Filling in the gaps: early middle English, nationalist philology, and reparative codicology

ABSTRACT

Ongoing interventions by antiracist scholars and activists demonstrate the lasting impact that the racist, nationalist, and colonialist foundation of the field has had on modern perceptions of the pre-Conquest English past and those who study it. This article identifies the impact of the same ideologies on the study of early Middle English literatures and its place in canonical accounts. The deployment of medieval English literatures in a teleological effort to establish histories of whiteness and legitimize white colonial superiority. However, close interrogation of the linguistic and literary developments of the period threatened the very structures they were invoked to sustain. Effectively, early Middle English was placed in a medial position that invoked its presence only to deny its importance. This article offers an alternative. Eve Sedgwick's conception of ‘reparative reading’ has resonances with both the material forms in which early Middle English is preserved, and the human experiences that underlie that preservation. Fragmentary lyrics, like the couplet from Poema Morale, provide an example. These snippets point to the presence of a widely circulating ‘cultural repository’ that could negotiate the structures of institutional (primarily Latinate) literacy and opened those frameworks to dynamic participation by a wide range of readers and users.

KEYWORDS:

• Early Middle English
• medieval manuscripts
• fragments
• bibliography
• reparative
• Sedgwick

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article was initially written in during the winter of 2020–2021. Since that time there have been several important publications that touch on and extend the issues discussed here: these include, significantly, Jonathan Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021); Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘What’s in a Name? The Past and Present Racism in “Anglo-Saxon” Studies’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 52 (2022), pp. 135–53; Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, ‘The Uses of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Past’ between Revolutions, Imperialism and Racism’, Práticas da História, 12 (2021), pp. 129–60; Eduardo Ramos, ‘Philology and Racist Appropriations of the Medieval’, Literature Compass, 20.7–9 (2023), e.12734; and three special issues: ‘Race, Revulsion, and Revolution’, postmedieval, 11.4 (2020), edited by Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, and Micah Goodrich; ‘Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts’, English Language Notes, 58.2 (2020), edited by Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy; and ‘The ‘Medieval’ Undone: Imagining a New Global Past’, boundary 2, 50.3 (2023), edited by Sierra Lomuto. Where possible, I have updated my references.

2 A very unscientific measure of this flourishing is provided by a search of Brepols’ International Medieval Bibliography. At the time of writing the search term ‘early Middle English’ returns 134 items published since 1966, over two thirds of which date to the three decades between 1990 and 2020. Nearly 6% were published within last three years (since 2019) due largely to the launch of the dedicated journal Early Middle English in that year. Of course, this measure excludes the many publications that do not use the term ‘early Middle English’ in their titles but do discuss literature in English that dates to the period of roughly 1100–1350 and exhibits the lexical markers associated with that term. Consequently, the results also lean heavily towards linguistic studies. Nevertheless, these data give a rough sense of a more widespread trend. A Google n-gram plot of the term exhibits a similar steep rise in usage in books in English from the late 1980s onward, after a sharp fall from its previous peak usage in 1932.

3 The work of editing and translating early Middle English has also flourished since the 1990s. Some landmarks on this path include, among others, G. V. Smithers (ed.), Havelok (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Elaine Treharne (ed. and trans.), Old and Middle English c. 890 – c. 1450: An Anthology (Oxford: Wiley, 2004), which includes a significant amount of early Middle English; Bella Millett (ed. and trans.), Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses: A Translation, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2009); Bella Millett (ed. and trans.), Wessex Parallel WebTexts (University of Southampton, 2003). https://wpwt.soton.ac.uk [Date accessed 30 August 2023]; Susanna Fein, David Raybin, and Jan Ziolkowski (ed. and trans.), The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, volumes 1–3 (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2014–2015); Emily Rebekah Huber and Elizabeth Robertson (ed. and trans.), The Katherine Group (Bodley MS 34) (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2016); Susanna Fein (ed. and trans.), The Owl and the Nightingale and the English Poems of Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (II) (Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University Press, 2022).

4 The ideas summarised here were developed, shaped, and led by scholars in premodern critical race studies, a field with a long intellectual history that is often ignored by white newcomers: see Margo Hendrix, ‘Coloring the Past, Rewriting Our Future: RaceB4Race’, paper presented at the Race and Periodization Symposium, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. (5 September 2019), recording and transcript published Folger Shakespeare Library. https://www.folger.edu/institute/scholarly-programs/race-periodization/margo-hendricks [Date accessed 24 June 2021]. For an extended analysis of Hendrix’s conclusions see Dorothy Kim, ‘Introduction to literature compass special cluster: Critical race and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16.9–10 (2019), pp. 1–16, esp. 1–7. I hope to do some justice to this extensive critical background, but I am aware that my account will not be without deficiencies, and I take responsibility for its lacks.

