Current Issues in Medieval England

The first section “Textual Interlacing” includes five papers focussing on the influential relations between texts, personalities and international authors. The opening chapter by Cataldi re-assesses the debt of influence of Penitence for Wasted Life to Poema Morale in terms of both content and metre through a detailed philological, metrical and linguistic analysis. Similarly, Lendinara’s careful philological study follows the influence of the Tretiz by Walter of Bibbesworth in Middle English and French literature, and multilingual glossaries over the two centuries. The attention of the author shifts from the literary work to its society in Khalaf’s paper, which investigates the production and circulation of Earl River’s Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers as part of a precise cultural plan of dissemination of moral and educational literature outside the court. The interplay between orality and written medium is at the centre of the paper by Del Lungo Camiciotti and Bolton Holloway on the encounter of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich and shows how analyses carried out from different perspectives can reveal more on the meaning of such event than is textually attested. This section concludes with Petrina’s inspiring paper, which traces the influence of Petrarch’s works in courtly, aristocratic poetry in England, leading to the early-sixteenth-century flourishing of northern humanism, and thus, challenges the traditional idea of a divide between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period in English literature.

The five papers in the third section “Language at different levels” analyse different phenomena pertaining to different levels and functions of language structures. Mäkinen proposes a method of remapping linguistic items from different meta-discourse classes onto the Aristotelian rhetorical concepts, through a qualitative-quantitative analysis of the Middle English translation of Henry Daniel’s Latin prologue to his English translation of Liber uricrisiarum. Stenbrenden examines back spellings (analogical spellings) in the history of English, applying the concept of “literal substitution sets”, and shows that the motivations for such spellings include not only phonemic merger, but also analogy, calligraphic changes and orthographic extensions, phonetic as well as phonological innovations, and that the phenomenon cannot be completely understood if scribal behaviour and clashes between scribal and authorial systems, both written and spoken, are not taken into account. From a more theoretical perspective, Stenroos reflects on how the implications of applying the dialect area and dialect continuum on Middle English language variation in writing, as different ways of inquiry, bring about different dialect maps, and suggests that an alternative approach to linguistic variation based on real historical contexts might reveal unexpected patterns. These patterns do not delineate a “pure dialect”, but socio-linguistic facts, such as peoples’ geographical movements, and literary texts in a different light. The last two contributions go back to the phenomena of morphological loss and replacement during the Middle English period (1100–1500), with Wårvik concentrating on the substitution of the Old English ambiguous adverb/conjunctions þa and þonne for the adverb then and the conjunction when and the consequent redistribution of their syntactic and discourse-pragmatic functions. Finally, Zimmermann investigates the disappearance of the negative particle ne in its function as a sentential negator and in negative concord structures, on the bases of to a quantitative analysis of data from three syntactically parsed Middle English corpora.