readings of obscene metaphors in mostly understudied texts. She also argues from codicological evidence to consider textual transmission and reader response. Harris ties all of her material to the present day, providing readings of contemporary texts in parallel with her analysis of a ‘usable’ medieval past. She concludes with a reading of Trump’s infamous ‘Grab ‘em by the pussy’ recording, revealing many of the same long-standing misogynist paradigms. Obscenity authorizes misogynist stereotypes, but it can also be used to challenge systemic violence and inequality. Amanda Joan Wetmore University of Toronto Copyright © 2020 Arthuriana

Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England by Sarah Salih

Reviewed by: Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England by Sarah Salih Gabriel Ford Sarah Salih. Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019. Pp. 220. $99.00. Sarah Salih's Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England draws together a range of materials to examine problems of representation, materiality, [End Page 441] and biblical iconoclasm in fifteenth-century England. Methodologically, Salih builds on Bruno Latour's work in actor-network theory, especially his On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, as well as Caroline Walker Bynum's and Michael Camille's research into the functions of medieval material objects, to explore tensions between Christianity and what she calls "paganity." As Salih's argument unfolds, cities and idols become particularly fraught and mutually interdependent sites for these tensions. Specifically, cities are what medieval English Christians inherit from the past, and idols are what they overthrow in the past. In plumbing the paradoxes embedded in these Christian material inheritances, Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England illuminates a variety of Middle English texts while also providing a useful theoretical framework for those working on myths of urban foundation, medieval classicism, hagiography, travel literature, iconophilia, and iconoclasm within and beyond fifteenth-century England. The introduction is the only one of the major sections that does not specifically organize itself around analyses of cities and idols. Instead, it establishes the framework for "paganity" as a site of inquiry. She uses this term to distinguish the largely imaginary cultural interlocutor that late medieval Christianity sustains for itself in its received historiography and sacred tradition (3 n. 12) from the historical practices that Christians might have described as "pagan." This imagined historical "paganity" is Salih's key interest here, not least because, as she observes, "There were no actual pagans in late medieval England" (2). Salih adapts Sylvia Tomasch's concept of the "virtual Jew" to theorize a "virtual pagan," a figure that allows her to discuss how literally absent pagans function in the imaginations of fifteenth-century English Christians. These virtual pagans acquire their cultural prominence from their presence at national, ethnic, or urban points of origin. Pagan Trojans founded both Rome and Britain, to give two examples to which Salih often returns. Appropriately, these legendary founders persist in the medieval imagination with a set of characteristic traits or topoi: "The pagans of classical legend are socially magnificent, technologically adept, founders of nations, cities and social order, but later degenerate into the sadistic but inept rulers and patriarchs of hagiographic encounters" (24). The positive traits keep the pagans continually before late medieval English Christians as exemplars, while the historiographic arc of their achievement and decline structures Christian society's account of its own superseding of these societies. This arc, from the founding of cities to their [End Page 442] conversion to Christianity and then to their persistence under Christian control, provides the basic structure of Salih's argument. The first chapter after this introduction, entitled "Origins: Building Cities, Making Idols," examines pagans as builders and thus as founders of built urban landscapes. Analyses of Lydgate's Troy Book bookend this chapter, and scholars interested in Lydgate's classical romances in particular will likely find this chapter of most interest. In Salih's analysis, Lydgate participates in a tradition of appropriating Troy for, and distinguishing Troy from, Britain and its cities. Central to this distinction is the function of the idol, and this chapter takes a wide chronological and temporal sweep to situate the idol theoretically, historically, and corporeally. It presents patristic and medieval Christian accounts of the idol as dead matter potentially animated by the worship of its devotees and—sometimes—the spirit of demons. Salih reads this Christian idol theory alongside the modern thinkers—Latour, Bynum, and Camille again, but also prominently Sara Ahmed and Bill Brown—finding rich dialogue in their discussions of objects, materiality, and idols. Grounding its discussion in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Wisdom, the chapter locates the beginnings of idolatry in a father's veneration of a vicarious object that stands in for his deceased son. This conflation of absent body and ambiguous idol sets the idol up as a...

