Chaucer, Gower and Langland -- Lyrics and romances -- Devotional writings -- Owners and users of medieval books -- A tribute to Professor Takamiya

The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; "Sir John Mandeville"; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historical prose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print. Contributors: BELLA MILLETT, RALPH HANNA III, AD PUTTER, KANTIK GHOSH, BARRY A. WINDEATT, A.C. SPEARING, IAN HIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, VINCENT GILLESPIE, HELEN L. SPENCER, ALFRED HIATT, FIONA SOMERSET, HELEN COOPER, GEORGE KEISER, OLIVER S. PICKERING, JAMES SIMPSON, RICHARD BEADLE, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE.

A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar Why do we say “I am reading a catalog” instead of “I read a catalog”? Why do we say “do” at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history. Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English— and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it’s not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).

Textual-Critical studies of medieval English literature have primarily focused on practical matters such as transcription, collation, recension, and the identification of scribal hands. But the theory of editing medieval English works remains largely unexplored. Tim William Machan addresses this void by setting out to articulate the textual and cultural factors that distinctively characterize Middle English works as Middle English and to reveal the role these factors play in editing and interpretation of these works. In revealing how the creation of textual criticism affected the transmission of Middle English, this book will be of interest and accessible to readers relatively new to both textual criticism and Middle English. It will also be of vital importance to specialists in medieval studies, Renaissance studies, and textual criticism.

First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

Like the Bible upon which it is based, the metrical paraphrase is unlikely to be a text read cover-to-cover by the faint-hearted. The Paraphrase is, in several ways, a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about readership and lay understandings of the Bible, about the relationship between Christians and Jews in late medieval England, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, about perceived roles of women in history and in society, and even about the composition of medieval drama. The Paraphrase-poet's proclamation that he intends to write stories "for sympyll men" (line 19) to understand the Scriptures and be engaged by them-"That men may lyghtly leyre / to tell and undertake yt" (lines 23-24)-thus combines the profit of sacred literature with the pleasure of the secular. This is Horace's utile et dulce ("both useful and pleasing") principle at its clearest, a singular example of the didacticism that characterizes so much of medieval literature, an aesthetic of pedagogic efficacy that is inseparably linked to the essential component of true pleasure in the text.

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of languages in written form. Written language alternation has existed since ancient times. It is present today in a great deal of traditional media, and also exists in newer, less regulated forms such as email, SMS messages, and blogs. Chapters in this volume cover both historical and contemporary language-mixing practices in a large range of language pairs and multilingual communities. The research collected here explores diverse approaches, including corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, literacy studies, ethnography, and analyses of the visual/textual aspects of written data. Each chapter, based on empirical research of multilingual writing, presents methodological approaches as models for other researchers. New perspectives developed in this book include: analysis specific to written, rather than spoken, discourse; approaches from the new literacy studies, treating mixed-language literacy from a practice perspective; a focus on both "traditional" and "new" media types; and the semiotics of both text and the visual environment.

An exploration of the use of images in Middle English texts, tracing out what can be deduced of a theory of language.

"A direct, clear, and user-friendly introduction to the sound of Chaucer's language, as well as to aspects of Chaucer's vocabulary and principal metrical form."--Back cover.

The volume provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. A re-evaluation of the concept of periodization is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional linguistic areas – phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics – and chapters on prosody, idioms, fixed expressions, onomastics, orthography, register, and standardization, among others.