Literary and Other Languages in Middle English

Author / Editor
Blake, N. F.

Title
Literary and Other Languages in Middle English

Published
Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, eds. Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1988), pp. 166-85.

Description
Almost all studies of Middle English language and style are flawed in method or lacking in comprehensiveness. The reaction of the medieval audience to dialectal differences is hard to gauge; e.g., sociolinguistic implications of the Northern dialect in RvT.
Several approaches may be valuable: printers' prologues that comment on language, scribal presentation in manuscripts, and comments of Chaucer's followers and early editors such as Caxton. Blake studies scribal glosses in various manuscripts of CT.

Alternative Title
Genres, Themes, and Images in English Literature from the Fourteenth to the Fifteenth Century

Chaucer Subjects
Language and Word Studies.
Reeve and His Tale.