The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut

Reviewed by: The Motets by Guillaume de Machaut Alice V. Clark Guillaume de Machaut. The Motets. Edited by Jacques Boogaart, translated by R. Barton Palmer and Jacques Boogaart, with art historical commentary by Domenic Leo. (Guillaume de Machaut: The Complete Poetry and Music, vol. 9) (Middle English Text Series.) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. [Acknowledgments, p. ix; pref., p. xi–xii; introd., p. 1–23; editorial policy, p. 25–32; The Motet Miniature: A Commentary, p. 33–45; score, p. 47–186; crit. commentary, p. 187–246; bibliog., p. 247–260. ISBN 9781580442879 (paperback) ISBN 9781580443029 (hardback) $39.95 (paperback); $99 (hardback).] Guillaume de Machaut is generally considered the most important poet and composer of fourteenth-century France. This assessment rests to a large degree on the fact that we have a large body of work securely attributable to him because he, unlike Philippe de Vitry and their mostly anonymous contemporaries, collected his poetry and music in books devoted entirely to his work. Six of these "Machaut manuscripts" containing both words and music survive, most copied during his lifetime and therefore representing different stages of his output; other sources exist, some only fragmentary and most without notation, and there are references to still others. All of this is clearly laid out in Lawrence Earp's magisterial 1995 study, Guillaume de Machaut: A Guide to Research (Garland composer resource manuals, v. 36 [New York: Garland Publishing, 1995]), affectionately known as the "Machaut Bible" and still unsurpassed, though it has been supplemented by his more recent work, done in collaboration with Domenic Leo and Carla Shapreau, on the Ferrell-Vogüé manuscript. Because Machaut's works extend across genres, including both polyphonic and monophonic music as well as narrative and lyric poetry, they were edited in stages. Most of the narrative poems were published by Ernest Hoepffner in the early twentieth century (Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, 3 vols. [Paris: Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1908–1921]), following up on earlier editions and excerpts, while the lyric poems (including those set to music) were edited by Vladimir Chichmaref (Poésies lyriques, 2 vols. [Paris: H. Champion, 1909]). While individual narrative poems have been newly edited in recent decades, Lawrence Earp observes that "modern editions of Machaut's poetry are on the whole not as solid philologically as the material now available for, say, Froissart." (Earp 1995, 197) Machaut's music was first edited in full by Friedrich Ludwig. The initial work was done in the first few years of the twentieth century, although the edition was published mostly in the 1920s and the final volume, devoted to the lais and the Mass, only became widely available in 1954, decades after Ludwig's death (Musikalische Werke, 4 vols [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1926–1954]). Another edition, by Leo Schrade, appeared only two years later [End Page 491] (The Works of Guillaume de Machaut, Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, vols. 2–3 [Monaco: Editions de l'Oiseau-Lyre, 1956]), but, as Earp has shown, it is "totally dependent on Ludwig" (Earp 1995, 281), though its use of modern clefs and convenient reprinting in 1977 means it is the edition most often encountered by students today. It is to be hoped that will change, starting with this new edition of the motets. The volume is part of a plan to edit anew all of Machaut's literary and musical works, overseen by R. Barton Palmer (a literary scholar at Clemson University) and Yolanda Plumley (a musicologist at the University of Exeter). Though it may seem strange at first to publish Machaut's works under the auspices of the Middle English Text Series (a program of the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, associated also with TEAMS, the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), the edition fits well the series's goal of making available editions suitable for classroom use. The two volumes published so far in this series are eminently affordable: the volume under review lists for $39.95 in paper, or $99.00 in hardback. The first volume of the edition, on the debate poetry, appeared in 2016; in addition to the French text and a facing English translation of Machaut...

