The Golden Days of the Early English Church

Literature written in England between about 500 and 1100 CE attests to a wide range of traditions, although it is clear that Christian sources were the most influential. Biblical apocrypha feature prominently across this corpus of literature, as early English authors clearly relied on a range of extra-biblical texts and traditions related to works under the umbrella of what have been called “Old Testament Pseudepigrapha” and “New Testament/Christian Apocrypha." While scholars of pseudepigrapha and apocrypha have long trained their eyes upon literature from the first few centuries of early Judaism and early Christianity, the medieval period has much to offer. This article presents a survey of significant developments and key threads in the history of scholarship on apocrypha in early medieval England. My purpose is not to offer a comprehensive bibliography, but to highlight major studies that have focused on the transmission of specific apocrypha, contributed to knowledge about medieval uses of apocrypha, and shaped the field from the nineteenth century up to the present. Bringing together major publications on the subject presents a striking picture of the state of the field as well as future directions.

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Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, by Ben Lowe.Imagining Peace: A History of Early English Pacifist Ideas, by Ben Lowe. University Park, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. xiv, 362 pp. $60.00 U.S. (cloth), $19.95 U.S. (paper).

Canadian Journal of History ◽

10.3138/cjh.35.1.137 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 137-138

Author(s):

Dominic Baker-Smith

Keyword(s):

State University ◽

Pennsylvania State University ◽

History Of ◽

Early English

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Aspectual Prefixes in Early English

10.3726/978-3-653-03645-9 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Vlatko Broz

Keyword(s):

Early English

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Bookmarks from the Past. Studies in Early English Language and Literature in Honour of Helmut Gneuss. Ed. Lucia Kornexl and Ursula Lenker (Münchener Universitätsschriften, 30).

Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen ◽

10.37307/j.1866-5381.2005.02.33 ◽

2005 ◽

Author(s):

Wolfgang Viereck

Keyword(s):

English Language ◽

The Past ◽

Language And Literature ◽

Early English

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Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198807704.003.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Anna-Maria Hartmann

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Literary History ◽

First Generation ◽

Early Modern England ◽

Related Material ◽

Wide Range ◽

The World ◽

Early English

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.

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Isoglosses and language change: Evidence of the rise and loss of isoglosses from a comparison of early Greek and early English

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics ◽

10.1515/psicl-2020-0018 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 56 (4) ◽

pp. 553-575

Author(s):

Nikolaos Lavidas

Keyword(s):

Language Change ◽

The Other ◽

Linguistic Features ◽

Considerable Distance ◽

Causative Constructions ◽

European Languages ◽

Other Hand ◽

Structural Ambiguity ◽

Early English ◽

Aspectual Verbs

Abstract We analyze the rise and loss of isoglosses in two Indo-European languages, early Greek and early English, which, however, show considerable distance between their structures in many other domains. We follow Keidan’s approach (2013), that has drawn the attention on the fact that the study of isoglosses (i.e., linguistic features common to two or more languages) is connected with common innovations of particular languages after the split into sub-groups of Indo-European: this type of approach aims at collecting isoglosses that appear across the branches of Indo-European. We examine the rise of the isogloss of labile verbs and the loss of the isogloss of the two classes of aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. Our study shows that the rise of labile verbs in both languages is related to the innovative use of intransitives in causative constructions. On the other hand, the innovations in voice morphology follow different directions in Greek and English and are unrelated to the rise of labile verbs. In contrast to labile verbs, which are still predominant for causative-anticausative constructions in both languages, the two classes of aspectual verbs are lost in the later stages of Greek but are predominant even in Present-day English. Again, a “prerequisite” change for the isogloss can be easily located in a structural ambiguity that is relevant for aspectual verbs in early Greek and early English. However, another independent development, the changes in verbal complementation (the development of infinitival and participial complements) in Greek and English, determined the loss of this isogloss.

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