Archaism, Belatedness and Modernisation: “Old” English in the Twelfth Century

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This article edits and discusses a series of twelfth-century annotations from London, BL, Royal 7 C. xii, a late-tenth-century copy of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, using them to explore a series of key questions regarding English literary culture in the post-Conquest period, including the relationship between the recopying and rereading of Old English texts and the composition of new, early Middle English texts; the audience for such works and the intelligibility and cultural status of Old English in the twelfth century.

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Reference: Mark Faulkner, ‘Archaism, Belatedness and Modernisation: “Old” English in the Twelfth Century’, Review of English Studies 63 (2012), 179-203.