34.2454, Review: Transforming Early English

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-2454. Wed Aug 09 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.2454, Review: Transforming Early English

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Date: 23-Jun-2023
From: Bev Thurber [bev at pagophilia.com]
Subject: Applied Linguistics, History of Linguistics, Language Documentation: Smith (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3875

AUTHOR: Jeremy J. Smith
TITLE: Transforming Early English
SUBTITLE: The Reinvention of Early English and Older Scots
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Bev Thurber

SUMMARY

Thomas Percy’s “Reliques of Ancient English Poetry” is known as “one
of the most influential publications of its day” (1). In 1783, Joseph
Ritson called it “beautiful, elegant, and ingenious” while, in the
same footnote, adding that “they who look into it to be acquainted
with the state of ancient poetry, will be miserably disappointed or
fatally misled” (3). This contrast provides the impetus for Smith’s
work in “Transforming Early English”: to determine how early editorial
practices reflected the culture behind them and enabled early texts to
be used in developing the culture of the editors. The evidence is in
minor details, such as spelling, font, and punctuation. These
“delicate textual traces”, Smith argues, “are responses to dynamically
shifting socio-cultural functions” (9).

Chapter 1, “On Historical Pragmatics”, introduces the theoretical
background of the book. Smith defines historical pragmatics as “the
application of pragmatic approaches to the written materials surviving
from the past, offering contextual informed explanations for the
linguistic features of the texts under analysis, ranging from lexical
and grammatical choices to features of writing-systems, including not
only spelling but also those traditionally considered the domain of
paleography and codicology, such as punctuation, script and typeface”
(28-29). This enables Smith to unite a variety of
approaches—linguistic, palaeographic, codicological, bibliographic,
and socio-cultural—in what he calls “a broader notion of philology,
linking what may be termed book history to linguistic study in ways
that would perhaps have been more familiar to eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century scholars than to those of more recent vintage”
(12). This is “pragmaphilology”, which Smith prefers to call
“‘recuperated’ or ‘reimagined’ philology” (29). It uses tiny details
of books, seen as artifacts and texts simultaneously, to understand
the communities—both communities of practice and discourse
communities—within which they were made. Books served these
communities in a variety of ways, including as objects to be displayed
as well as scripts meant to be delivered orally (23).

Subsequent chapters show these ideas in action. Each chapter presents
several case studies centered on a general theme. The chapters are
ordered roughly chronologically in terms of the original texts they
focus on. The later reworkings discussed are from many different
periods.

Chapter 2, “Inventing the Anglo-Saxons”, begins with Beowulf. It
compares the editorial practices of early republications of the
manuscript—focusing on those of Humphry Wanley, Grimur Jonsson
Thorkelin, and John Mitchell Kemble—to show how a number of different
discourse communities were emerging. Then, the chapter shifts to a
study of John Day’s 1566 edition of one of Ælfric’s homilies under the
title “A testimonie of antiquitie” and related works. This section
highlights the tension between antiquarian and ideological uses; Smith
notes that the sermons were “easily repurposed as ammunition for other
seventeenth-century religious conflicts” (69). The third case study is
about copies of Old English texts produced during the Early Middle
English period to highlight earlier antiquarianism, as shown by the
annotations of the famed Tremulous Hand of Worcester. The chapter
concludes by returning to Beowulf with a discussion of its runes,
which provoke questions about their role in manuscript culture a
millennium ago.

Chapter 3, “‘Witnesses preordained by God’: The reception of Middle
English religious prose”, picks up with the Ancrene Riwle, which was
briefly discussed among the Early Middle English texts in Chapter 2.
It describes the massive Vernon manuscript in detail and compares it
to the versions in Cotton Nero MS A.xiv and Pepys 2498 to show how the
scribes updated the text. Various spellings were changed, as were some
vocabulary items and sentence structures. However, the most telling
changes are to punctuation, which is used much more extensively in the
Vernon and Pepys manuscripts than in the Nero manuscript. Smith
suggests that this “show[s] the repurposing of an old text for a
discourse community where literacy was—no doubt uncertainly—becoming
more extensive” (99). The chapter then expands this discussion to
include reworkings of other religious texts, focusing on Thomas
Wimbledon’s fourteenth-century “Sermon”. Its reuse in Joseph Morgan’s
“Phoenix Britannicus” in 1732 heralds “the ongoing social life of the
written word”, which, as part of the Enlightenment, “seems to have
been a crucial element in the forging—and expression—of national
identities in the emerging British state” (111). The chapter concludes
with a case study on Nicholas Love’s “Mirror of the Blessed Life of
Jesus Christ”, which was submitted to church authorities for approval
about 1410. As the text was reworked over time, its dialect was muted,
its spelling standardized, and its punctuation regularized, especially
with the advent of printing. This highlights the role of authority in
textual transmission; as the text’s presentation became standardized,
so did its interpretation. Pragmatic features, Smith notes, guide
interpretation and offer control to the person producing the text
(126).

