English in the Middle Ages
Tim William Machan
Reviews and Awards
"It's typical of M's scholarship that everyone interested in this area will have to rethink completely after reading English in the Middle Ages."--Language
"Professor Machan explores for the first time fully a new dimension in the understanding of the role of the English language in medieval England. He is rigorous and sceptical in his examination of assumptions that have come to be too easily accepted - about the rise of 'standard' English, about 'linguistic nationalism', about the role of Lollardy in fostering the vernacular, about the intrinsic funniness of regional dialects. He uses literary texts well, and offers, from his particular linguistic vantage-point, new and compelling interpretations of the dialect northernisms in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and of the subtleties of the 'sociolect' of courtly love-conversation in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."--Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
"If the idea of integrating the insights of linguistic research into literary criticism is scarcely new, this book is notable in presenting such an approach not as a pious aspiration but as a practical, and probably necessary, programme for researchers in Middle English literature, as well as Historical linguistics. ...Machan's volume offers an invaluable resource, which will surely provide the starting point for many new directions in academic research--and, with luck, become the first volume in a sequence of such studies."--Linguist List 15.2037
"This is a fascinating book, and a brave one, for it is not easy to think meaningfully in several disciplines simultaneously, and Machan here sets himself the daunting task of looking at writing that is, on the whole, historical and literary, while everywhere using the analytic terms and protocols of sociolinguistics.... An eloquent and extended reminder that there are other ways to look at the medieval writing we prize than the ways we have grown accustomed to."--Speculum