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This thesis responds to a lack of information regarding reading practice in literature in early Middle English. Here, reading is often used as a metaphorical or symbolic act - representing piety, devotional practice, or intellectualism - but how reading took place, how users engaged with books, is rarely figured. Other seams of evidence are therefore needed to access the reading process. The corpus of manuscripts on which I focus consists of thirty-three multilingual books containing English, Latin, and French produced in England between 1066 and c. 1300. Using this corpus, and inspired by the work of Leah Price, Juliet Fleming, Kathryn Rudy, and others, I seek to test the boundaries of what has previously been considered permissible evidence for reading, thereby adjusting and expanding current conceptions of the range of activities and practices high medieval book use entailed. The thesis begins with a case study of some important readers: scribes. In chapter one, using the seven surviving copies of Poema Morale as a corpus I read against current critical considerations of variance in manuscript transmission as a sign of 'scribal authorship' in order to establish practices of scribal reading. Chapters two and three go on to demonstrate how these 'scribal readers' prefigured a work's use as they copied, particularly when they chose to introduce or exclude textual apparatus in the form of titles, capitals, or paraph marks. The final part of the thesis examines the retrospective evidence of use left by readers who marked and altered their books to determine the extent to which readers conformed to the practices imagined by manuscript producers. As a whole, then, the thesis showcases the variegated nature of reading practice - from critical analysis to nugatory scanning - and the alternative uses for books in English in this period. It shows that vernacular reading was a work of 'embodied intellectual labour' that benefitted from the material form of the book, and that engagement and manipulation of this form was not just tolerated, but expected, and perhaps actively encouraged.

The Master's thesis proceeds from a corpus-based analysis and focuses on strong forms of Early Middle English adjectives. A formal distinction between weak and strong adjectival forms had disappeared during the period of Middle English, the work, therefore, aims at the transitional period between Old and Middle English, when the strong forms could still be identified, either due to the relics of inflectional endings, syntactic position, or context. A representative sample of the most frequent adjectives was chosen from the corpus comprising the extant Middle English texts with help of specific searching code. Consequently, the strong forms were manually chosen from these according to their formal characteristics and position in the sentence. This sample was then analyzed from the syntactic point of view, as well as from the point of view of functional sentence perspective. The results of the analysis show that the indication of indefiniteness was mostly expressed by the mix of syntactic and contextual means in EME. It has also been found out that the adjectives, being used both attributively and predicatively, were by rule part of the rheme.

The present MA thesis presents an analysis of version D of the Early Middle English verse sermon known as the Poema Morale. The objectives of the study were to verify the present localisation of D in Western Kent and clarify its relations to two more copies of the same text (T and M). The research consistsed in analysing the language of the text it terms of its dialect and distinguishing between different layers of copying, where possible. The analysis was performed using the electronic tool Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, specific procedures included mainly analyses of maps showing the distribution of dialectal features found in D, which were complemented by discussions of forms which D shares with other Kentish texts or versions T and M. The aim of these discussions was the identification of words coming from the exemplar. Evidence supporting the localisation of D in Kent as well as forms presumably taken from the archetype were presented and put in the context of the results of previous studies.

<p>  </p> <p>While the field of Monster Studies has proliferated across disciplines, particularly in relation to studies of the medieval period, often Early Middle English literature has been ignored. In some ways, this is sensible, since the term “monster” is not attested in English until Chaucer’s use of it in the late 14th century in <em>The Canterbury Tales. </em>However, nonhuman beings that might otherwise have been categorized as monsters are still present in the literature. Building on the idea of Hughes’ “non-human human beings” and Mittman’s and Heng’s reconceptualization of race and the “monstrous races,” I propose a new term: nonhuman person. I propose three criteria for determining if a particular literary being falls in this category. I use literary analysis to determine if each criterion is met. Then I examine the lexical choices made to identify and describe each of these nonhuman persons in two sample texts from each rough time period in the language: .<em>The Wonders of the East </em>and <em>Beowulf </em>for Old English; <em>The Owl and the Nightingale </em>and Layamon’s <em>Brut </em>for Early Middle English; and <em>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight </em>and <em>The Canterbury Tales </em>for Late Middle English. Finally, I examine the shifts in the lexicon over time in order to examine how English re-envisions the nonhuman person from the Old English period up through Chaucer’s use of “monster” in his <em>Tales. </em></p>

CHARLES UNIVERSITY - FACULTY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ELT METHODOLOGY Relationships between the borrowed Old Norse adjectives in English and their Old English counterparts MA THESIS Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Jan Čermák, CSc. Author: Světlana Müllerová Abstract: The aim of this MA thesis is to examine the relationship between six word pairs, each comprising an Old Norse adjectival borrowing in Middle English and its Old English counterpart along with its Middle English reflex for further reference. The inquiry into their relationship involves an analysis of: their (i) formal aspects, (ii) syntactic properties, (iii) semantic fields and (iv) external factors possibly contributing to their obsolescence or survival, such as the restriction to certain text types or geographic localization, as suggested by the individual linguistic profiles in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English and Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. The description of individual semantic fields of the given words is based on their semantic classification within the Historical Thesaurus of English. This analysis is based on the occurrences of the individual words as taken from the dictionaries Middle English Dictionary and Dictionary of Old English, and related corpora Dictionary of Old English Corpus and...