Chapter 4, “The great tradition: Langland, Gower, Chaucer”, focuses on
some of the best-known Middle English texts: Piers Plowman, Confessio
Amantis, and of course the Canterbury Tales. The chapter pushes the
chronology of reworkings discussed forward, through Crowley’s
“radicalism” in presenting a text to an audience that needed more help
(141) to the present-day Riverside Chaucer (151ff). Changes in
punctuation, intended in part to make the text better reflect oral
discourse, reflect the social reading practice of the
eighteenth-century discourse community some of these editions were
aimed at. In various ways, all these editors have raised the question
“is it ever possible to produce an edition that represents the
author’s original conception of the work when the original readership
for that work no longer exists?” (157). This chapter extends Chapter
3’s conclusion by describing how “changes in formal features … reflect
pragmatically changing socio-cultural functions, while also reminding
us of the challenges faced by textual critics as their discipline
mutated over time” (173).

Chapter 5, “Forging the nation: Reworking Older Scottish literature”,
brings the nationalism theme that gradually emerged in the previous
chapters to the foreground with a discussion of John Ramsay’s 1489
copy of John Barbour’s “Bruce and Blind Hary’s Wallace”, which was
produced “in a distinctively Scottish variety of secretary script”
(178). This provides an entry point to the direct political
implications of how texts were presented. Robert Freebairn, Allan
Ramsay the elder, and Thomas Ruddiman are introduced as “Jacobite
conduit[s] of medieval texts” (195). The chapter’s final case study is
a comparison of three versions of Gavin Douglas’s “Eneados”. All the
versions of texts discussed here highlight different discourse
communities and purposes, yet all support Older Scots literature and
therefore assert a Scottish national identity.

Chapter 6, “On textual transformation: Walter Scott and beyond”,
returns to the themes of the introduction with the author Smith
considers “Percy’s spiritual successor” (38). Through Scott’s edition
of “Sir Tristrem”, Smith brings the themes of the book up to the
present day. Scott’s punctuation “pointed forward to trends in textual
editing of the vernacular that were to become dominant” (228). It
steps back to provide a broader perspective on the changing cultural
contexts and discourse communities that surround every text.

The book concludes with a dozen plates showing pages (generally the
title pages) of the texts discussed, a 33-page bibliography, and a
9-page index.

EVALUATION

Three recurring themes stand out in this book: the transition from
manuscript to print, how punctuation constrains interpretation, and
the development of a national identity. These three themes are closely
intertwined, with the distribution of books helping the interpretation
set up by the punctuation used in them become the dominant one and
participate in the formation of a national identity. Although
publishers generally call each new version of a text the most correct
or authentic version, it is impossible to bring an old text to a new
audience without making decisions about the presentation that push the
text’s interpretation in one direction or another. Smith points to
this as evidence that “in reality the notion of ‘textual truth’,
‘correctness’ or ‘authenticity’ is a fluid one, open for negotiation
as texts are recuperated at different times” (236). In this way, every
text looks both forward and back in “a Janus-like relationship to both
past and present” (237).

The individual case studies presented here are inspiring examples of
how to apply historical pragmatics. Separately, they highlight what
can be learned about a community by the way it presents a particular
text, especially when several interpretations are possible and the
presentation pushes readers toward one at the expense of others. Taken
together, the case studies effectively demonstrate the “profound
connexion” between language and its written presentation (238).

Like the many reworkings of older texts it discusses, “Transforming
Early English” looks both forward and back by presenting the ways the
texts have changed over time while invoking a new type of philology
that brings together the scattered ways of studying older texts. This
“reimagined philology” (238) encourages scholars to approach older
texts holistically, as artifacts being presented to a community. This
book will be appreciated by anyone studying older texts, especially
those interested in how the texts were received later on and how they
are being interpreted and presented today.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Bev Thurber is an independent scholar whose interest include
historical linguistics and the history of ice skating.



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