This book is a rigorous and broad update of the state of the art in the investigation of Old and Middle English. The volume, written by some of the best known experts in this field, addresses different issues, such as etymology, manuscript sources, and medieval literary traditions, among others. Its contents will be particularly useful for those interested in the different perspectives of current research in the field, exhorting the reader to consider the relationship of the medieval textual heritage and language with both its contemporary medieval audience and the readers of the 21st century. This book will appeal to specialists in Old and Middle English language and literature and also to university students. In contrast with monographs, which focus on a specific aspect, these essays allow a broader panorama of what is being done and the approaches currently being used.

This book is a rigorous and broad update of the state of the art in the investigation of Old and Middle English. The volume, written by some of the best known experts in this field, addresses different issues, such as etymology, manuscript sources, and medieval literary traditions, among others. The contents of the volume will be particularly useful for those interested in the different perspectives of current research in the field, exhorting the reader to consider the relationship of the medieval textual heritage and language with both its contemporary medieval audience and the readers of the 21st century. This book will appeal to specialists in Old and Middle English language and literature and also to university students. In contrast with monographs, which focus on a specific aspect, these essays allow a broader panorama of what is being done and the approaches currently being used.

Uses the life of Richard I to argue that medieval England's public talk was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature.

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.

Vita mortuorum in memoria vivorum — volume 5 of the Beyond Language series is dedicated to the memory of Professor Jacek Fisiak, one of the titans in English historical linguistics in Poland and beyond. For over 40 years, he taught at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, where he established a stronghold of English studies in Europe. His efforts were appreciated with medals, awards, honorific titles, and mentoring positions amongst academic bodies. “The present In Memoriam volume undoubtedly counts among the all-encompassing and much-expected individual and collective acts of commemoration to recognize the authority of Professor Jacek Fisiak—the great scientist, the indefatigable Organizer, Manager and Mentor, relentless of any adversity or difficulty; the person whose countless contributions and merits in the history of Polish humanities – especially in the field of philological sciences and English studies in Poland – cannot be overestimated. […] On the one hand, the articles included in the volume yield a multidimensional testimony of the authors' scientific kinship with Professor Fisiak's broad scientific interests. On the other, they present a whole range of individual philological inquiries, starting from texts whose synthetic theoretical overtones prove the rich experience of their authors, through the articles of a more general nature, to prolegomena stimulating further in-depth scientific analyses. […]” (from the review by prof. Grzegorz Kleparski)_____TABLE OF CONTENTS_____Jacek Fisiak 1936–2019____ MENTOR in Academia: The Master in Title and Reality―by Joanna M. Esquibel____PART II. Old and Middle English Literature | Campbell’s “Art of Parallelism” in Old English Poetry: A Reappraisal―by Rory McTurk | The Question of Beowulf’s Relation to Fairy Tales Revisited―by Andrzej Wicher | Cornish Symptoms in the Old English Orosius―by Andrew Breeze | When a Lexical Borrowing Becomes an Ideological Tool: The Case of Saint Erkenwald―by Letizia Vezzosi | Medieval Multitasking: Hoccleve Translates Christine de Pizan and Imitates Chaucer, For Example his Binomials―by Hans Sauer | Mimetic Desires in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur―by Barbara Kowalik____PART III. Old and Middle English language and historical linguistics | Selected Elements of Language Change―by Aleksandra R. Knapik | For and Against Anglo-Frisian: The Linguistic Debate on the Matter―by Katarzyna Buczek | On Speech and Discourse Communities in the Viking Age―by Piotr P. Chruszczewski | East Anglia as an Old English and Middle English Dialect Area―by Peter Trudgill | Middle English Voiced Fricatives Revisited―by Piotr Gąsiorowski | From Where Did the Death of the English Inflection Come?―by Janusz Malak | On the Expansion of the Old Norse Root hap- in Middle English―by Rafał Molencki | So that in Clauses of Result and Purpose in Old English and Middle English―by Jerzy Nykie____PART IV. Adapting Earlier English for Modern Times | Adapting Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Drama for Theatre―by Magdalena Kizeweter, Anna Wojtyś | Medieval Modernism and the New Age Magazine: Creating Modernity While Turning to the Past―by Dominika Buchowska____PART V. Modern English, contrastive studies, and translation studies | Variation in the Use of the 3rd Person Singular Marker in American Private Letters from the mid-19th Century―by Radoslaw Dylewski, Magdalena Bator, Joanna Rabęda | The NAD Phonotactic Calculator: An Online Tool to Calculate Cluster Preferability Across Languages―by Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Dawid Pietrala | Event Construal in Some English Middle and Reflexive Constructions and Their Polish Counterparts―by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk | Problems in Studying Loan-Translations―by Alicja Witalisz | When do nouns control sentence stress placement?―by Aleksander Szwedek____PART VI. Notes on Contributors | Index

