Studies in English Language and Literature: Doubt Wisely

by Toswell,M. J.; Toswell,M. J.

• ISBN13: 9780415138482
• ISBN10: 0415138485
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-12-05
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This collection of 29 papers is in honor of E. G. Stanley. Written by scholars he has supervised within the last 20 years, the essays gathered here illustrate the advantages of following John Donne's axiom "doubt wisely." The primary focus of the collection is on the close reading of words in their immediate context. Contributors provide new analyses of such difficult but rewarding fields as Old English meter and syntax,Beowulf,the origins and development of standard English, Middle English poetry and prose and the post-medieval receptions of medieval works.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	viii	(2)
Preface and acknowledgments	x	(2)
List of abbreviations	xii
Introduction	1	(8)
M.J. Toswell
E.M. Tyler
Part I On language and linguistics	9	(108)
1 Names will never hurt me	13	(16)
Fran Colman
2 The vocabulary of very late Old English	29	(13)
Andreas Fischer
3 Late copies of Anglo-Saxon charters	42	(29)
Christine Franzen
4 Reasonable doubt, reasoned choice: the letter A in the Dictionary of Old English	71	(14)
Antonette diPaolo Healey
5 Alexander Ellis and the virtues of doubt	85	(14)
L.C. Mugglestone
6 About the evolution of Standard English	99	(18)
Laura Wright
Part II On words and phrases	117	(98)
7 Grendel's arm and the law	121	(12)
Rolf H. Bremmer Jr
8 Does wyrd bio ful aroed mean `Fate is wholly inexorable'?	133	(24)
Mark S. Griffith
9 Old English swefn and Genesis B line 720	157	(18)
Antonina Harbus
10 The sword mightier than the pen? Hrothgar's hilt, theory, and philology	175	(11)
James I. McNelis III
11 Metrical stress on alliterating finite verbs in clause-initial a-verses: `some doubts and no conclusions'	186	(13)
H. Momma
12 Old English habban + past participle of a verb of motion	199	(16)
Michiko Ogura
Part III On the interpretation of a single text	215	(108)
13 Doubt and time in Lazamon's Brut	219	(21)
Marie-Francoise Alamichel
14 Unscholarly Latinity and Margery Kempe	240	(12)
Melissa Furrow
15 Doubts about Medea, Briseyda, and Helen: interpreting classical allusion in the fourteenth-century French ballade Medee fu en amer veritable	252	(15)
Nicola F. McDonald
16 Woman-kennings in the Gisla saga Surssonar: a study	267	(19)
Karin Olsen
17 `Symtyme the fende': questions of rape in Sir Gowther	286	(18)
Corinne J. Saunders
18 Medieval `allegorical imagery' in c. 1630: Will. Baspoole's revision of the Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode	304	(21)
Kathryn Walls
Part IV On taxonomies, genres, and sources	323	(118)
19 The swallow's nest and the spider's web	327	(15)
E. Ruth Harvey
20 The idea of the `Christian epic': towards a history of an Old English poetic genre	342	(20)
Ivan Herbison
21 AElfric's sources reconsidered: some case studies from the Catholic Homilies	362	(25)
Joyce Hill
22 Ulysses and Circe in King Alfred's Boethius: a classical myth transformed	387	(15)
Susan Irvine
23 Poetic inspiration and prosaic translation: the making of Cadmon's Hymn	402	(21)
Andy Orchard
24 The metre of the Ormulum	423	(18)
Elizabeth Solopova
Part V On assumptions	441	(90)
25 Textual boundaries in Anglo-Saxon works on time (and in some Old English poems)	445	(12)
Peter S. Baker
26 Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, and the discovery of the individual in Old English verse	457	(18)
Fiona
Richard Gameson
27 St AEthelthryth: the making of history from hagiography	475	(18)
Pauline A. Thompson
28 Tacitus, Old English heroic poetry, and ethnographic preconceptions	493	(15)
M.J. Toswell
29 How deliberate is deliberate verbal repetition?	508	(23)
Elizabeth M. Tyler
Index	531