The Three Barriers to Closure in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon and the Middle English Translations

Chapter 3 focuses on the Latin versions of St Margaret’s vita, circulating in medieval England. These include the one from the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), which became a base for many other versions, both Latin and vernacular. Its influence is also found in some of the English breviaries, discussed in the second section of the chapter. The chapter proceeds with an overview of Latin verses and hymns to St Margaret and finally discusses the vernacular texts influenced by the Legenda Aurea: the two Middle English translations, the Gilte Legende and Caxton’s Golden Legend; Nicholas Bozon’s Anglo-Norman verse life, and St Margaret’s legend from the Scottish Legendary.

This chapter considers the ways in which ideas permeated and changed society over time, through mechanisms that cannot directly be seen in the literary record. It seeks to adumbrate the vibrant oral culture of the period by tracing the movement of ideas between texts, contexts and audiences, using romances, lyrics, sermons, devotional works, anecdotes and proverbs, and accounts of legal cases. Extended discussions are offered of the figure of King Arthur in the Latin of Geoffrey of Monmouth, French of Wace, and English of Laȝamon; the Marian lament at the Passion, in Latin and its French and later English translations; the early Middle English religious lyric; the Mirror of the Church in Latin, French, and English; the South English Legendary, and several other texts.

This article explores the motivations behind the loss of a number of Germanic prefixes in the history of English. Using Old and Middle English translations of Boethius’ de Consolatione Philosophiae as a corpus, it is shown that prefix loss is not specific to a single word category, nor to the presence of morphosyntactic characteristics such as prefix separability. This state of affairs cannot be explained by current theories of prefix loss, which are generally restricted to inseparable verbal prefixes. The fact that some prefixes are lost and some are preserved, also argues against an across-the-board grammaticalisation account, based mostly on semantic factors. It is held here that a closer look at the prosodic structure of native prefixes can provide a principled explanation for the entirety of our data. To this effect, the optimisation of a resolved moraic trochee (Dresher & Lahiri, 1991) amid significant restructuring of the language's lexicon had crucial impact on the fate of prefixed words. In particular, Early Middle English would have come to prefer maximal, branching feet, and avoid words with prefixes constituting heavy, non-branching feet. Ultimately, the preservation of prosodic structure led to the loss of heavy monosyllabic prefixes due to stress clash between prefix and root. Light monosyllabic and bisyllabic prefixes, in contrast, were preserved, since no clash occurred. This argument explains the changes in prefixation from a purely prosodic standpoint, hence accounting for the data for both verbal and nominal prefixes, which were heretofore dealt with separately.

AbstractThe majority of Greek and Semitic words found in the Latin version of St John’s Gospel express specific biblical terms, closely connected with Jewish and Christian religion and culture, but almost entirely unknown to most of the English population until the evangelisation that took place in the 7th century. The comparison of the Old and Middle English translations of the Latin source text presented here attempts to identify the procedures and methods which both Old and Middle English translators used to make the Latin items understandable to their audience, as well as to explain the reasons for the differences between the translations, where possible.