English Reformation and Early Type

Today's class introduced you to the English Reformation and also gave you a chance to try reading "black-letter" type from the early sixteenth century.

I looked over the biographies of Edward VI on the Biographic database that LMU links to. It says that Edward caught measles and/or smallpox, recovered but was weak, and then eventually died of tuberculosis. So now we know.

Here are today's lecture notes:
Henry VIII and the making of English identity
* Henry VIII was the second son of Henry VII. His older brother died before their father, so Henry became king, and married the woman who had been engaged to his brother, Catherine of Aragon.
* Henry and Catherine had one daughter, Mary Tudor. Henry and Cath had no more kids and H sued for divorce. The pope refused to grant this. In 1534, H declared himself the head of the church of England and married his paramour, Anne Boleyn. Their baby was Elizabeth Tudor. H had all the monasteries dissolved in one of the biggest land-grabs in English history.
* H had Anne executed on suspicious of infidelity (treason, if you’re married to the king). He then married Jane Seymour, who had Edward Tudor.
* Henry (after 3 other marriages but no more kids) died in 1547. Edward became Edward VI as a boy. His main advisor was the Protector, who supported much more radical reform of the English Church (under H, it was pretty close to Catholicism)
* Edward died in 1553. His older sister, Mary succeeded him. She was Catholic. The Church of England returned to Catholicism, and she had several Protestant “martyrs” (or, if you like, “heretics”) killed. She is now called “Bloody Mary” (not to be confused with Mary, Queen of Scots, by the way, who is a different person).
* Mary wasn’t well, either (probably had cancer). She died in 1558. Her sister, Elizabeth took the throne and England was Protestant again. This wavering back and forth produced something of an identity crisis, and, once the country had settled itself with a Protestant monarch, they felt a need to differentiate themselves from “non-English” identity categories. The origin of English “national identity” is often located at this time.

English typography of the early 16th century.
Remember, the early sort of type (now called black-letter) is not identical to modern characters in several ways (some of which continued in early modern roman type). Let’s get ourselves accustomed to reading some of it in the original.
* “s” at the start of a word is above the line of writing, with a long vertical stroke hooked to the right at the top. It can easily be mistaken for an “f”. We can also sometimes see a long S in words “foulneffe”
* U and v are often interchangeable, with V at the start of a word and u in the middle (although this is not necessarily consistent). A lower case v can be closed at the top, with a stroke angling up from the left
* Y and I are interchangeable in some instances, as are I and J
* R after vowels or other (orthographically) round letters can be written “upside down” in the “rounded r” form
* Ink can often smudge a page, and letters can be worn and have missing bits or odd appearances.

The Great Vowel Shift, Chaucer, and Caxton

Do go spend some time reading Melinda Menzer's excellent site on the Great Vowel Shift. (If you've read the reading for Tuesday, can you identify the term for how "Do" is used in the previous sentence?)

Great Vowel Shift!!!!

• one of the kookiest things to happen to the English language since proto-Germanic moved the accent off the end of the words.
• Melinda Menzer has an excellent web site that lets you hear the differences and talks through the stages of the GVS. It also has a little dialogue that you can listen to to hear the sounds change in speech. You need Quicktime on your machine (I don’t know if library machines will have this or not).
• all the vowels sounds moved up in the mouth, except the top front and back, which dropped, centered, and became dipthongs (I->ai, for instance).
• probably this happened for prestige reasons. Several dialects were in contact in London, remember. Some of them pronounced different letters differently, so that certain words were homophones (like around here, bowl and boll can be). This caused other speakers to change their own speech to differentiate themselves. Still, it’s a striking change for the language to undergo.
• It began around 1450-1500, and was progressing through the early modern period (in Shakespeare, “eat” and “ate” are homophones, for instance).
• This is why ME sounds so odd to us. The GVS changed English pronunciation drastically, even after orthography had been set.

Chaucer

• One of the most important literary figures from the Middle English period, Chaucer was the first English poet whose work inspired national sentiment about the English language and its literary potential.
• He was middle-class—his father was a wine merchant, and he served as a Customs official in London.
• At the time of his life, the war with France had gotten rather bitter, so that French was no longer as popular
• Chaucer’s major work is The Canterbury Tales, a set of stories that are told by fictional pilgrims (including one named Chaucer) on their way to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. This site itself was a locus of some national feeling—the origin and center of the Church in England, and a saint who was local but highly venerated.
• The works are in some ways drawing on a set of “estates satire”—a very formalized set of portraits of people from different levels of society. Many critics have felt that Chaucer’s pilgrims are taking that tradition and moving it towards what we now call “realistic” characters. Some critics, however, maintain that his portraits are all entirely conventional.
• at any rate, the Tales, as well as several other short and long poems of Chaucer’s were hugely popular, and circulate in several manuscripts, some of which are richly illustrated
  
• But manuscript transmission carries with it problems of accuracy, as we see in Chaucer’s poem “Adam Scriveyn” (Adam the Scribe) (handout). It also doesn’t circulate as widely, even though scribal workshops seem to be coming into fashion to provide books for wealthy, middle-class patrons. Often one would read aloud from a manuscript; early punctuation was probably an aid to audible reading.

