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This study describes meaning changes that have occurred in the native word stock of English. Since no existing studies are devoted solely to investigating semantic change in Old English words, this study tries to illustrate word histories through examples of usage in the past and by a discussion of causes for change.

Transatlantic slavery and the literary imagination The challenges of turning transatlantic slavery into literature A polyphony of historical voices: Caryl Phillips’s dialogic imagination Literary imagination and the Zong Massacre: Fred D’Aguiar and David Dabydeen Perspectives

This essay revisits Ian McEwan’s extremely successful novel Saturday, and interrogates its exemplary assessment of the British cultural climate after 9/11. The particular focus is on McEwan’s extensive recourse to the writings of Matthew Arnold, whose melancholy outlook on culture and anarchy McEwan basically translates into the 21st century without much ideological fraction. This relapse into Victorian liberal humanism as consolation for a Western world besieged by the contingencies of terrorism is extremely problematic. Not only does it wilfully ignore the transcultural realities of modern Britain, it also promotes an ahistorical and apolitical mode of critical inquiry which may be called reductive at best in view of the global challenges that the novel addresses.

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This dissertation reads a group of Old English prose and verse texts that linguistic evidence suggests probably originated in Mercia, within the context of eighth- and ninth-century Mercian cultural and political history. This approach complements and supplements existing scholarship, offering evidence that the theory that a culture of vernacular translation and composition thrived in Mercia has fruitful explanatory powers. It articulates a theoretical narrative of the early period of Old English literature, and identifies two major trends that can be linked to the political and material culture of Mercia in the eighth and ninth centuries. The first is the proliferation of vernacular hagiography, both in prose and verse. In the first chapter, I offer an overview of Anglo-Saxon texts connected with the cult of Guthlac, a saint closely connected to the Mercian dynasty in the eighth and ninth centuries. This chapter offers an interpretation of Felix's Vita sancti Guthlaci as an iteration of Mercian identity, and highlights the way in which Guthlac A asserts and emphasizes the saint’s Mercian identity. I then propose a revival of the cult of Guthlac linked to a crisis in the Mercian succession in the ninth century, to which the possibly Cynewulfian account of Guthlac's death in Guthlac B, the Old English prose translation of Felix's life, and the entries in the Old English Martyrology, may be connected. In Chapter 2, I offer a reading of the hagiographical poetry of Cynewulf, namely Juliana and Elene, in light of the remarkably – and arguably uniquely – powerful position of women in Mercia from the reign of Offa onwards. The early cult of Juliana appears to have a Mercian bias, and the empowered female saints in Cynewulf's works may also be connected to evidence for female literacy in the Tiberius-group manuscripts, all of which originate in eighth- and ninth-century Southumbria. In Chapter 3, I read the Old English translation of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica, a major though until recently little-studied prose work, in relation to other texts with a literal style of translation and a hagiographical focus, and its apparent interest in Mercian conciliar culture. I also propose that the style of illumination of the earliest extant copies of the Old English Historia ecclesiastica may be influenced by Mercian, Tiberius style. The second major trend which the material and literary culture of Mercia manifests in this period is an early Orientalism, imitating and appropriating Eastern models as signs of power and sophistication. Sculptures such as those at Breedon-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, in which Mary is modelled on Byzantine sculpture, or the dinar of Caliph al-Mansur (773-4), reminted as coinage for Offa, demonstrate a deep engagement with Oriental culture prevalent in Mercia during this period. Several decorative elements in the eighth- and ninth-century Tiberius group manuscripts, which have stylistic affinities and are often associated with Mercia, also have Oriental origins. This same phenomenon is traceable in the literary record. For example, Cynewulf's works engage in various ways with different regions of the Orient, including the Mediterranean, Africa, Rome, Jerusalem and India. The Old English Martyrology combines Insular and continental saints with Eastern saints. The Oriental character of two of the prose texts of BL Cotton Vitellius A. xv., The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle and The Wonders of the East, both usually considered Mercian on linguistic grounds, has been long noted. Together with its manuscript neighbours, Wonders and Beowulf, I consider the Letter's interest in the wider world, as well as its theorization of kingship, by which it might be considered a speculum regum. This thesis reads these texts in the light of various forms of evidence for Mercian literary culture, including linguistic characteristics and preexisting scholarship. In so doing, it fleshes out a theoretical narrative of vernacular literature prior to the late ninth-century Alfredian renaissance.

