The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world.
Patience is a Middle English alliterative poem written in the late 14th century. Its unknown author, designated the "Pearl Poet" or "Gawain-Poet", also appears, on the basis of dialect and stylistic evidence, to be the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Cleanness and may have composed St. Erkenwald. This is thought to be true because the techniques and vocabulary of regional dialect of the unknown author is that of Northwest Midlands, located between Shropshire and Lancashire.
Benjamin Thorpe was an English scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature.
Frederick James Furnivall was an English philologist, best known as one of the co-creators of the New English Dictionary. He founded a number of learned societies on early English literature and made pioneering and massive editorial contributions to the subject, of which the most notable was his parallel text edition of The Canterbury Tales. He was one of the founders of and teachers at the London Working Men's College and a lifelong campaigner against injustice.
Pearl is a late 14th-century Middle English poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. With elements of medieval allegory and from the dream vision genre, the poem is written in a North-West Midlands variety of Middle English and is highly—though not consistently—alliterative; there is, among other stylistic features, a complex system of stanza-linking.
Ælfric of Eynsham was an English abbot and a student of Æthelwold of Winchester, and a consummate, prolific writer in Old English of hagiography, homilies, biblical commentaries, and other genres. He is also known variously as Ælfric the Grammarian, Ælfric of Cerne, and Ælfric the Homilist. In the view of Peter Hunter Blair, he was "a man comparable both in the quantity of his writings and in the quality of his mind even with Bede himself." According to Claudio Leonardi, he "represented the highest pinnacle of Benedictine reform and Anglo-Saxon literature".
Henry Sweet was an English philologist, phonetician and grammarian.
Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.
Walter William Skeat, was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in the United Kingdom.
Sir Israel Gollancz, FBA was a scholar of early English literature and of Shakespeare. He was Professor of English Language and Literature at King's College, London, from 1903 to 1930.
"Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad" is a 1929 essay by J. R. R. Tolkien on the thirteenth century Middle English treatise Ancrene Wisse and on the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad. The essay has been called "the most perfect though not the best-known of Tolkien's academic pieces". Tolkien and Neil Ripley Ker later edited a volume of the text for the Early English Text Society.
This is a list of all published works of the English writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien's works were published before and after his death.
A text publication society is a learned society which publishes scholarly editions of old works of historical or literary interest, or archival documents. In addition to full texts, a text publication society may publish translations, calendars and indexes.
In English philology, AB language is a variety of Middle English found in the Corpus manuscript, containing Ancrene Wisse, and in MS Bodley 34 in Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Bodley manuscript includes what is known as the Katherine Group; and the Wooing Group texts use this same language.
Samuel Weller Singer (1783–1858) was an English author and scholar on the work of William Shakespeare. He is also now remembered as a pioneer historian of card games.
The Treatise of Love is an English prose text first printed around 1493. Its printing was the work of Wynkyn de Worde, who took over William Caxton's printing business in 1491, and printed the Treatise before he began publishing under his own name in 1494. Drawing greatly on the Ancrene Wisse, the text contains religious advice addressed to an audience of aristocratic women.
The Wooing Group is a term coined by W. Meredith Thompson to identify the common provenance of four early Middle English prayers and meditations, written in rhythmical, alliterative prose. The particular variety of Middle English in which the group is written is AB language, a written standard of the West Midlands which also characterises the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group.
Mabel Katharine Day was a British scholar of medieval English. She managed the Early English Text Society from 1921 to the 1940s as assistant director. She edited and published medieval texts including contributions to A Guide for Anchoresses and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The Pearl Manuscript, also known as the Gawain manuscript, is an illuminated manuscript produced somewhere in northern England in the late 14th century or the beginning of the 15th century. It is one of the best-known Middle English manuscripts, the only one containing alliterative verse solely, and the oldest surviving English manuscript to have full-page illustrations. It contains the only surviving copies of four of the masterpieces of medieval English literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. It has been described as "one of the greatest manuscript treasures for medieval literature", and "the most famous of all romance manuscripts".