William Caxton

• About 100 years after Chaucer’s death, William Caxton introduced to England one of the most revolutionary inventions in the history of Europe—the printing press.
• Caxton didn’t invent the press, but he saw the business possibilities in it. With the expansion of a wealthier middle class, the literate population was growing. Manuscript production was very expensive; books could be produced more cheaply.
• Early books were made to look like manuscripts. The decorated initials were drawn in and colored by hand (the origin of modern paragraph indentation).
• The effect of printing on language was to retard spelling change. Writing slows language change in the first place; the introduction of texts to an ever-expanding section of the population really slowed it down.
• Caxton wrote and spelled in a way that reflects his Westminster location, using in the London dialect. As rival presses sprang up, they also centered in London. So while in Middle English we have manuscripts from all over preserving several dialects, in the early modern period we don’t have all that evidence.
• Texts became somewhat more stable—although printed versions of a text could differ from each other, the variety is much less than hand-copied manuscripts.
• As the renaissance draws on, people even begin to argue a need for spelling reform—a sure sign that orthography was becoming fixed even as the GVS was continuing to shape pronunciation
• Words begin to become “reified”—become “things” rather than supposedly immediate and translucent referents to the concept they convey.

Exam review

For Tuesday's exam, you will need to look over your lecture notes and the notes up on the course blog. Pay attention to the people who are mentioned--both scholars and historical figures. Also, label your book so that you can easily find information in it for the open-book portion of the exam.

Some things to know:
Who were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? What language subgroups come from Proto-Indo-European? Which subgroup includes English? Which other subgroup has directly influenced English, and how did this happen?

What groups of people have lived in Britain, and who displaced them? How did the successive displacements come about?

What are some of the characteristics of Old and Middle English? What type of language is each of these? What are some of the changes that occur between Old English and Middle English, and what brought these changes about?

What do we mean by strong verb "classes" in Old English? What sort of information can we determine about a verb by knowing its class?

What are the 4 primary cases of Old English nouns, and what does each case mean grammatically (what does it tell us about the noun's role in its sentence)?

What can the definite article tell you about a noun's case and number (this is on a handout, not in Fennell)? Which articles are unambiguous?

What are some identifying characteristics of Middle Scots?

A good link for Middle Scots

This website on Middle Scots lists the differences between it and Middle English.

We'll take a good bit of time tomorrow to review for an exam, but we'll also listen to some Middle English lyrics sung by the group Anonymous 4. Just for fun, I've included a link to their website. It looks like they're touring right now, and they'll be in Danville, KY next month! It's about 2.5 hours from here, if anyone thinks it sounds like a fun road trip.

The Norman Conquest

Today's class talked about the Norman Conquest. There are several websites devoted to the topic: The Essential Norman Conquest seemed particularly well-done. And there's a contest to win a free book!

You can find hundreds of images of the Bayeux Tapstery on-line. The Google Images search results are here.

Thursday's Lecure note:

The Norman Conquest
*The house of Wessex (descendents of King Alfred the Great) ended with Edward the Confessor, who died with no children.
*Kingship was mostly hereditary in these days, but not strictly father-son. Often a king would designate an heir, but the more powerful family member could also take control. The acclimation of the other powerful families could also make a difference.
*All this came into conflict when Edward died. He had previously designated his kinsman, William of Normandy, his heir. His wife’s kinsman, Harald Godwinson, declared himself king, claiming that William had elected him (Harald) on his death bed. The nobility acclaimed Harald was king. William started to put together an invasionary force to go claim his kingdom.
*Meanwhile, Harald’s troublesome brother, Tostig, got together with the King of Norway, Harald Hardrada, and convinced him that he should be king of England! So the Vikings (plus Tostig) land in the north of England. Harald went screaming up with his army and dealt them a decisive blow at the battle of Stanford Bridge (just outside of York)
*William, despite the late season, put his men and their horses on ships, and landed in Pevensey while H was north.
*H came back down at top speed, leaving his archers behind in order to travel faster (a key mistake, as it turned out).
*The two armies came together at a place the Anglo-Saxons called “Senlac”, just a few miles from the town of Hastings. After a long fight (all day), the Normans won. Harald and most of the other Anglo-Saxon nobility were killed, and the age of the Anglo-Saxon hegemony over England came to an end.
*How do we know? In addition to written sources, we have one of the most amazing medieval artifacts in existence—the Bayeux Tapestry. This name is a misnomer, as it’s actually embroidery. It shows the events of the sucession debate and the battle.

II. Language and the Normans
*The Normans (who were descended from Vikings) spoke Old French, which very quickly became “Anglo-Norman” as a specialized dialect in England. They did not have the developed literary vernacular or legal culture that the AS had.
*They had all the influential positions in the Church and the government (which wasn’t yet very centralized). English was the conquered people’s language. Eventually, over the centuries, the ties between the Normans and their (intermarried) descendants and their continental French counterparts weakened, and English began to take on its own identity as a national language again.
*This is one of the major reasons why modern English has such redundant vocabulary—we have Germanic words from OE, and Latinate words from French.

III. Middle English
*Is a merger of Old English and Old French into a new language, patterned basically after English grammatically but with some French elements (like “of” for possessives)
*Sounds began to change (mostly simplifying), and words begin to look more like modern English (see p. 98 and 100)
*Inflectional endings simplified—all plurals were –es, and all the singular except the genitive is the same
*Pronouns simplified and look more like MdE
*Several French loan words (some of which have now dropped back out)

A link about Old English

Sabrina forwarded this link to me, and she said it was helpful. Thanks, Sabrina!

Omniglot Old English