Volume 134, Issue 4

The compound word grass-bed occurs four times in Old and Middle English texts. In each case, grass-bed occurs in an alliterative poem; in each case, the word is used as a kenning for a site of bodily death (a battlefield or a grave). The chronologically and metrically uneven distribution of poetic words like grass-bed in the corpus of medieval English texts raises questions about the reliability of the extant written record, the historical resources of individual writers, and the cultural meanings of poetic traditions. Meanwhile, research in alliterative metrics has begun to suggest that the division of medieval English literary history into Old and Middle subperiods masks fundamental continuities between pre- and post-Conquest alliterative verse. Progress in alliterative metrics refocuses the historical problems attendant upon rare poetic words like grass-bed . Conversely, against the backdrop of technical argumentation in the field of metrics, the study of words offers a second way of understanding the continuity of the alliterative tradition. This article explores connections between metrical history and lexical history via a case study of one especially long-lived and metrically marked poetic word.

The Middle English compound noun counter-rivere – attested as counterreuere in the MED , and as counter reuer , cownter reuer , cownteryuer , cowntre ryver in all known manuscripts – is glossed by the MED s.v. contrevure n., (b) as denoting ‘a contrivance of some sort’ employed in the sport of hawking. The MED offers no definitive etymology, but invites readers to compare the word with Old French controvëure ‘invention’, which does indeed fit well with the citation supplied for sense (a) ‘a stratagem’. 1 Without wishing to challenge the MED ’s lemma or its treatment of that word under sense (a), I argue that its interpretation of the technical hawking term under sense (b) is mistaken, and that it has erroneously conflated two entirely different lexical items. Close examination of the contexts in which counter-rivere occurs will confirm that the word needs to be lemmatised separately with a gloss indicating that it denotes a specific type of hawking assistant, and that it has roots (hitherto unrecognised) going back to Anglo-Latin.

The late-medieval Scottish–English border had a porous impermeability. Politically, there was in theory a demarcation between Scotland and England that remained relatively fixed from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries, though a zone of marches surrounded that demarcation, and border disputes continued throughout the period. On the English–Scottish linguistic border, such porous impermeability took several forms. The extremes would be works written primarily in either Scots or some form of English and arrayed between them is what might be called the interlinguistic marches: works written in a language neither entirely Scots nor entirely English that somehow depends on and elides any easy distinctions between the varieties. These marches, and what they say about the Scots–English linguistic border, are the focus of this paper. The paper begins by looking at several texts whose language challenges any easy pronouncements about Scots–English dialect boundaries. Originally written in one variety, they survive as well in copies wherein the text has been rewritten, in all or in part, in the other variety. These rewritings might be called ‘dialect translations’, though other terms also could apply, each of them reframing not only the rewritings but also the varieties and language dynamics they help create. From these examples the paper turns to the larger issue that is its primary concern: the medieval English linguistic repertoire, including the grammatical integrity and social significance of medieval English regional varieties in general. Language and dialect boundaries certainly do matter, but it is speakers who decide how and when.

The emergence of the form dialect in early modern English is often mentioned in histories of the language, but important as it is, the evidence for it has never been analyzed as a whole, and its treatment in the revised OED entry for dialect leaves room for modifications. This article presents and re-evaluates the evidence for dialect in sixteenth-century English sources. It demonstrates that there were two homonyms with this form, one a shortening of English dialectics and one a borrowing from post-classical Latin dialectus , from its Greek etymon διάλεκτος, and, less often, from French dialecte . After treating dialect ‘dialectics’ briefly, it explores the known attestations of dialect ‘kind of language’, showing the range of senses in which this word could be used, and the ways in which it can be shown to have spread from one user of English to another, beginning with one clearly defined expatriate learned circle in the 1560s, entering more general learned use in the 1570s and 1580s, and becoming a fully naturalized literary English word in the 1590s. The paper therefore offers a detailed case-study of the naturalization of a learned word in early modern English and also contributes to the history of the conceptualization of language variation in sixteenth-century England.

Cultures – though showing, as modern sociology has it, a strong tendency towards being treated as ‘reified’ – are not a pre-existent ‘given’, neither as an ‘entity’ nor as a ‘system’, but ought to be seen as ‘structures’ continuously built and re-built by their members in an endless collective process of appropriatory, and performative, construction and re-construction. It is in this sense that the constitution, tradition, and modification of cultures can be described as a never-ending process of ‘translation’. Drawing above all on Yuri Lotman’s dictum that “the elementary act of thinking is translation” (1990: 143), but also on Bruno Latour’s suggestion to see ‘society’ as a relational network of mediating actors ‘making others do’ things as well as on Patrick Hutton’s idea of seeing ‘history’ as an ongoing process of continuously structuring the previously unstructured, and on a concept of ‘discourse’ that defines it as a system of thought and argumentation predominantly articulated in texts, the article develops twelve theses trying to propose that what is conceived of as the constitution of ‘culture’ must be seen as an interminable dynamic process of an unfathomable plurality of individual hermeneutic acts (con/dissensually) translating ‘understanding’ into ‘understanding’.

Literary periodization is still a useful practice, but in constant need of revision. As we approach the centenary of Robert Lowell’s birth in 2017, a critical reexamination of the contested concept of an ‘age of Lowell’ is required, both because of its unwarranted, apparently magisterial claim and its untapped potential. This essay recalls the historical circumstances of Irvin Ehrenpreis’s coining of that term and its fraught reception history. Three arguments remain significant: Lowell’s historical position and his own, strongly historicizing poetry changed the poetic discourse of the 1960s and beyond; Lowell participated in and helped shape the ‘identitarian’ turn of the 1960s, and Lowell’s 1973 volume History marked the conclusion of his age-crafting and personal myth-making project. The essay concludes with a brief look at Lowell’s biological age, heretofore rarely considered in Lowell studies. The ‘age of Lowell’ deserves a fresh interpretation.