Reading Middle English: Some Resources

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Reading Middle English: Some Resources Reading Middle English: Some Resources This document is intended to direct you towards some resources for reading and working with Middle English that you will find useful throughout the MPhil. Late-medieval Europe had an exceptionally complex linguistic ecology, with a spectrum of vernacular languages interacting with the linguae francae of Latin and the different forms of French used all the way from Britain to the eastern Mediterranean. Medieval England, as well as boasting an exceptionally long history of writings in the vernacular in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, was a place in which languages met and interacted: the distinctive language that scholarship calls ‘Middle English’ emerged from this linguistic mix (although the development of the modern scholarly idea of Middle English has its own complex history — on which see Matthews towards the bottom of this list). In the MPhil, you will be encountering writings in English, French, and Latin. Separate resources are provided for French and Latin, but, as some of the studies in the final section of this book suggest, it is impossible to think about the language and culture of medieval England without thinking seriously about all three of its main written languages. Before the MPhil begins, you should try to have a look at least one of the introductions to Middle English listed below if you can, and play around with some of the dictionaries, too. As you read more writings in Middle English, don’t forget that good-quality editions (e.g. the editions produced for the Early English Text Society, with their distinctive mud- brown livery) are excellent resources for the study of language: through their introductions, their explanatory notes, and (the first port of call for a mystified reader) their glossaries. PK, July 2020 Wide-ranging introductions to Middle English J.A. Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, A Book of Middle English, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 3–65. J.D. Burnley, The Language of Chaucer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). Simon Horobin, Chaucer’s Language, 2nd edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian, 2013). Useful Dictionaries Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2001); < http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/>. [the essential dictionary for definitions and citations of Middle English words] Oxford English Dictionary, ed. James Murray et al. (3rd edition online, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); < www.oed.com > [as a historical dictionary interested in how words change over time, the OED is often useful for reading Middle English — especially its detailed accounts of the etymologies of words] Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. Louise Stone and William Rothwell (London, 1977–93) <http://www.anglo-norman.net/ > [although not a dictionary of English words, there are deep connections between English and French in medieval England, and the AND can be useful for getting a better understanding of words that enter English from the French of England (or the reverse)] Dictionnaire de Moyen Français (ATILF CNRS / Université de Lorraine, 2012); < http://www.atilf.fr/dmf > [covering the period of Middle French (post c.1300), this is an essential reference work for your reading of Middle French literature, but it can also be useful for exploring how Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R.E. Latham, D.R. Howlett, and R.K. Ashdowne (Oxford: OUP for the British Academy, 1975–2013); available through searching <https://libguides.cam.ac.uk/az.php> Database of Latin Dictionaries, ed. Paul Tombeur et al. available through searching <https://libguides.cam.ac.uk/az.php> [includes the DMLBS as well as a range of other dictionaries looking at both classical and medieval Latin] These dictionaries all achieve different things, and you should get used to turning to them for their different purposes. Try, for instance, searching for word glose in both the MED and OED: you will see that the MED gives many more quotations from ME texts (offering some clues, perhaps, for your own further reading as you think about this term), whereas the OED mentions only a handful of ME examples, but gives much more detail on the etymology of the term (stretching back beyond Latin to its origins in Greek). Other uses of the word in different contexts, from both Anglo-Norman (or Anglo-French) and continental French sources can be dug up by searching for the same word, glose, in AND and DMF. More specialised or technical resources Tauno F. Mustanoja, A Middle English Syntax, Part I: Parts of Speech (Helsinki, 1960) Richard Jordan, Handbook of Middle English Grammar: Phonology, tr. E.J. Crook (The Hague: 1974) Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, 4 vols (Aberdeen, 1986) Margaret Laing, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English 1150–1325 Version 3.2 <http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/laeme2/laeme2.html> (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2013) Note that the two linguistic atlases listed above are enormously interesting and important resources for the study of dialect, but are not necessarily very user-friendly. The best way to approach these resources is through some case-studies of what dialectology of Middle English has to offer: see, e.g., M. L. Samuels, ‘Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology’, English Studies 44 (1963), 81–94. Middle English Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems, ed. Margaret Laing (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989) Useful studies or reflections on language Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: OUP, 2009) Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: CUP, 2005) John Fisher, ‘Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century’, Speculum 52 (1979), 970–99. Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500, ed. Tim William Machan, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2016). Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Carolyn P. Collette (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2009) David Matthews, The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Oxford: OUP, 2003) 1 Nicolette Zeeman Images, Relics, Idols and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England (Medieval and Renaissance MPhil: Optional Lent Term Course, Lent term 2021) Debates about the use and abuse of images raise many questions about the role of mediatory objects within Christian worship. Images and sculptures, famously described by Gregory the Great as the ‘books of the laity’, provided imaginative access to and information about God; they were also a means of encouraging devotion and exciting desire for him. But the more effective they were, the more they also risked drawing attention to themselves and becoming an object of devotion or fetishisation in their own right – ‘idolatry’. Underlying the problem of images is ultimately a problem about the right and wrong uses of the material world and all its objects, bodies, texts, institutions, practices and appearances. For this reason, the problem of images even has implications for certain ‘apophatic’ forms of contemplation, which emphasise the need for the subject to strip away earthly phenomena in order to open her/himself up to the divinity. It also has implications for thinking about the institution and phenomenology of the church. Debates about images become very intense in late medieval England due to the emergence of the English heresy of Lollardy, which attacked images as part of a larger critique of the church, one that focused on shrines, pilgrmages and incense, as well as many other ritual practices and priestly interventions. In response to this, the fifteenth century was witness to a sustained backlash against Lollardy and a renewed espousal of many image-using and related practices. However, Christian theories and anxiety about the image and the idol also find expression thoughout the later Middle Ages in an obsessive interest in the devotional practices of other cultures – both in the gods of classical antiquity and its literature, and in the imagined idols of contemporary Muslim culture (especially self-revealing in this last case, as contemporary Islam was a non image-using religion). Equally interesting, these religious theories also permeate secular medieval culture and find expression in the courtly art, literature and psychology of love. General Introductory Reading (please read at least one or two of these before the course begins; sections of some of them will be recommended for particular classes). Essential reading for each class appears first (there is more secondary reading for the first class than for subsequent ones). All of the required primary and secondary texts will be scanned and provided on the Faculty Moodle internet site. I can provide references for original-language editions for texts cited here in translation. Finally, please bring to each seminar photocopies of one image that you have found in your reading or elsewhere that we might discuss! Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers. Images and Literacy in late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), chapter 5; also chapter 4 of her England’s Iconoclasts, vol.1 Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); see also pp.1-34 of this book. Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol. Ideology and Image-making
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