DOUGLAS GRAY (ed.), From the Norman Conquest to the Black Death: an anthology of writings from England.
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 59; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjs054
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Linguistics and language evolution
ResumoTHIS timely anthology presents extracts from 127 texts written in England between 1066 and c. 1350, and is a worthy addition to a distinguished tradition that includes Joseph Hall’s Selections from Early Middle English (1920), Bruce Dickins and R. M. Wilson’s Early Middle English Texts (1951), and J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers’ Early Middle English Verse and Prose (1966; 2nd edn 1968). The easiest way of assaying the value of Gray’s anthology is by comparing it with these three forebears. The first difference evident is in scope: Hall’s anthology included 23 texts; Dickins and Wilson’s 38; and Bennett and Smithers’ 19. The massive increase in breadth comes not (alas!) from Gray’s rediscovery of a vast cache of lost early Middle English texts, but from his astute decision to include texts written in Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin alongside those in English. As a consequence, the anthology is the first to instantiate the multilingual approaches to twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature now gaining traction. The downside of this decision is that the English texts are choked, with Gray finding no place for numerous texts familiar from the earlier anthologies. There is, for example, no space for the evocative short poem beginning ‘Sanctus Beda was iboren her’, printed by Dickins and Wilson as The Disuse of English. Religious texts have suffered particularly intensely: there is nothing from the Lambeth or Trinity homilies, no Poema morale, nothing from the Kentish sermons, no Genesis and Exodus. While such texts may not have the appeal of the romances, their literary-historical significance is considerable.
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