Robert D. Fulk's Introduction to Middle English is a book that all scholars and graduate students in Middle English (ME) studies will want to have on their shelves for ready reference, and one that fills a substantial void in texts for undergraduate and graduate classes in the area. It also constitutes a contribution to the linguistic study of Middle English, and for that reason will equally find a place in the libraries of Anglo-Saxonists and historians of the English language, and should be acquired by all serious research libraries. Far from competing with the current crop of ME readers designed primarily for students of literature rather than language—who might be overwhelmed with the complex state of knowledge about the ME language itself and who in any case are only with difficulty persuaded to read outside the later 14th century—this book tackles the language itself as a whole and head-on. It is, therefore, as a course text, best adapted to (and, in my opinion, the only really viable current option for) those university courses that introduce students to the language of the ME period rather than the literature, though it could also be used with separate textual editions in a literature course.
A quick index as to what this book is not would be the obvious comparison to Burrow & Turville-Petre Reference Burrow and Turville-Petre2005, A Book of Middle English, which at 419 pages has only 61 pages on the language and its grammar compared to the 117-page investigation in Fulk, nearly double the length. Moreover, Burrow & Turville-Petre Reference Burrow and Turville-Petre2005 has only five reading texts (out of 18) from before the 14th century, compared to the 18 (of 38) in Fulk, so Fulk gives material beyond his grammar for a far better overview of the development—and dialectical variety—of the language. However, to be fair Burrow and Turville-Petre are really trying to do something quite different. Fulk's real “competition” is probably the early grammars Wright & Wright Reference Wright and Wright1928 and Mossé Reference Mossé1968, ancient works of linguistic scholarship that are here thoroughly superseded. Even the magisterial Mustanoja Reference Mustanoja1960 is to some extent replaced.
The grammar is about as comprehensive as one could desire; it does the needed work of cutting through the complex and sometimes even contradictory data of individual texts in order to give the broad outline one needs without at all disguising the complexity of the situation students and scholars will find when they wade out into the world of actual ME text, and indeed without minimizing the scholarly disagreements that prevail. Moreover—and this is its most valuable quality—the book is based not on traditional accounts and approaches as much as on the corpus of published recent linguistic scholarship as reviewed critically by a practitioner. Thus, it is a very up-to-date grammar, both in the sense that it is based on the latest scholarship throughout and in the sense that it takes a linguistic rather than a philological approach to its task. The guide to the important scholarship on the language provided in the bibliography and in-text references of the grammar thus constitutes one of the most useful features of the book: Graduate students and scholars new to the area will find that reading Fulk for an overview and following his references up for further information as they need will be a very viable approach to working up the linguistic scholarship. Almost as a corollary to that, it should be said that undergraduate students without background in historical linguistics or Old English will probably find this a rather dense book—the many tables and lists are very helpful to the advanced student or scholar, but a bit overwhelming to the neophyte, I suspect.
Rather than the traditional division into phonology and accidence (see Brunner Reference Brunner1965, Mossé Reference Mossé1968), the grammar adopts the modern approach and has three main sections (after a brief historical overview and a short but adequate introduction to orthography). These accounts of phonology, morphology, and syntax are judiciously oriented towards describing the place of Middle English between Old English and the student's own English, an approach that will make this book useful in institutions that offer a series of courses on the different stages of English. One result of this approach for the account given is that ME structures tend to be described either as different from Old English or from modern speech rather than as developed systems of the ME language itself. This is a general bias of English historical linguistics and common in History of the English Language textbooks, of which this may be taken as a very specialized one, but it does tend to leave the unfortunate impression in the student's mind that Middle English is either degenerate Old English or a rustic unformed variety of Modern English, or both. It also means that the focus tends to shift away from the contributions of Old Norse and Old French to the ME language. Again, this reflects a general bias in English historical linguistics, not a fault of Fulk's.
All sections of the grammar are excellent, and Fulk has done a particularly good job with dialects, a task made paradoxically more difficult by the excellent work of the two linguistic atlases (LALME and LAEME). In effect, Fulk traces his own dialect boundaries here, inspired by venerable precedent such as Oakden Reference Oakden1930 but using the data provided by the linguistic atlases and other sources to draw isoglosses that divide the island neatly (but with some striking differences from earlier dialect maps) into Northern, West Midland, East Midland, Southern, and South-Eastern gross dialect areas. All editors of ME texts will now need to refer to this work as the most persuasive and best evidenced account of ME dialect divisions one is likely to see for some time. It is unfortunate that the very brief section on Poetic Form that immediately follows, perhaps required by the publisher, was not pursued with as much ardor, given Fulk's credentials in the area. It is adequate in treating the isolated poetic line, though prone to over-broad generalization, but deficient in its treatment of stanzaic forms and of rhyme.
The illustrative texts are very well chosen, some of them linguistic must-haves (Peterborough Chronicle, 1137 entry; the Ormulum; Henry III's 1258 proclamation), others, as expected, standard authors and literary texts (Laemon, King Horn, The Owl and the Nightingale, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, Langland, Gower, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, Lydgate, Margery Kempe, the Second Shepherds’ Play), but many are more unusual texts delightful to discover in an introductory textbook and of great interest both linguistically and in terms of content. I was particularly excited to see The Soul's Address to the Body, Ancrene Wisse, Seinte Marherete, The Vox and the Wolf, Havelock, Handlyng Synne, the Ayenbyte of Inwyt, Barbour's Bruce, Trevisa, the Petition of the Company of Mercers, two Paston letters, Hoccleve, and the Testament of Cresseid. Most of the texts are short extracts, but this is a real feast of reading opportunities for the teacher and student; any beginning scholar who studiously works through all the texts and the grammar will find that the keys to the whole treasure chest of the writings in Middle English are in her hands.
The texts are all given a manuscript and editorial context, and each is accompanied by a specific account of its orthography and phonology, morphology and syntax, lexicon, dialect, and (where relevant) prosody, and with explanatory notes that tackle difficult expressions in the text and its cultural assumptions and allusions. The glossary at the back of the book gives, besides the signification and grammatical category, the immediate etymon in Old English, Old Norse, or Old French. Often a narrower etymology is given—for example to Old Anglian or Late West Saxon or Anglo-Norman—and although I find this often to be a helpful feature in explaining the particular form found in a text, readers who want to track the word further would have been aided if the most common Old English or Old French form had also been provided.
In sum, this is a very useful new textbook for courses in the ME language that is also a distinct scholarly contribution to the study of the language, an essential book for scholars in the immediate area and very useful even for those whose interests are somewhat tangential.
