Featuring numerous updates and additional anthology selections, the 3rd edition of Introduction to Old English confirms its reputation as a leading text designed to help students engage with Old English literature for the first time. A new edition of one of the most popular introductions to Old English Assumes no expertise in other languages or in traditional grammar Includes basic grammar reviews at the beginning of each major chapter and a “minitext” feature to aid students in practicing reading Old English Features updates and several new anthology readings, including King Alfred’s Preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care
"A guide to enable students to acquire sufficient command of Old English in one semester to allow them to read any text in the language, in either prose or verse"--
An Introduction to Middle English combines an elementary grammar of the English language from about 1100 to about 1500 with a selection of texts for reading, ranging in date from 1154 to 1500. The grammar includes the fundamentals of orthography, phonology, morphology, syntax, regional dialectology, and prosody. In the thirty-eight texts for reading are represented a wide range of Middle English dialects, and the commentary on each text includes, in addition to explanatory notes, extensive linguistic analysis. The book includes many useful figures and illustrations, including images of Middle English manuscripts as an aid to learning to decipher medieval handwriting and maps indicating the geographical extent of dialect features. This introduction to Middle English is based on the latest research, and it provides up-to-date bibliographical guidance to the study of the language.
This book is designed to ease the beginner into competent reading of Old English texts. It presents the essential points of Old English grammar and also includes a selection of short, relatively simple original language texts, glossed and annotated. Numerous practice exercises are also included throughout. A companion website includes additional interactive exercises, a fuller grammar, and further original language texts.
This book makes learning Old English easy. It contains a simplified grammar, a minimum of phonology, well-chosen selections from Old English prose, and rich selections from Old English poetry. The texts are in regularized spelling, based on Early West Saxon, so that beginners will not have to wrestle with a shifting orthography. All texts come with facing-page literal translations. The prose selections include: "The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan"; "The Story of King Cynewulf of Wessex"; "The Wars of King Alfred against the Vikings"; and King Alfred's Preface to Cura Pastoralis. The poetry includes: Caedmon's "Hymn" from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People; The Battle of Brunanburg; The Battle of Maldon; The Dream of Rood from the Vercelli Book; The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament, The Storm Riddles, The Panther, and The Whale from The Exeter Book.
This reader remains the only major new reader of Old English prose and verse in the past forty years. The second edition is extensively revised throughout, with the addition of a new 'Beginning Old English' section for newcomers to the Old English language, along with a new extract from Beowulf. The fifty-seven individual texts include established favourites such as The Battle of Maldon and Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf, as well as others not otherwise readily available, such as an extract from Apollonius of Tyre. Modern English glosses for every prose-passage and poem are provided on the same page as the text, along with extensive notes. A succinct reference grammar is appended, along with guides to pronunciation and to grammatical terminology. A comprehensive glossary lists and analyses all the Old English words that occur in the book. Headnotes to each of the six text sections, and to every individual text, establish their literary and historical contexts, and illustrate the rich cultural variety of Anglo-Saxon England. This second edition is an accessible and scholarly introduction to Old English.
Literary Research and the Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Eras: Strategies and Sources is a guide to scholarly research in the field of medieval English literature covering the period 450 CE to 1500 CE. Graduate students and scholars researching this period face many challenges: working in two distinct literary traditions, comprehending multiple languages (Old English, Middle English, Latin, Anglo-Norman, and French), knowing the manuscript tradition for a particular title and the research methodologies for discovering and locating primary sources in the print and digital realms, and the awareness of the overlap and assimilation of literary themes with religious, historical, cultural, and political perspectives. The volume presents the best practices for building a foundation of sound scholarship practices in the field of medieval English literature. This volume explores primary and secondary resources, including general literary research guides; types of library catalogs; print and online bibliographies and indexes; scholarly journals and series; manuscripts, archives, and digital collections; genres; tools for understanding Old and Middle English such as dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, glosses, etymologies, palaeographies, and text mining tools; and Web resources. The final chapter researches the shifting reputation of the poet, Thomas Hoccleve. Given the interdisciplinary nature of medieval studies, an appendix of additional readings in art, history, music, philosophy, religion, science, social sciences, and theater is provided.
The texts in this reader include prose, metrical prose, and poetry, and represent a variety of genres (saints’ lives and metrical charms as well as heroic verse). Frequently taught canonical texts are balanced with interesting, lesser-known works. The glossary is at the back of the book, and the companion website includes texts with clickable glossing, as well as additional texts for study.