This collection explores Beowulf’s extensive impact on contemporary culture across a wide range of forms. The last 15 years have seen an intensification of scholarly interest in medievalism and reimaginings of the Middle Ages. However, in spite of the growing prominence of medievalism both in academic discourse and popular culture—and in spite of the position Beowulf itself holds in both areas—no study such as this has yet been undertaken. Beowulf in Contemporary Culture therefore makes a significant contribution both to early medieval studies and to our understanding of Beowulf’s continuing cultural impact. It should inspire further research into this topic and medievalist responses to other aspects of early medieval culture. Topics covered here range from film and television to video games, graphic novels, children’s literature, translations, and versions, along with original responses published here for the first time. The collection not only provides an overview of the positions Beowulf holds in the contemporary imagination, but also demonstrates the range of avenues yet to be explored, or even fully acknowledged, in the study of medievalism.

Mood, modality and evidentiality are popular and dynamic areas in linguistics. Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions – Categories, co-text, and context focuses on the specific issue of the ways language users express permission, obligation, volition (intention), possibility and ability, necessity and prediction linguistically. Using a range of evidence and corpus data collected from different sources, the authors of this volume examine the distribution and functions of a range of patterns involving modalising expressions as predominantly found in standard American English, British English or Hong Kong English, but also in Japanese. The authors are particularly interested in addressing (co-)textual manifestations of modalising expressions as well as their distribution across different text-types and thus filling a gap research was unable to plug in the past. Thoughts on categorising or re-categorising modalising expressions initiate and complement a multi-perspectival enterprise that is intended to bring research in this area a step forward.

New approaches to this most fluid of medieval genres, considering in particular its reception and transmission.Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval Insular romance, which although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon - a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions.The topics of the essays gathered here range from Dafydd ap Gwilym and Walter Map to Melusine and English Trojan narratives, and address topics from women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both. women and merchants to werewolves and marvels. Together, they position the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception; and alongside the generic re-imaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. The volume also shows how, even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.uistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio - in terms of learning, or power, or both.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

In Experimental Histories, Hannah Weaver examines the medieval practice of interpolation—inserting material from one text into another—which is often categorized as being a problematic, inauthentic phenomenon akin to forgery and pseudepigraphy. Instead, Weaver promotes interpolation as the signature form of medieval British historiography and a vehicle of historical theory, arguing that some of the most novel concepts of time in medieval historiography can be found in these altered narratives of the past. For Weaver, historiographical interpolation constitutes the traces of active experimentation with how best to write history, particularly the history of Britain. Historians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Britain recognized the difficulty of enfolding complex events into a linear chronology and embraced innovative textual methods of creating history. Focusing on the Brut tradition but also analyzing the long history of interpolated historiography, including the Bayeux Embroidery, Experimental Histories offers a new interpretation of generic remixing in medieval writing about the past. Drawing on both manuscript studies and the new formalism, it shows that the practice of inserting materials from romance and hagiography allowed creative revisers to explore how lived events relate to passing time. By embracing interpolation, Weaver provides lively insights into the ways that time becomes history and human actors experience time.