The study of the theme of dom and the Old English Doomsday verse (Judgment Day I, Judgment Day II and Christ III) begins with an investigation of the word-symbol itself and its possible meanings in poetic context. The initial, philological analysis is not intended to be exhaustive (and examples are largely limited to the poetic corpus), but rather to answer such questions as why one monosyllable can have such divergent referents as "law", "fate", "judgment", "wisdom", "selfassessment", "opinion" and both "heroic" "fame" and Christian "glory", and also to aid our understanding of the possible nuances of meaning of dom in the poetry. The method is intended to add an important perspective to an historical approach to medieval literature, for it can lead to a deeper appreciation of the poetic "word-hoard" and the complexity of associations particular word-symbols might have evoked in the Anglo-Saxon audience. Dom is analyzed initially in the light of Peter Clemoes' statement that Old English words can be "nuclei of meaning, symbols of integrated experience, [and] aggregates of traditional association". The semantic investigation leads on to a study of the concept of dom as both "heroic" reputation, the "pagan consolation", and the complex Christian idea of "glory", in particular referring to the after-life. An appreciation of the way in which a word was adopted and baptized by the Christian poets illustrates how the successful fusion of heroic and Christian concepts took place in Anglo-Saxon times, and how the "word-hoard", the traditional vocabulary and metaphors, was adapted to convey the new and complex doctrines. The study of a semantic shift can shed light on the evolution of an idea. The major part of the study is devoted to an analysis of the eschatological poetry in the light of the semantic investigation, for in these works the relationship between the divergent referents of dom and the parallels between heroic and Christian ideas of the after-life can be demonstrated best. The poets of the Doomsday verse do not simply recount the traditional, eschatological events, but treat the biblical, patristic and apocryphal accounts of the Last Things imaginatively and figuratively in order to stress their didactic theme which is that the moment of Judgment is ever-present and that immortality is gained by the individual's constant attempt to approximate what is considered the state of perfection. The themes of Judgment Day and the Apocalypse are very minor and, like the accounts of hell with which they are often confused, used as an incentive to better living. The poems are centripetal, aimed at instructing the individual at the present moment. The nature of the reward is rarely discussed and if so often in negative terms. Consequently, the Christian concept of dom as "glory", divine "fame", is akin to the earlier "heroic" one. Both traditions, based on hierarchical principles, stress that man's duty is to strive continuously towards a perfection which was conceived of in terms of the ethical law, although the nature of that law and the future reward differed. The important dom "judgment" rests with the individual to choose to act in a dorngeorn ("eager for glory") state and gain the sodfrestra dom "the glory of the righteous" like Beowulf or the Christian saint. Thus the concepts of dom as "decision", "judgment", "glory", etc. are seen to be inextricably fused, as are the heroic and Christian traditions in AngloSaxon times. Such findings also substantiate what was discovered in the semantic study, and the philological and literary-thematic analyses complement each other. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation investigates the Old English word field for the concepts of ‘pledges’ and agreements by analysing the words belonging to the field in their contextual environments. The particular focus is on the word wedd (‘pledge’), which is shown to have different connotations in different text types. The main subject of the study is the corpus of Anglo-Saxon legal texts in which pledges played an important part. Pledges occur in collocation with concepts such as oaths (að) and sureties (borg), but there are important differences in function and linguistic usage between the terms. One important aspect of the language of pledging is the formulaic word pair að and wedd which comes to stand for the entirety of legal interactions, as no single word for ‘legal agreement’ is used by authors of legal prose. Possibly in part influenced by this development, the meaning of wedd, which originally denoted an object given as a pledge, becomes more abstract. The study further argues that this development is facilitated by the influence of Christianity. Old English words were required to express unfamiliar aspects of the new religion. I analyse words used to translate biblical covenants in detail. Because of its specifically legal overtones, wedd was employed by Anglo-Saxon translators and commentators to take on the functions of Latin words with a wider range of meaning, such as foedus or pactum. In its narrower sense wedd is important in the theology of sacraments. I show that the Eucharist and baptism are modelled on types of pledges from the legal social world that would have been familiar to Anglo-Saxon homilists and their audience. That this is a conscious decision on the part of Anglo-Saxon authors is indicated by the fact that this aspect is often added to their adaptations of orthodox Latin sources. An analysis of pledging in Old English poetry shows that wedd was rarely used by Anglo-Saxon poets, even in the adaptation of biblical texts which were shown to employ wedd as a deliberate lexical choice in their prose versions. In poetry, the equivalent term is wær (‘agreement’ or ‘treaty’). I argue that this difference can be explained by the fact that wedd was a technical term, belonging to the register of legal language, where wær never occurs. It is argued that wedd, possibly because of its legal connotations, was not a common word for Old English poets and is only used occasionally, mostly for purposes of poetic variation. I suggest that this is connected to the early date of some of the poems and to the traditional and possibly slightly archaic nature of Old English poetic language.