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Language and Community in Early England - Imagining Distance in Medieval Literature (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,211
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Language and Community in Early England - Imagining Distance in Medieval Literature (Paperback)
Series: Routledge Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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This book examines the development of English as a written
vernacular and identifies that development as a process of
community building that occurred in a multilingual context. Moving
through the eighth century to the thirteenth century, and finally
to the sixteenth-century antiquarians who collected medieval
manuscripts, it suggests that this important period in the history
of English can only be understood if we loosen our insistence on a
sharp divide between Old and Middle English and place the
textuality of this period in the framework of a multilingual
matrix. The book examines a wide range of materials, including the
works of Bede, the Alfredian circle, and Wulfstan, as well as the
mid-eleventh-century Encomium Emmae Reginae, the Tremulous Hand of
Worcester, the Ancrene Wisse, and Matthew Parker's study of Old
English manuscripts. Engaging foundational theories of textual
community and intellectual community, this book provides a crucial
link with linguistic distance. Perceptions of distance, whether
between English and other languages or between different forms of
English, are fundamental to the formation of textual community,
since the awareness of shared language that can shape or reinforce
a sense of communal identity only has meaning by contrast with
other languages or varieties. The book argues that the precocious
rise of English as a written vernacular has its basis in precisely
these communal negotiations of linguistic distance, the effects of
which were still playing out in the religious and political
upheavals of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the book argues
that the tension of linguistic distance provides the necessary
energy for the community-building activities of annotation and
glossing, translation, compilation, and other uses of texts and
manuscripts. This will be an important volume for literary scholars
of the medieval period, and those working on the early modern
period, both on literary topics and on historical studies of
English nationalism. It will also appeal to those with interests in
sociolinguistics, history of the English language, and medieval
religious history.
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