Dr. Mark Faulkner

Summary

The transition from Old to Middle English in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been described as 'the most dramatic change in the English language' (van Gelderen), yet also as 'the textual "black hole"' in its history (Curzan). Historians of both English literature and the English language routinely treat it as inscrutable. Yet the period is not, in fact, inscrutable. It is relatively easy to assemble a brief list of English texts that can be securely attributed to the twelfth century and show that this inscrutability is more imagined than real. This raises the possibility that numerous texts that have always been assumed to be Old or early Middle English on the basis of the very questionable assumption that there was little or no composition in English in the twelfth century might also belong to that period. This project continues the programme of reinstating the twelfth century into English literary and linguistic histories by producing a handlist of texts written in that period, achieving in so doing significant advances in methods for dating undated medieval texts. In particular, the funding secured from the Provost's Project Awards will be used to recruit a historical linguist with training in quantitative and perhaps computational methods to develop 'big data' techniques to assist in the process of dating texts from this period.

Funding Agency

Trinity College Dublin

Programme

Provost's Project Award

Summary

Numerous large corpora of medieval texts have been built over the last thirty years, collectively comprising over ten million words. However, they were built for varied purposes and have different user interfaces and search protocols. This project seeks to explore the possibilities for harnessing the enormous collective potential of this big data as a tool for cultural, historical, literary and linguistic analyses through the organisation of an international colloquium, and networking towards future international, collaborative funding bids to develop new overarching interrogation techniques.

Funding Agency

Irish Research Council

Programme

New Foundations Scheme

Summary

The transition from Old to Middle English in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries has been been described as 'the most dramatic change in the English language' (van Gelderen), yet also as 'the textual "black hole"' in its history (Curzan). This perception has meant that some of the most basic questions of literary history, such as where and when particular texts were written, have been regarded as unanswerable. Yet this transitional period appears a black hole only because a significant category of evidence, late copies of Old English texts, has been systematically ignored. This body of material comprises 29 manuscripts, collectively containing 471 texts and just over 1.25 million words of English. While texts of approximately a fifth of these works are already available in the main resource for the study of earlier English, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, this proportion obscures the unevenness of the coverage, with many manuscripts only sketchily represented or not represented at all. This project will produce transcriptions of selected texts from these unrepresented manuscripts and aggregate them into a digital corpus, available under a Creative Commons license to scholars and students across the world.

Funding Agency

Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences

Programme

Benefaction Fund