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Old English literature refers to poetry and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid 12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English had almost completely deteriorated, giving way to the much larger Middle English corpus of literature.
John Peckham was a Franciscan friar and Archbishop of Canterbury in the years 1279–1292.
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.
The "Gawain Poet", or less commonly the "Pearl Poet", is the name given to the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an alliterative poem written in 14th-century Middle English. Its author appears also to have written the poems Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness; some scholars suggest the author may also have composed Saint Erkenwald. Save for the last, all these works are known from a single surviving manuscript, the British Library holding 'Cotton MS' Nero A.x. This body of work includes some of the most highly-regarded poetry written in Middle English.
The Old English poem Judith describes the beheading of Assyrian general Holofernes by Israelite Judith of Bethulia. It is found in the same manuscript as the heroic poem Beowulf, the Nowell Codex, dated ca. 975–1025. The Old English poem is one of many retellings of the Holofernes–Judith tale as it was found in the Book of Judith, still present in the Catholic and Orthodox Christian Bibles. The other extant version is by Ælfric of Eynsham, late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon abbot and writer; his version is a homily of the tale.
The Junius manuscript is one of the four major codices of Old English literature. Written in the 10th century, it contains poetry dealing with Biblical subjects in Old English, the vernacular language of Anglo-Saxon England. Modern editors have determined that the manuscript is made of four poems, to which they have given the titles Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. The identity of their author is unknown. For a long time, scholars believed them to be the work of Cædmon, accordingly calling the book the Cædmon manuscript. This theory has been discarded due to the significant differences between the poems.
Ancrene Wisse is an anonymous monastic rule for female anchoresses written in the early 13th century.
The Ormulum or Orrmulum is a twelfth-century work of biblical exegesis, written by an Augustinian canon named Orm and consisting of just under 19,000 lines of early Middle English verse. Because of the unique phonemic orthography adopted by its author, the work preserves many details of English pronunciation existing at a time when the language was in flux after the Norman conquest of England. Consequently, it is invaluable to philologists and historical linguists in tracing the development of the language.
West Saxon is the term applied to the two different dialects Early West Saxon and Late West Saxon with West Saxon being one of the four distinct regional dialects of Old English. The three others were Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian. West Saxon was the language of the kingdom of Wessex, and was the basis for successive widely used literary forms of Old English: the Early West Saxon of Alfred the Great's time, and the Late West Saxon of the late 10th and 11th centuries. Due to the Saxons' establishment as a politically dominant force in the Old English period, the West Saxon dialects became the strongest dialects in Old English manuscript writing.
The Owl and the Nightingale is a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Middle English poem detailing a debate between an owl and a nightingale as overheard by the poem's narrator. It is the earliest example in Middle English of a literary form known as debate poetry.
Huchoun, Huchown or Huchowne "of the Awle Ryale" is a poet conjectured to have been writing sometime in the 14th century. Some academics, following the Scottish antiquarian George Neilson (1858–1923), have identified him with a Scottish knight, Hugh of Eglinton, and advanced his authorship of several significant pieces of alliterative verse. Current opinion is that there is little evidence to support this.
Cornish literature refers to written works in the Cornish language. The earliest surviving texts are in verse and date from the 14th century. There are virtually none from the 18th and 19th centuries but writing in revived forms of Cornish began in the early 20th century.
The Vercelli Book is one of the oldest of the four Old English Poetic Codices. It is an anthology of Old English prose and verse that dates back to the late 10th century. The manuscript is housed in the Capitulary Library of Vercelli, in northern Italy.
The Blickling homilies are a collection of anonymous homilies from Anglo-Saxon England. They are written in Old English, and were written down at some point before the end of the tenth century, making them one of the oldest collections of sermons to survive from medieval England, the other main witness being the Vercelli Book. Their name derives from Blickling Hall in Norfolk, which once housed them; the manuscript is now at Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71.
South English legendaries are compilations of versified saints' lives written in southern dialects of Middle English from the late 13th to 15th centuries. At least fifty of these manuscripts survive, preserving nearly three hundred hagiographic works.
The Tremulous Hand of Worcester is the name given to a 13th-century scribe of Old English manuscripts with handwriting characterized by large, shaky, leftward leaning figures usually written in light brown ink. He is assumed to have worked in Worcester Priory, because all manuscripts identified as his work have been connected to Worcester.
The Eneados is a translation into Middle Scots of Virgil's Latin Aeneid, completed by the poet and clergyman Gavin Douglas in 1513.
The Trinity Homilies are a collection of 36 homilies found in MS Trinity 335 (B.14.52), held in Trinity College, Cambridge. Produced probably early in the thirteenth century in the Early Middle English period, the collection is of great linguistic importance in establishing the development of the English language, since it preserves a number of Old English forms and gives evidence of the literary influence of Latin and Anglo-Norman as well as of the vernacular used in sermons for lay audiences. The same manuscript, like that of the Lambeth Homilies, also preserves a version of the Poema Morale.
The Poema Morale is an early Middle English moral poem outlining proper Christian conduct. The poem was popular enough to have survived in seven manuscripts, including the homiletic collections known as the Lambeth Homilies and Trinity Homilies, both dating from around 1200.
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.
References
Citations
- 1 2 3 Sisam, Celia (1951). "The Scribal Tradition of the Lambeth Homilies". The Review of English Studies . 2 n.s. (6): 105–13. JSTOR 511023.
- 1 2 Trips, Carola (2002). From Ov to Vo in Early Middle English. John Benjamins. p. 22. ISBN 9789027227812 . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
- 1 2 Wilson, R.M. (1935). "The Provenance of the Lambeth Homilies with a New Collation". Leeds Studies in English . 4: 24–43. Retrieved 2020-04-21. Alt URL
- ↑ Swan, Mary (June 2012). "London, Lambeth Palace, 487". The Production and Use of English Manuscripts: 1060 to 1220. Retrieved 6 September 2012.
- ↑ Allen, Hope Emily (1929). "On the Author of the Ancren Riwle". Publications of the Modern Language Association . 44 (3): 635–80. JSTOR 457407.
- ↑ Edwards 2004, p. 11.
- ↑ Millett 2007, pp. 43–64.
Bibliography
- Edwards, Anthony Stockwell Garfield (2004). A Companion to Middle English Prose. DS Brewer. ISBN 9781843840183.
- Millett, Bella (2007). "The pastoral context of the Trinity and Lambeth homilies". Essays in Manuscript Geography: Vernacular Manuscripts of the English West Midlands from the Conquest to the Sixteenth Century. Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe. Vol. 10. Turnhout: Brepols. pp. 43–64.