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Language, Linguistics and Middle English Literature

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Explores the intersections between two fundamental approaches to medieval literature, shedding new light on texts ranging from The Canterbury Tales to Le Morte Darthur.This volume identifies new me...
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  • 18 March 2025
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Explores the intersections between two fundamental approaches to medieval literature, shedding new light on texts ranging from The Canterbury Tales to Le Morte Darthur.


This volume identifies new methods and questions for language-based approaches to medieval English literature and literature-based approaches to Middle English by identifying philology as a cross-disciplinary practice shared by literary scholarship and linguistics. How can late medieval cultural perception and social participation be illuminated by literary language? What can language forms tell us about the experience of England's multilingual landscape? Contributors trace the relay between imaginative literature and an expanding Middle English lexicon, the literary affordances of phonological and morphological features of Middle English, and the way that medieval literature engaged with its multilingual sources. Essays also consider how social authority is negotiated in language, with a particular focus on highly charged words such as "corruption", "instability", and "treason" and highly charged phenomena such as language contact, allusion, and genre experiments. Together, they show that literary and linguistic approaches may inform each other to open new avenues of research on a wide variety of texts - including Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, Malory's Le Morte Darthur, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Lydgate's Reson and sensuallyte and Hoccleve's Regement of Princes. The volume thus pays tribute to the influence on both fields of distinguished medievalist Karla Taylor.
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Price: $95.00
Pages: 272
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Publication Date: 18 March 2025
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781843847397
Format: Hardcover
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative, Language and Linguistics
REVIEWS Icon
Part I: Introduction: Language Matters
1. Karla Taylor's Philology - Elizabeth Allen
2. Recent Methods and the Persistence of Philology - Catherine Sanok

Part II: The Special Affordances of Literary Texts for the History of English

3. Borrowed Suffixes in Late Middle English Poetry:
Multilingualism, Decomposability, and End-Rhyme Architecture - Chris C. Palmer
4. Congregation or Coven: Talking about Civic Assembly in Middle English - Colette Moore

Part III: The Lexis of Middle English Literature

5. Overcome by Words: Supplementarity and Advisory Ethics in the Tale of
Melibee
David Lavinsky
6. Buddha and the Grail: Speaking of the Unstable World in Barlam and Iosaphat and Malory's Le Morte Darthur - Kenneth Hodges

Part IV: The Aesthetics of Language in Middle English Literature
7. Facing the Reeve: Reason, Resonance, and the Tragedy of the Local in the
Canterbury Tales - Stephanie L. Batkie
8. "Borne to Blisse": Souls in Flight and (In)Authentic Vision in Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales - Ashby Kinch

Part V: Language Between Texts: Intertextuality on the Level of Language
9. Treason and the Royal Person: Chaucer to John Lane - Andreea Boboc
10. Tears of Survival: Myrrha and Criseyde - Elizabeth Allen

Karla Taylor's Published Writing
Index
Tabula Gratulatoria