Language and Community in Early England

This book examines the development of English as a written vernacular and identifies it as a process of community building that occurred in a multilingual context. Moving from the 8th-13th centuries, to the 16th-century antiquarians who collected medieval manuscripts, it suggests that this period in the history of English can only be understood if we loosen insistence on a sharp divide between Old and Middle English and place the textuality in the framework of a multilingual matrix. It argues that the tension of linguistic distance provides necessary energy for the community-building activities of annotation and glossing, translation, compilation, and other uses of texts and manuscripts.