Dekker Kees. Recovering Old English

Cambridge University Press, 2024. — 90 p.Recovering Old English (Cambridge Elements in England in the Early Medieval World) by Kees Dekker examines the philological activities of scholars involved in the recovery of Old English in the period between c. 1550 and 1830. This Element focuses on four philological pursuits that dominated this recovery: collecting documents, recording the lexicon editing texts and studying the grammar. This Element demonstrates that throughout the vicissitudes of history these four components of humanist philology have formed the backbone of Old English studies and constitute a thread that connects the efforts of early modern philologists with the global interest in Old English that we see today.Old English is the vernacular language spoken and written in much of what is now England and southern Scotland during the early Middle Ages. It evolved from the dialects of West Germanic tribes which settled in areas of mainland Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries. Referred to as Angles, Saxons and Jutes by the Venerable Bede, the period’s most eminent historian, these tribes have become known collectively as Anglo-Saxons or as the early English. Over time, their language has been known as ‘Saxon’, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘English-Saxon’, but since the 1960s the term ‘Old English’ (OE) has prevailed. Written records of OE testify to a rich culture of vernacular literacy in England from the 7th to the 11th centuries. An accelerating sequence of demographic, social and linguistic changes in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries – most notably the settlement of Scandinavians, who spoke related North Germanic dialects, and the regime changes following the conquest of England in 1066 by Norman knights who predominantly used a dialect of French – affected spoken English to such an extent that manuscripts from the middle of the 12th century contain a type of English that linguists have classified as early Middle English. In the vibrant, mobile and more urbanised culture of the later Middle Ages, Middle English developed so rapidly that OE texts became arcane and gradually ceased to be copied. In the 13th and 14th centuries, some OE texts were glossed by individual users to ensure a basic understanding.1 Ultimately, at the beginning of what we now call the early modern period (beginning c. 1450–1500), texts written in OE were by and large no longer understandable to readers of English, who, as the printer William Caxton reported, thought it resembled German. By the time of King Henry VIII’s accession (1509), knowledge of OE, if it existed at all, was incidental, individual, incomplete and inconspicuous.Table of ContentsPreamble
Collecting Old English
Recording Old English
Editing Old English
Studying Old English
Transitions and Turning PointsAbbreviations
Bibliography