Middle English

The Middle English group at the University of Stavanger works with medieval and sixteenth-century texts written in or containing English. We compile text corpora based on new transcriptions, and carry out research, especially from the viewpoints of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and philology. This site contains information about our projects. It als... o contains the online versions of two corpora: The Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) and A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The MEG-C corpus contains samples of the texts, of various genres, that were mapped in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Mcintosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986), representing the period ca 1325-1500. The latest published version, 2011.1, contains 410 texts, and we will shortly add an augmented version. The MELD corpus contains transcriptions of local documents - administrative texts and letters - from the period 1399-1525. The current version, 2017.1, contains 2,017 texts and is published in instalments. So far we have published the East Midlands part (June 2017), as well as East Anglia and the Southeast (Dec 2020). We would like to encourage visitors to browse, to read, and to send us feedback! Why Middle English? Because it allows us to study large quantities of historical English texts that were produced in a multilingual context and in a manuscript culture, with all the fluidity and variability of handwritten text production. Because of the abundance of linguistic variation in this period, when there was not yet an established standard model for writing, and linguistic habits could vary tremendously: in relation to geography, genre, function, audience, educational background and other factors identifying these is a research question in itself. This makes Middle English an extremely interesting area of study, not least from the point of view of the changes in technology and literacy practices in our own time, which may cause us to question things that were taken for granted in a print culture: the identity of a ...Read More