5 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 12, 136–8. ‘Diversity work’ is Ahmed’s term for the labour required to make institutions – in the case of this discussion the institution as academic sub-field – more inclusive and to act on issues of racial inequality: labour that regularly runs up against the stultifying force of institutional messaging, where language celebrating diversity is deployed as an alternative to concrete action. Institutional misuse has led to suspicion among ‘diversity practitioners’ and activists regarding use of the language of diversity, however Ahmed retains the word for its multivalency: diversity is political, institutional, social, and personal. ‘Diversity work’ remains overwhelmingly the purview of BIPOC workers. See, Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), esp. pp. 1–15, and 141–71.

6 For some recent analysis of the ‘mainstreaming’ of right-wing views see for example, Cas Mudde, The Far-Right Today (New York, NY: Polity, 2019); Ann Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Toronto: Signal/McClelland Stewart, 2020); James Downes, ‘How the Far-Right Took over the Mainstream’, openDemocracy (24 September 2020). https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/how-far-right-took-over-mainstream/ [Date accessed 22 June 2021]. I use the word ‘began’ advisedly, because gaining and retaining the attention of the field on issues of racism and colonisation remains difficult, with many preferring to ignore or deny the racial inequality that continues to perpetuate in medieval studies. Furthermore, it should be noted that other medievalists have been vocal in their support of such alt-right extremists, inviting the attention of pundits and encouraging harassment of racialised scholars.

7 Dorothy Kim, ‘Antifeminism, Whiteness, and Medieval Studies’, In the Middle (18 January 2016). https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-and-medieval.html, [Date accessed 22 June 2021]. See also Dorothy Kim, ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle (10 November 2016). https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/11/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-medieval.html, [Date accessed 13 July 2021]; Dorothy Kim, ‘Teaching Medieval Studies in a Time of White Supremacy’, In the Middle (28 August 2017). https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/08/teaching-medieval-studies-in-time-of.html, [Date accessed 4 June 2021]. It should be noted (as the scholarship of antiracist activists is often ignored by those seeking to detract or distract from their work) that Kim’s work on this topic extends far beyond the bounds of what is laid out here: see, e.g. Dorothy Kim, ‘The Politics of the Medieval Pre-Racial’, Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies [Special Issue], ed. Dorothy Kim, Literature Compass 18.10. e12617 (2021), 1–9. Kim’s book, The Alt-Medieval: Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.

8 Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Iain Macleod Higgins, Dorothy Kim, and Meg Worley, ‘Making Early Middle English’, Early Middle English, 1.1 (2019), pp. 1–2.

9 For example, Bella Millett, ‘The Audience for the Saints’ Lives of the Katherine Group’, Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990), 127–56; Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Bella Millett, ‘Women in No Man's Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’. In Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, edited by Carole M. Meale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 86–103. The same period saw also an increase in research into the linguistic structures of early Middle English, especially in the wake of the corpus building and evaluation that led to Margaret Laing, A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, version 1 (The University of Edinburgh, 2007).

10 Meghan L. Nestel, ‘A Space of Her Own: Genderfluidity and Negotiation in The Life of Christina of Markyate’; Caitlin G. Watt, ‘“Car vallés sui et nient mescine”: Trans Heroism and Literary Masculitinity in Le Roman de Silence’; Blake Gutt, ‘Medieval Trans Lives in Anamorphosis: Looking Back and Seeing Differently (Pregnant Men and Backward Birth)’, all in Medieval Feminist Forum, 55.1 (2019), pp. 100–34, 135–73, 174–206.

11 Boyarin et al., ‘Making Early Middle English’, p. 2.

12 Damian Fleming, ‘Christian Hebrew in England with and without Jewish Books’, Early Middle English, 1.1 (2019), 73–82; Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: University of Columbia Press, 2003), esp. pp. 68–114; and throughout Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); M. Breann Leake, ‘Churches Out of Time: Nostalgia, Early Middle English, and the Futures of Durham and A Lament for the English Church’, Early Middle English, 2.2 (2020), pp. 59–79, quotation p. 62.

13 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 126, 138, 150–1 respectively.

14 Ibid., p. 146.

15 Adam Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing Anglo-Saxon Studies: A Response to ISAS in Honolulu’, In the Middle (29 July 2017). https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2017/07/decolonizing-anglo-saxon-studies.html, [Date accessed 22 June 2021]. See also, for this and other ideas covered here, Adam Miyashiro, ‘Our Deeper Past: Race, settler-colonialism, and medieval heritage politics’, Literature Compass, 16.9–10 (2019), e.12550.

16 The conference program is available via. the Wayback Machine: ‘ISAS Honolulu 2017’, University of Hawai`i (2017). https://www.isas2017.com; archived at Wayback Machine, Internet Archive (2 August 2017). https://web.archive.org/web/20170802024139/http://www.isas2017.com/, [Date accessed 22 June 2021].

17 Miyashiro, ‘Decolonizing’: The conference program featured a single native Hawaiian speaker, whose paper was on a Hawaiian topic. One further paper touched on Polynesia. Miyashiro judges this paper, given by a white American scholar, to have ‘replicat[ed] the worst possible legacy of colonial representation of kanaka maoli (native Hawaiians) from America’s colonial history.’

18 Correctives of the medieval imagery in use largely occurred on social media before gaining the attention of the press. Thomas Blake, ‘Getting Medieval Post-Charlottesville: Medievalism and the Alt-Right’, in Louie Dean Valencia-García (ed.), Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 179–97 critiques the corrective approach. For a recent in-depth analysis of the ideological medievalism underpinning one of the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville see Wan-Chuan Kao, ‘Identitarian Politics, Precarious Sovereignty’, postmedieval, 11.4 (2020), pp. 371–83.

19 Annie Abrams, as cited by Jo Livingstone, ‘Racism, Medievalism, and the White Supremacists of Charlottesville’, The New Republic (15 August 2017). https://newrepublic.com/article/144320/racism-medievalism-white-supremacists-charlottesville, [Date accessed 13 July 2021]. See also, for example, Cord Whitaker, ‘The Problem of Alt-Right Medievalist White Supremacy, and Its Black Medievalist Answer’, in Louie Dean Valencia-García (ed.), Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 159–76, esp. 161–6; Sierra Lomuto, ‘White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies’, In the Middle (5 December 2016). https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/12/white-nationalism-and-ethics-of.html, [Date accessed 6 June 2021]; David Perry, ‘Introduction’, in Andrew Albin, Mary C. Erler, Thomas O’Donnell, Nicholas L. Paul, Nina Rowe (eds.), Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-used Past (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 1–13 (9); Miyashiro, ‘Deeper Pasts’. Such work is ongoing, and antiracist work continues in many public forums including on social media, in the digital and print press, as well as in peer-reviewed academic settings.

20 I use the verb ‘condensed’ advisedly. Though terminological change has been a contested area of discussion that those who reject antiracist arguments often refocus on, it is only part of a much broader set of problems that must be addressed. Problems that include the overwhelming whiteness of scholars working in medieval studies, the Eurocentrism of current scholarship, and the refusal to receive or take seriously work on the history of race and racism: see Eduardo Ramos, ‘Confronting Whiteness: Antiracism in Medieval Studies’, postmedieval, 11.4 (2020), pp. 493–502. A shift in terminology is just a small piece of the puzzle, and it alone will not facilitate substantive change.

21 See Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, ‘The Many Myths of the Term ‘Anglo-Saxon’’, Smithsonian Magazine (14 July 2021). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/many-myths-term-anglo-saxon-180978169/ [accessed 17 October 2021]; and Rambaran-Olm and Wade, ‘What’s in a Name?’, pp. 136–7.

22 See Susan Reynolds, ‘What Do We Mean by "Anglo-Saxon" and "Anglo-Saxons"?’, Journal of British Studies, 24.4 (1985), 395–414 (p. 398).

23 This area has a long and cumulative history of research that includes, but is not limited to: Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780–1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: the Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Ian Wood, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Early Middle Ages, 1750–2000’, in Marios Costambeys, Andrew Hamer, and Martin Heale (eds.), The Making of the Middle Ages (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), pp. 36–53; Margarita Diaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 317–67; Donna Beth Ellard, Anglo-Saxon(ist) Pasts, postSaxon Futures (punctum books, 2019); Helen Young, ‘Thomas Percy’s Racialization of the European Middle Ages’, Literature Compass, 16.e12543 (2019). For the history of ethnoracial political ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, see especially, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Matthew X. Vernon, The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages (Cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018), esp. pp. 1–43; and Rambaran-Olm and Wade, ‘What’s in a Name?’, pp. 137–44.

24 David Wilton, ‘What do we mean by Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 119.4 (2020), pp. 425–56, esp. 442–51. The blurring I allude to is a function of the use of the term by politicians and pundits as a racist dog-whistle to white supremacist groups.

25 Mary Rambaran-Olm, ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies [Early English Studies], Academia and White Supremacy’, Medium (27 June 2018). https://mrambaranolm.medium.com/anglo-saxon-studies-academia-and-white-supremacy-17c87b360bf3 [accessed 17 October 2021]. I make use of the term ‘decolonisation’ here, despite Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s powerful warning that ‘decolonization is not a metaphor’ (Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1.1 (2012), pp. 1–40), in recognition of the fact that, while dispossession may be at the heart of settler-colonialism, the trappings of colonialism extend far beyond it. In this article I follow Rambaran-Olm and others in viewing racism within the field of medieval English literature as a direct legacy of the colonial project: see also Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, ‘Introduction: Decolonising the University?’, in Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, and Dalia Gebrial (eds.), Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Books, 2018), pp. 4–6.

26 On the day that I wrote this sentence it was revealed that an open letter in support of Dr Rambaran-Olm had been highjacked by such actors, who over a number of days added numerous overtly racist, ableist, homophobic, and sexist corruptions of the names of scholars working in pre-modern critical race studies and in antiracist activism to the signatory list. For more on the push back from within field, see Rambaran-Olm and Wade, ‘What’s in a Name?’, pp. 148–53.

27 Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 60–136.

28 David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

29 See Matthews, Making, pp. xxxiii and 162–75; and crucially Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 157–86, esp. 159 and 179.

30 For more recent work on this philological heritage see Ramos, ‘Philology’.

31 Heng, Invention, p. 27.

32 Joseph Bosworth, A Compendious Anglo-Saxon and English Dictionary (London: 1838), p. iii. Instances of this sort of race-talk abound. A prime example is Thomas Jefferson’s, Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language (1851), composed largely in 1798: see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 110–13.

33 See also Will Abberley, ‘Philology, Anglo-Saxonism, and National Identity’, in Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 326–39 (pp. 327–8).

34 Bosworth, Dictionary, iii. See Irvin Painter, White People, pp. 174–7.

35 Shyama Rajendran, ‘Undoing “the vernacular”: Dismantling Structures of Raciolinguistic Supremacy’, Literature Compass, 16.e12544 (2019), pp. 1–13.

36 Momma, Philology to English Studies, p. 98.

37 Rajendran, ‘Undoing “the vernacular”’, pp. 1–5.

38 Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘Analogy in Translation: Imperial Rome, Medieval England and British India’, in Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (eds.), Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 183–204. See Rajendran, ‘Undoing’, p. 3.

39 Early English Text Society, List of Publications 2020 (Oxford: 2020), pp. 6–11. My thanks to Daniel Wakelin (in a private communication, 30 September 2021), who points out that the presence of early Middle English in the Extra Series itself marks the lack of interest shown by earlier editors and commercial presses. If the titles released in the concurrent Extra Series (pp. 25–30), which was conceived to reprint (and re-edit where necessary) works that had already appeared in print, are included in this survey the proportion of early Middle English is greatly diluted.

40 This is not to say the early Middle English is still missing from canonical accounts of English language development (although its presence may still be lacking), only that its historic absence has had a lasting effect on teaching and research. Some significant modern accounts that reinstate the importance of early Middle English include, John Algeo and Carmen Acevedo Butcher, The Origins and Development of the English Language, seventh edition (Cengage, 2013 [1964]); Thomas Hahn, ‘Early Middle English’, in David Wallace (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 61–91; and importantly for students of literature, Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

41 William Turnbull (ed.), Romances of Sir Guy of Warwick, and Rembrun his Son, Abbotsford Club 18 (Edinburgh: 1840), p. ix.

42 David Matthews, ‘Ideas of Medieval English in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Tim William Machan (ed.), Imagining Medieval English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 261–280 (pp. 273–7).

43 Matthews, ‘Ideas’, p. 265.

44 George Hickes, Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Criticus et Archaeologicus, 2 vols. (Oxford: 1703–5), v. 1, p. 134; trans. Matthews, ‘Ideas’, p. 267.

45 Matthews, ‘Ideas’, p. 268.

46 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: 1755), v. 1, p. x. Spenser, of course, writes in praise of Chaucer in The Faerie Queene (1596): ‘Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled, / On Fame's eternal beadroll worthy to be filed’ (iv.ii, stanza 32). It is no coincidence that Spenser’s own writing is embedded in the beginnings of imperial colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Nor that Chaucer was often heralded by nineteenth-century philologists as the beginnings of modern English, the other side of the gap that early Middle English is positioned (and fails) to bridge.

47 Alexander Nicholson (ed.), Ancient Metrical Romances from the Auchinleck Manuscript, Abbotsford Club 4 (Edinburgh: 1836), p. viii–ix.

