Simon Horobin | |
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Born | 22 September 1972 |
Occupation |
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Language | English |
Nationality | British |
Subject | Linguistics |
Simon Horobin (born 22 September 1972) is a British philologist and author.
Horobin graduated from the University of Sheffield. [1] He is a professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. [2] [3]
He has been a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut, Harvard University, and Charles University. [1] He has also acted as honorary secretary for the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. [4]
Horobin has appeared on several radio and television programmes to discuss linguistic issues and has been interviewed for various articles in numerous national papers. [5]
Middle English is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages.
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language, associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.
Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve (1368/69–1426) was a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature, significant for promoting Chaucer as "the father of English literature", and as a poet in his own right. His poetry, especially his longest work, the didactic work Regement of Princes, was extremely popular in the fifteenth century, but went largely ignored until the late twentieth century, when it was re-examined by scholars, particularly John Burrow. Today he is most well known for his Series, which includes the earliest autobiographical description of mental illness in English, and for his extensive scribal activity. Three holographs of his poetry have survived, and he also copied literary manuscripts by other writers. As a clerk of the Office of the Privy Seal, he wrote hundreds of documents in French and Latin.
Adam Pinkhurst is best known as a fourteenth-century English scribe whom Linne Mooney identified as the 'personal scribe' of Geoffrey Chaucer, although much recent scholarship has cast doubt on this connection.
Elizabeth Helen Cooper,, known as Helen Cooper, is a British literary scholar. From 2004 to 2014, she was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Steven Kevin Connor, FBA is a British literary scholar. Since 2012, he has been the Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. He was formerly the academic director of the London Consortium and professor of modern literature and theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
Bernard O'Donoghue FRSL is a contemporary Irish poet and academic.
Derek Stanley Brewer was a Welsh medieval scholar, author and publisher.
David John Daniell was an English literary scholar who became Professor of English at University College London. He was founder of the Tyndale Society, a specialist in William Tyndale and his translations of the Bible, and author of a number of studies of the plays of Shakespeare.
Contact between Geoffrey Chaucer and the Italian humanists Petrarch or Boccaccio has been proposed by scholars for centuries. More recent scholarship tends to discount these earlier speculations because of lack of evidence. As Leonard Koff remarks, the story of their meeting is "a 'tydying' worthy of Chaucer himself".
Elizabeth Solopova is a Russian-British philologist and medievalist undertaking research at New College, Oxford. She is known outside academic circles for her work on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings.
Alastair J. Minnis is a Northern Irish literary critic and historian of ideas who has written extensively about medieval literature, and contributed substantially to the study of late-medieval theology and philosophy. Having gained a first-class B.A. degree at the Queen's University of Belfast, he matriculated at Keble College, Oxford as a visiting graduate student, where he completed work on his Belfast Ph.D., having been mentored by M.B. Parkes and Beryl Smalley. Following appointments at the Queen's University of Belfast and Bristol University, he was appointed Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of York; also Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies and later Head of English & Related Literature. From 2003 to 2006, he was a Humanities Distinguished Professor at Ohio State University, Columbus, from where he moved to Yale University. In 2008, he was named Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale.
Ardis Butterfield is a scholar of medieval music and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor of English, and Professor of Music and French at Yale University United States.
Gillian Lesley "Jill" Mann, FBA, is a scholar known for her work on medieval literature, especially on Middle English and Medieval Latin.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Norman Francis Blake was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.
Christopher Cannon is a medievalist at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and Classics, previously Chair of Classics, and from 2020-2024 Vice Dean for the Humanities and Social Sciences in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. His research and writings have focused on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, early Middle English, and elementary learning in the Middle Ages.
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
Marion Turner is the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer. She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize, and was a finalist in the PROSE Awards, and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
Daniel Leslie Wakelin, FBA, is a British palaeographist. Currently he is the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the University of Oxford and a fellow of his St Hilda's College.