| Research Abstract |
My achievements with the aid of the research grant for 1997-99 are as follows :
1. I have compiled a catalogue of the Old English anonymous homilies and saints' lives that are extant. The list, based upon Scragg's and Bately's similar works but enlarged and supplemented by information about the subsequent editions and the original manuscripts where no edition has been published, contains, for each of the items, information of the original manuscript, the relation to other variant texts and related items and of the source(s), and is classified according to the system of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English, for ease of reference.
2 Of those 150 items, I have edited three afresh--two from MSS Junius 85-86 (items V and VII, which are a variant text of AElfric, Catholic Homilies II, item vii, and Blickling Homily IV, respectively) and one (Napier XXX, whose sources include four Vercelli Homilies and Wulfstan's Institutes of Polity) from the microfilm of the original manuscript (Hatton 113). The first two are the first complete edited texts of these anonymous but important works, while in the last I have corrected a few errors that are found in the DOE Corpus in transcription of the punctuation and text. Altogether, the three new edited texts are more faithful to the original manuscript texts and will be hopefully a more reliable basis of linguistic and literary studies of these works.
3 Using these new editions, I have made linguistic studies of late Old English anonymous homilies, with particular reference to syntax and style in the Vercelli and Blickling Homilies and Napier XXX. The results include two articles, 'Initial Verb-Subject Inversion in Some Late Old English Prose' and 'A "Wulfstan Imitator' at Work : Linguistic Features of Napier XXX', which are both published in my volume of collected papers Studies in the History of Old English Prose (Tokyo, 2000)
|