An analysis of the punctuation of the Middle English "Letter of Ipocras" in London, Wellcome Library, MS 405

Punctuation in early English has been traditionally considered to lack consistency and systematicity, as shown in the relevant literature. Yet, recent research has uncovered that individual texts followed particular punctuation practices regarding signs and functions that were relatively systematic and consistent, even if they were also quite frequently text-based. In line with this, the present article explores the punctuation practice found in a copy of the Middle English medical text called Letter of Ipocras, the one held in London, Wellcome Library, MS 405. This contribution first reviews research on punctuation practices in Middle English texts and discusses the functions that historical punctuation has been reported to perform. Then, a cursory description of both the manuscript and the text is offered. Next, the punctuation signs found in the text are described and discussed, and their various functions at different levels illustrated with the help of examples. The article closes with a reflection on the global function of the pointing practice of the text, which veers towards the grammatical and pragmatic functions.

Beowulf 33a and Hapax Legomena

It is pointed out that ūtfūs in line 33a of the Old English poem Beowulf is not a hapax legomenon, as it appears in two late Middle English verse texts. It is also argued that the first word of the half line, manuscript īsiġ, is a hapax legomenon in English, if emendation to īliġ is accepted. The distribution of this latter adjective in West Germanic and its meaning are discussed.

Challenging Communion: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Literature

Challenging Communion: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Literature

Voiced or voiceless? Old english <f> In Middle English <fd> Sequences

AbstractThe Old English past system for the verb habban have, has past tense (pt) hæfde, hefde and past participle (ppl) hæfd, hefd (late West‐Saxon also hæfed (Campbell 1959: §762)). Many early Middle English texts show a reflex set that does not reflect the handbook consensus on the voicing of fricatives between voiced segments. In certain text languages in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) corpus of tagged texts (CTT), the ppl of the verb have is hVued, while the pt is hVfde. The reflex of OE <f> in these words is spelled <u> intervocalically and <f> before <d>. This orthographic distinction seems to be systematic and is illustrated also by the reflexes of OE hēafod head (LAEME heued, bihefdet), hlǣfdige lady (lefdi, lauedy), wēofod altar (ƿeofdes, ƿeouedes (pl), the past systems of (be)lǣfan leave (leafde, leuede), (be)lefan believe (lefde, ileuet) and (be)rēafian (be)reave (reafde, reuede).By this stage in the history of English, voiceless and voiced fricatives could appear contrastively in initial position. This opened the way for <f> and <u/v> to contrast medially, which happened increasingly systematically. Our main research question therefore is: does <fd> in early Middle English texts represent [vd] as normally supposed, or could it represent [fd]?From LAEME CTT we have retrieved the forms of all words that potentially show non‐initial labial fricative plus voiced consonant: i.e. reflexes of OE non‐initial <fd>, <fn>, <fr>, <fl>. The results indicate that the different consonants provoke non‐arbitrary differential use of <u> or <f>. Frequency of occurrence of voicing is tied to the sonority of the following consonant in the pattern: voiced stops > nasals > liquids (order: lateral > rhotics). Voicing is most resisted where sonority is lowest, with [d] the most resistant followed by [n], [l] and [r] in that order. Our concluding hypothesis is that at least a subset of reflexes of OE <fd>, were at least variably pronounced [fd]. Such a pronunciation existed variably alongside [vd] and more commonly [ved], from voicing of [f] in voiced surroundings and addition of unhistorical [e]. Similarly, at least a subset of reflexes of OE non‐initial <fn>, <fr>, <fl> also were at least variably pronounced with [f] and what we find in the texts are representations of what was current in speech.Then since that I have neuer swarfdeLet not my paines be ondeseruid(Sir Thomas Wyatt (1502–1542): London British Library, Egerton 2711, poem 41)

Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx by Margaret Connolly, and Raluca Radulescu

