Page 9 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes So general was decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could
translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe there were not many beyond the Humber
Pastoral Care, introduction.

Notes Alfred the Great proposed that students be educated in Old English and those who
excelled would go on to learn Latin. In this way many of the texts that have survived
are typical teaching and student-oriented texts.
The bulk of the prose literature is historical or religious in nature. There were considerable losses
of manuscripts as a result of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Scholarly study
of the language began in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I when Matthew Parker and others obtained
whatever manuscripts they could.

1.1 Extant Manuscripts
In total there are about 400 surviving manuscripts containing Old English text, 189 of them considered
major. These manuscripts have been highly prized by collectors since the 16th century, both for
their historic value and for their aesthetic beauty of uniformly spaced letters and decorative
elements.
There are four major manuscripts:
The Junius manuscript, also known as the Caedmon manuscript, which is an illustrated
poetic anthology.
The Exeter Book, also an anthology, located in the Exeter Cathedral since it was donated
there in the 11th century.
The Vercelli Book, a mix of poetry and prose; it is not known how it came to be in Vercelli.
The Nowell Codex, also a mixture of poetry and prose. This is the manuscript that contains
Beowulf.
Research in the 20th century has focused on dating the manuscripts (19th-century scholars tended
to date them older); locating where the manuscripts were created — there were seven major
scriptoria from which they originate: Winchester, Exeter, Worcester, Abingdon, Durham, and two
Canterbury houses, Christ Church and St. Augustine’s Abbey; and identifying the regional dialects
used: Northumbrian, Mercian, Kentish, West Saxon (the last being the main dialect).
Not all of the texts can be fairly called literature; some are merely lists of names. However those
that can present a sizable body of work, listed here in descending order of quantity: sermons and
saints’ lives, biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon
chronicles and narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works on
grammar, medicine, geography; and poetry.

1.2 Old English Poetry
Old English poetry falls broadly into two styles or fields of reference, the heroic Germanic and the
Christian; these two are as often combined as separate in the poetry, which has survived for the
most part in four major manuscripts.
The Anglo-Saxons left behind no poetic rules or explicit system; everything we know about the
poetry of the period is based on modern analysis. The first widely accepted theory was constructed
by Eduard Sievers (1885). He distinguished five distinct alliterative patterns. The theory of John C.
Pope (1942), which uses musical notation to track the verse patterns, has been accepted in some
quarters, and is hotly debated.
The most popular and well-known understanding of Old English poetry continues to be Sievers’
alliterative verse. The system is based upon accent, alliteration, the quantity of vowels, and patterns
of syllabic accentuation. It consists of five permutations on a base verse scheme; any one of the five
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