Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

The Introduction shows that English language writing from the long twelfth century (1050 - 1215) has been seriously neglected in existing literary and linguistic histories because it falls between the subperiods of ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English. It argues for a rapprochment between literary and linguistic approaches, finding this in philology and seeing the question of the continuity between the two subperiods as residing primarily in the extent to which texts composed after the Norman Conquest inherited the conventions developed for writing in different genres before 1066 during the process of textualisation (Verschriftlichung). In addition to this focus on genre, the new literary history offered in the book, the chapter explains, sees English texts as the product of a multilingual literary environment, integrates consideration of the revision, adaptation and remediation of older texts alongside the investigation of the composition of new texts, and explores regional modulations in the writing of English.