A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century
Language and Literature between Old and Middle English

Mark Faulkner offers a compelling new narrative of what happened to English-language writing after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Mark Faulkner (Author)

9781316516096, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 28 July 2022

290 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'… an engaging and erudite attempt to re-configure the history of English language and literature in the years following the Norman Conquest and before the emergence of the chief literary writers in English of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. … The book sets out [its] case in engaging and scholarly fashion; it may change the way the history of English is understood.' Paul Cavill, The Glass

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction
2. Approaching Twelfth-Century English-Language Texts
Part II. The Affordances of English: 3. English in the Linguistic Ecology of the Long Twelfth Century
4. English as a Language of Documentary Record
5. English as a Language for Writing History
6. English as a Language for Sermon Writing
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Medieval history [HBLC1], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], Historical & comparative linguistics [CFF]