Reviewed by: Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx by Margaret Connolly, and Raluca Radulescu Alexandra Barratt Connolly, Margaret, and Raluca Radulescu, Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx (Texts & Transitions, 12), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. xx, 351; 30 b/w, 2 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €95.00; ISBN 9782503568478. For nearly twenty years, William Marx has been a general editor of 'Middle English Texts' (Universitätsverlag Winter), a series for which several of the contributors to this Festschrift, whose title is self-explanatory, have edited volumes. The first section appropriately concentrates on the minutiae of editing. A. S. G. Edwards queries the treatment of manuscript capitalization and text division in the Athlone Piers Plowman editions; Ronald Waldron examines the extent of scribal attention to punctuation in English and Latin copies of the Polychronicon; Janet Cowen scrutinizes the function, if any, of virgules in an English verse translation of [End Page 237] Boccaccio's De mulieribus claris; and Hans Sauer taxonomizes 'binomials' (i.e. doublets and similar phrases) in the same Boccaccio text. Section 2 focuses on chronicles. Erik Kooper exhaustively analyses the work of a copyist and/or adaptor who drastically abridged one version of Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle; Andrew Prescott and Raluca Radulescu both write on the Middle English Prose Brut, the former on its influential treatment of the Peasants' Revolt and the latter on the manuscript tradition; Julia Boffey speculates on the possible different audiences for Robert Fabian's two chronicles. Section 3 contains seven contributions on religious texts. Oliver Pickering claims one of the many hybrid versions of Nine Points Best Pleasing to God as prose heightened with rhyme and assonance; Susan Powell supplements her edition of Mirk's Festial with additional historical and textual notes and Margaret Connolly, too, revisits earlier work, discussing Chapter AB from Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, which circulated independently of and possibly existed before the main text. Veronica O'Mara studies the problems of defining the term 'prayer' in relation to those found in the Chester Processional; Mayumi Taguchi examines the use of multiple biblical and extra-biblical sources in The Patriarks and Caxton's Golden Legend; Martha Driver revisits the Gospel of Nicodemus to discuss the recycling of French woodcuts in Julian Notary's and de Worde's editions. John J. Thompson traces the fortunes among lay readers of Nicholas Love's Mirror in manuscript and print during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The volume concludes with a list of the honorand's publications. Alexandra Barratt University of Waikato Copyright © 2019 Parergon

The Invention of Style

Style is a rare word in Middle English. It has long been assumed that the concept of a writer's individual or personal style only developed during the early modern period. This paper traces the emergence of style in English writing from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, performing textual analysis at both the macro and the micro level by using computer software (Voyant; Stylo for R; AntConc) in tandem with traditional close reading. Two major databases were deployed: first, a collection of 279 Middle English digital texts assembled by my research assistant, Imogen Forbes-Macphail, and second, the Middle English Glossarial Database created by Professor Larry Benson, which includes lemmatized texts of Chaucer and Gower's English corpora. The results show that the literary sense of "style" is introduced to the English literary tradition by Chaucer, by way of Petrarch, and then more fully explored by Lydgate, especially in his Fall of Princes. Using stylometry software (Stylo for R by M. Eder), the essay shows in a series of graphs how Chaucer and Gower's styles are distinct from one another, using principal components analysis, cluster analysis, a bootstrap consensus tree, and network analysis; these graphs also show a clear distinction between Chaucer's verse and his prose. I suggest that the difference between Chaucer and Gower is related to these writers' explicit gestures toward the "high style" (Chaucer) and the "plain style" (Gower). The final section of the paper returns to the larger question of style as the word appears in the Forbes-Macphail database, investigating more closely the large spike in usage that appears in the fifteenth century in Lydgate's poetry. By examining his use of personal pronouns and adjectives in conjunction with style, I show that Lydgate pioneered the notion of a writer's personal style, in contradistinction to the rhetorical levels of style (high and low) to which Chaucer and Gower refer.

