Since the publication of Kennedy's monumental Bibliography of Writings on the English Language, no bibliography has systematically surveyed the Old and Middle English scholarship accumulated over the past 60 years. Tajima's work aims to meet the need for an updated bibliography of Old and Middle English language studies; it lists books, monographs, dissertations, articles, notes, and reviews on Old and Middle English language. The items have been listed into fourteen fairly broad categories: (1) Bibliographies, (2) Dictionaries, glossaries and concordances, (3) Histories of the English language, (4) Grammars (historical, Old English and Middle English), (5) General and miscellaneous studies, (6) Language of individual authors or works, (7) Orthography and punctuation, (8) Phonology and phonetics, (9) Morphology, (10) Syntax, (11) Lexicology, lexicography and word-formation, (12) Onomastics, (13) Dialectology, (14) Stylistics.

Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.

This book gives a linguistic overview of the first eight centuries of English poetry - years which produced such key works as Beowulf, Layaman's Brut and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It begins with chapters on the social and literary context, before turning in more detail to subjects such as poetic diction, rhymed and alliterative verse, borrowed words, recurrent phrases, rhetoric and linguistic variety. Aimed at the beginning student and general reader, the book seeks to enhance appreciation and enjoyment by making the linguistic resources of the poets better understood.

The monograph aims at filling a long-existing gap in English historical linguistics by offering a comprehensive account of the semantic development of Old and Middle English synonyms of the term sickness, and an examination of possible conditioning factors leading to the loss of Anglo-Saxon lexical items, presented within the context of previous research on the semantic change in general, and theoretical and practical discussion of English medieval medicine, in particular. Analyzing the origin and meaning of the terms within the overall structure of the lexical field, the author also considers different chronological layers of the sickness-nouns and the explicatory techniques used by the scribe when presenting those terms to their reader. The book will be of interest to lexicologists, scholars interested in historical language for specialized purposes, as well as historians of medicine.

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.

This book traces the evolution of traditional English verse structures from their Old and Middle origins to the Modern English period.

Originally published in 1977, Old English and Middle English Poetry provides a historical approach to English poetry. The book examines the conditions out of which poetry grew and argues that the functions that it was assigned are historically integral to an informed understanding of the nature of poetry. The book aims to relate poems to the intellectual and formal traditions by which they are shaped and given their being. This book will be of interest to students and academics studying or working in the fields of literature and history alike.

After an extensive introduction that takes stock of the relevant research literature on Old Age in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, the contributors discuss the phenomenon of old age in many different fields of late antique, medieval, and early modern literature, history, and art history. Both Beowulf and the Hildebrandslied, both Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and Titurel, both the figure of Merlin and the trans-European tradition of Perceval/Peredur/Parzival, then the figure of the vetula in a variety of medieval French, English, and Spanish texts, and of the Old Man in The Stricker's Daniel, both the treatment of old age in Langland's Piers the Plowman and in Jean Gerson's sermons are dealt with. Other aspects involve late-antique epistolary literature, early modern French farce in light of Disability Studies, the social role of old, impotent men in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Netherlandish paintings, and the scientific discourse of old age and health since the 1500s. The discourse of Old Age proves to have been of central importance throughout the ages, so the critical examination of the issues involved sheds intriguing light on the cultural history from late antiquity to the seventeenth century.

This book is a guide to the development of English syntax between the Old and Modern periods. Beginning with an overview of the main features of early English syntax, it gives a unified account of the significant grammatical changes that occurred during this period. Four leading experts demonstrate how these changes can be explained in terms of grammatical theory and the theory of language acquisition. Drawing on a wealth of empirical data, the book covers a wide range of topics including changes in word order, infinitival constructions and grammaticalization processes.

"This practical and informative course book is a fascinating, visual volume which leads the student through the development of the language from Old English, through Middle and Early Modern English to the establishment of Standard English in the eighteenth century." "At the core of this substantially expanded second edition lies a series of nearly 200 historical texts, of which more than half are reproduced in facsimile, and which illustrate the progressive changes in the language. The book is firmly based upon linguistic description, with commentaries which form a series of case studies demonstrating the evidence for language change at every level - handwriting, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar and meaning." "Such a wealth of texts, as well as the structured activities and the various case studies, allow the volume to be used not only as a stimulating course text, guiding students through the analysis of data, but also as a comprehensive resource book and invaluable reference tool for teachers and students at all levels."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved