"Edward Lye (1694-1767) was an important contributor to the advancement of our understanding of the structure of the English language, its vocabulary, and its literature. Compared with the work of more celebrated pre-nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonists and antiquaries, Lye's was a scholarly output of less original talent and reach (the role he gave himself was 'to remove the rubbish out of the way, as an underworkman'), but in the course of editing, improving, and publishing the hitherto unpublished work of others he made genuine advances in scholarship, particularly in the areas of English lexicography and Gothic studies. The Lye correspondence - in the main a collection of scholarly letters that are also sometimes the personal communications of friends - indicates how varied his interests were, how widely he read, and how frequently he discussed texts, elucidated cruces, and established correct textual readings, often for the first time." "This edition presents the 193 letters known to have passed between Edward Lye and forty-five correspondents between 1729 and Lye's death in 1767. English translations are provided for letters written in Latin, Greek, and Swedish, as well as for words and passages in other languages (e.g. Old English, Gothic, Hebrew) discussed in the correspondence. The introduction provides a biography of Lye and a detailed examination of his major scholarly accomplishments: the edition of Franciscus Junius's Etymologicum Anglicanum, published in 1743 with extensive improvements and additions by Lye; the publication in 1750 of Eric Benzelius's edition and Latin translation of the Gothic Gospels (Sacrorum evangeliorum versio Gothica), together with Lye's own contribution of corrections and notes, preface, and a Gothic grammar; the Dictionarium Saxonico- et Gothico-Latinum, completed posthumously by Owen Manning and published in 1772; and an unfinished translation into Latin of the Old English poems of the Caedmon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodl. MS. Junius 11)." "Supporting materials, including biographical records and documents relevant to the edited letters and Lye's publications, are presented in several appendices; there are also biographical notes on Lye's correspondents and a bibliography of manuscripts and printed works. This book will be of value to all those interested in Germanic philology, the history of Old English and Gothic scholarship, and the work of the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century antiquaries in England and northern Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

Throughout the centuries of its existence, Anglo-Saxon society was highly, if not widely, literate: it was a society the functioning of which depended very largely on the written word. All the essays in this volume throw light on the literacy of Anglo-Saxon England, from the writs which were used as the instruments of government from the eleventh century onwards, to the normative texts which regulated the lives of Benedictine monks and nuns, to the runes stamped on an Anglo-Saxon coin, to the pseudorunes which deliver the coded message of a man to his lover in a well-known Old English poem, to the mysterious writing on an amulet which was apparently worn by a religious for a personal protection from the devil. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies rounds off the book.

The first of a two-volume examination of medievalism and academic scholarship, this collection is divided into four sections: Canonizing Chaucer, Antiquarian loomings, Medievalism, medieval studies, and Medieval studies at the millennium. Medievalism, the "continuing process of creating the middle ages", engenders formal medieval studies from a wide variety of popular interests in the middle ages. This volume accordingly explores the common ground between artisticand popular constructions of the middle ages and the study of the middle ages within the academy. Essays treat the genesis of medieval studies in early modern antiquarianism; the erection of academic medievalism through persistent, indeed perverse, appeals to heroic medieval manliness and attenuated female spirituality; the current jeopardy of the book (a medieval invention) in the face of technological assau Contributors: DAVID O. MATTHEWS, STEVE ELLIS, ANTONIA WARD, GRAHAM PARRY, MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS, ANNA SMOL, DAVID ALLAN, MATILDE MATEO, MARYA DEVOTO, ULRIKE WIETHAUS, STEPHEN STEELE, JAMES KENNEDY, WILLIAM CALIN, JESSE D. HURLBUT, JOAN GRENIER-WINTHER, WILLIAM PADEN

This volume brings together fifteen articles exploring the linguistic and literary foundations of lexicography and lexicology. Topics explored here include a discussion of the relationships between lexicography and ideology in China; Frisian legal language and the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch; the history and lexicography of Faroese; Wortgeschichte digital and its relation to Grimmian tradition; the linguistic history of phonetically imitative words; and studies of Croatian, Czech, English, Greek, and Turkish historical dictionaries. The book also presents a digital and textual study on the status of eponyms across the history of the Royal Society, as well as a study of German paronym dictionaries, a modern history of bilingual Russian-Tajik terminological dictionaries, and a historical overview of the lexicography of Frisian. The research findings and close readings by expert practitioners and historians of dictionaries and word studies found in the pages of this volume continue to broaden critical perspectives upon the study of manuscripts and print artifacts; dictionaries and standard varieties; biographies; bibliography and text analyses; dictionary production; and corpus and digital analyses.

Thomas Chatterton was a poet, forger, and adolescent suicide, and the debate over his work was a pivotal episode in the history of eighteenth-century literature. It ultimately established Chatterton as the inspiration for Romantic poets like Blake, Coleridge, and Keats. This book is a major collection of diverse new essays by scholars, critics, and writers like Peter Ackroyd and Richard Holmes. They show the mercurial Chatterton in exciting new contexts, and restore him as a seminal figure in English Literature.

This Element Recovering Old English examines the philological activities of scholars involved in the recovery of Old English in the period between c. 1550 and 1830. This Element focuses on four philological pursuits that dominated this recovery: collecting documents, recording the lexicon editing texts and studying the grammar. This Element demonstrates that throughout the vicissitudes of history these four components of humanist philology have formed the backbone of Old English studies and constitute a thread that connects the efforts of early modern philologists with the global interest in Old English that we see today.