A Study of Noun-Deriving Suffixes in Competition in Middle English

This paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of the Germanic suffixes -dom, -hood, -lac, -ness, -rede(n), and -ship in Middle English. The main objective is to assess the occurrence and use of synonymous derivations in the corpora examined, namely the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) (Stenroos et al. 2014) and the Middle English Local Documents Corpus (MELD) (Stenroos and Thengs 2014). The six suffixes could be attached to the same base with no apparent distinction in meaning, giving way to competing abstract formations. The analysis can shed light and offer fresh insight into the co-occurrence of these contending formations in different Middle English text types, including specialised and more general texts, and help explain their survival or demise.

‘Hit is false poynted in many places’: Paratextual Communication on Punctuation in Early English Prologues, Title Pages and Errata Lists

ABSTRACTThis article explores paratextual references to punctuation (pointing) in prologues, title pages and errata lists in Late Middle and (early) Early Modern English texts. The aim is to discern what this paratextual evidence may reveal about text and book producers’ ideas about the purposes of punctuation and their attitudes to its (correct/incorrect) application in reading and writing during a period which largely predates the publication of theoretical works on punctuation. The three paratextual elements (prologues, title pages and errata lists) were chosen because they serve partly different kinds of communicative function in the book. The primary sources for the study of prologues include both manuscript and printed texts; for title pages and errata lists, the research is based on sixteenth-century printed materials obtained from the Early English Books Online database. The findings highlight some particular kinds of writing in which correct punctuation seems to have mattered to such an extent that text producers chose to alert the reader to it paratextually, for example devotional and liturgical texts intended for (communal) oral delivery. Paratextual statements concerning punctuation may include comments on the punctuation system in the actual material text/book at hand (a manuscript copy or a printed edition) or relate to the benefits of correct punctuation more generally. The infrequent inclusion of faulty punctuation in the studied sample of approximately fifty errata lists might be partly explained by visual and typographical constraints that affected the capacity of such lists to express corrections addressing punctuation.

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. Rebecca Krug. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp vii+241.

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader. Rebecca Krug. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Pp vii+241.

The Distribution of the Perfect Auxiliaries be/have in Middle English Texts

Like many Germanic languages, English has developed specific periphrastic constructions to express perfective meaning. Before being fully grammaticalized in the 16th century, they were used occasionally in Old and Middle English as complex verb phrases with either habban ‘to have’ or beon/wesan ‘to be’ acting as auxiliary verbs. By the Modern English period, forms created with be disappeared from the language and were almost completely replaced by forms with have, a process which did not occur, for instance, in German. As the data on this development are quite scarce, a relatively simple model is assumed with a steady diachronic progress towards the system established in Modern English, a model which disregards synchronic variation. This paper attempts to investigate the distribution of the perfective constructions with be and have, especially in the 15th century texts and to identify the main factors accounting for diff erences in their usage. Instead of taking into account only the diachronic aspect of the development described, the present study focuses mainly on investigating the synchronic variation in the auxiliaries used with the two most frequent verbs of motion, namely come and go in the perfective meaning.

MARGARET CONNOLLY and RALUCA RADULESCU (eds). Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx

MARGARET CONNOLLY and RALUCA RADULESCU (eds). <i>Editing and Interpretation of Middle English Texts: Essays in Honour of William Marx</i>

Degree of Grammaticalisation of Behind, Beneath, Between and Betwixt in Middle English

The present paper traces the history of four selected adverbs with the prefix be- in Middle English. Already in Old English behind, beneath, between and betwixt are attested to function as both adverbs and prepositions, which demonstrates that the process of grammaticalisation accounting for the development of prepositions from adverbs started before that period. The focus of the study are the diachronic changes of the degree of grammaticalisation of the examined lexemes in the Middle English period as demonstrated by the ratio of their use with a respective function in the most natural context. Hence, specially selected Middle English prose texts are analysed. The analysis shows that while behind and beneath are still frequently used as adverbs in the whole Middle English period, between and betwixt are predominantly used as prepositions already in Early Middle English. This clearly demonstrates that the degree of grammaticalisation of the latter two Middle English words was much higher than that of behind and beneath.