Description
Book SynopsisAn anthology of the principal source materials for the study of the formation of Middle English as a discipline. The first section traces the development of ideas about Middle English in the work of 13 writers, and the second section represents literary criticism and commentary by 19 authors.
Trade Review“This volume fills an obvious gap in the discipline of medieval studies generally and has no rival. Up till now it has been very difficult for both students and scholars to gain access to the primary material that relates to the subject of the development of the field of Middle English studies.”
—Margaret Clunies Ross,University of Sydney, Australia
“Anyone studying Middle English in the past fifty years has inherited a broad consensus about what the subject is. But this consensus and relative certainty are actually of very recent origin. For much of the history of the study of Middle English texts—certainly well into the twentieth century—the field was a very poorly mapped one indeed, to the point that the use of the unifying term, ‘Middle English,’ was in fact extremely rare until the 1870s, and not uniform after then.”
—Introduction
