Band 135, Heft 4

A new runic inscription was found in 2017. The object could be a handle of a ladle or spoon from Sedgeford, Norfolk. The tentative date of the object ranges from the 8th to the 10th century. The inscription consists of a cross and eight characters, seven of which are clearly runes, but the second character of the sequence is problematic. Although the inscription has no diagnostic rune identifying it as being written in the Old English fuþorc , there is no doubt that the language of the text is Old English. The inscription represents the Old English male personal name B[.]rnferþ . After an overview of the inscription and the runes, and a graph-typological description of character 2, I have attempted to analyze possible phoneme-grapheme relations of Graph 2, assigning the possible readings to certain dialect areas.

Recent scholarship has challenged the view of the late twelfth-century Trinity Homilies , and of the contemporary Lambeth Homilies , as two collections that merely continue the earlier Old English vernacular homiletic tradition. This study aims to contribute to the scholarly debate on the Trinity Homilies by considering the elements of tradition and innovation featured in the twenty-ninth sermon of the collection, De Sancto Andrea . Through a discussion on the passage on the ‘Soul’s Address to the Body’ preserved in this homily, I shall show that Trinity XXIX includes both elements of continuity with the ‘Soul and Body’ literature attested in Old English homiletic texts (like the antithetical rhetorical pattern developed in the damned soul’s speech) and new features (like the motif of the ‘Signs of Death’ and the theme of ‘neglectful friends’) which reflect early Middle English developments in the ‘Soul and Body’ theme. I shall argue that the Trinity XXIX homilist probably adapted and reworked a lost Latin source into a poetic passage metrically and thematically consistent with contemporary ‘Soul and Body’ poetry. In the Appendix, I shall discuss the sources for the Latin material embedded in Trinity XXIX. 1

Twenty years ago, George R. Keiser showed that the mutilated last quire of Lincoln Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library, MS 91 had once contained a herbal written in Middle English. He discovered moreover that passages parallel to those reconstructable for the Lincoln manuscript appear in other texts, including an important work called John Lelamour’s Herbal after a name mentioned in its explicit, and concluded that Lelamour, an otherwise unknown fourteenth-century schoolmaster from Hereford, was the author of the original treatise that Thornton and other scribes used for the composition of their own herbals. The present article will present ample evidence which will demonstrate that Keiser’s hypothesis on a Herefordian pedigree for this textual family cannot be sustained any longer, and that the origins of this textual family should in fact be sought not too far from Scotland. A linguistic approach based on a collection of scribal modifications, both unconscious and conscious ones (i. e. copy mistakes and changes made on purpose by the several copyists), will be used for the task. This will reveal how linguistic variation between the several manuscripts can be profitably used to reconstruct the dialect of the original translation, which will here consequently be named Northern Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus’s De Viribus Herbarum (or Northern Macer for short).

This paper reports on the results of a corpus-based study that deals with a hitherto neglected kind of formal asymmetry between active and passive clauses involving two-place prepositional verbs like agree . These contrasts are found in the context of two satisfied conditions: a) The preposition in question is omissible, which holds for agree in present-day British English as in They agreed (on / upon / to / with) the proposal . b) Unlike active uses, passivization of relevant prepositional options necessarily results in preposition stranding as in The proposal has been agreed on / upon / to / with . It is shown that – in both passive and active clauses – stranded prepositions tend to be omitted more often than non-stranded ones. Unlike the passive, the active provides only a restricted range of contexts compatible with the potential use of stranded prepositions. What is more, these environments are relatively infrequent with most verbs. This is what largely explains the active-passive asymmetries with the verbs explored in this paper. Crucially, however, stranded prepositions can in several cases be demonstrated to be more strongly avoided in the passive than the active, thus mirroring their cross-linguistic distribution (see e. g. Maling and Zaenen 1985; Truswell 2009). The voice contrast is found to be independent of diachronic changes resulting in either the loss or the acquisition of the prepositions involved.