48 Nicholson (ed.), Ancient Metrical Romances, p. xiii.

49 The 72-page pamphlet titled, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of Races, purported to be a Republican publication advocating for race mixing and interracial marriage in an effort to draw popular ire. Its publication made interracial relationships a key issue of the 1864 American presidential election, and the authors are said to have attempted to trick Abraham Lincoln into endorsing the work: see Sidney Kaplan, ‘The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864’, Journal of African American History, 34.3 (1949), pp. 274–343, esp. pp. 276–83.

50 Kaplan, ‘Miscegenation Issue’, p. 278.

51 Joseph Ritson (ed.), Ancient Engleish Metrical Romanceës, 3 vols. (London: 1802), v. 1, p. lxiv.

52 Richard Morris (ed.), Old English Homilies and Homiletic Treatises of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, EETS OS 34 (London: 1868), p. vi; T. O. Cockayne (ed.), Seinte Marherete: The Meiden ant Martyr, in Old English, EETS OS 13 (London: 1862; reissued 1866), p. vii.

53 James Morton (ed.), The Legend of St Katherine of Alexandria, Abbotsford Club 20 (London: 1841), xiv.

54 Cockayne (ed.), Seinte Marherete, p. v.

55 Jeremy Bentham, Principals of Penal Law, in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: 1838), v. 1, p. 480.

56 Ritson (ed.), Romanceës, v. 1, p. lxii.

57 This narrative also has notable parallels with the modern “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory (and older “white genocide” conspiracy theory), which entered nationalist popular discourse in the 2010s via. the work of Renaud Camus and uses a fundamental (but deliberate) misunderstanding of demographic statistics to posit that welcoming immigration policies in majority-white western nations has led to a demographic shift that will turn white populations into political minorities and will eventually lead to the demise of whiteness.

58 Bosworth, Dictionary, p. iv.

59 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 130.

60 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 135.

61 Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 2 vols. (New York: Springer, 1961–3), v. 2, p. 433, as quoted by Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 135.

62 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 131.

63 For a summary of New Philology, which has prompted numerous new investigations and interventions, see Stephen G. Nichols, ‘Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture’, Speculum, 65.1 (1990), pp. 1–10.

64 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 128.

65 Ibid., p. 149–50.

66 Ibid., p. 146.

67 Varying degrees of scepticism and critique are offered by, for example, Barbara Christian, ‘The Race for Theory’, Cultural Critique, 6 (1987), 51–63; Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, ‘The Dream of a Common Language’, in Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (eds.), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 1–18; Jean Walton, ‘Replacing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narratives of Feminism’, Critical Inquiry, 21.4 (1995), pp. 775–804; Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); David L. Eng, ‘Colonial Object Relations’, Social Text, 34.1 (2016), pp. 1–19; Hortense Spillers, ‘Time and Crisis: Questions for Psychoanalysis and Race’, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 26.2 (2018), pp. 25–31, esp. pp. 28–30. Of course, psychoanalysis has also had an important role in discussions of race and colonialism, including in the foundational work of Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. du Bois: see, for an overview, Arlene R. Keizer, ‘African American Literature and Psychoanalysis’, in Gene Andrew Jarrett (ed.), A Companion to African American Literature (Oxford: Wiley, 2010), pp. 410–20.

68 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 128.

69 Ibid., p. 146–50.

70 Margaret Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Medieval English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993).

71 R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952).

72 Maidstone, Maidstone Museum, MS A.13, ff. 46v, 93r, 253r consecutively. For analysis of the Maidstone manuscript’s use of the verse see Betty Hill, ‘A Couplet from the Conduct of Life in Maidstone MS A 13’, Notes and Queries, 50.4 (2003), p. 377.

73 Hans Marcus (ed.), Das Frühmittelenglische “Poema Morale”: Kristisch Herausgegeben mit Grammatischer Durchprüfung und Deutscher Übersetzung (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1934), p. 180, ll. 145–6.

74 Ibid., p. 180, ll. 142–4.

75 Maidstone, Maidstone Museum, MS A.13, f. 46v.

76 Gillis J. Dorleijn and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, eds., Cultural Repertoires: Structure, Function and Dynamics (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), especially Alisdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Cultural Repertory of Middle Scots Lyric Verse’, pp. 59–85; and the definitions provided by Gillis J. Dorleijn, and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, ‘The Structure and Function of Cultural Repertoires: An Introduction’, pp. ix–xix. (p. xii).

77 Rambaran-Olm and Wade, ‘What’s in a Name?’, pp. 146–53.