Tamar, Widowhood, and the Old English Prose Translation of Genesis

AbstractRecently, more attention has been paid to the conscious translation efforts that produced the Old English Hexateuch/Heptateuch, examining how a number of revisions must be analyzed as an effort to control readerly interpretation. This study contributes to that discussion by considering the translation of Genesis 38, which greatly changes the biblical narrative by removing Tamar’s second marriage and any rationale for the death of her first husband. Previously, this omission has been read as a way to streamline the story or avoid unsavory (sexual) topics. We argue, instead, for another, concurrent possibility: to revise the text in light of pre-Conquest views on widowhood. The turn of the millennium saw early English widows gain much more attention in various legal and ecclesiastical sources. These sources, we believe, speak to the concerns of the translator in some of the alterations found in the chapter (including forced remarriage, multiple marriages, the amount of time in between marriages, and the Levirate custom as an institution).

Download Full-text

Three Old English Prose Texts in MS. Cotton Vitellius A XV. Edited with an Introductory and Glossarial Index by Stanley Rypins. (Milford, for the Early English Text Society. £1 5s. net.)

Notes and Queries ◽

10.1093/notesj/cxlviii.apr25.306 ◽

1925 ◽

Keyword(s):

Old English ◽

English Text ◽

English Prose ◽

Early English

Download Full-text

Co-occurrence and iteration of intensifiers in Early English

English Text Construction ◽

10.1075/etc.10.2.04men ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 10 (2) ◽

pp. 249-273 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Belén Méndez-Naya

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Old English ◽

Special Focus ◽

Extensive Literature ◽

Content Type ◽

English Prose ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Early English ◽

Linguistic Phenomenon

This article focuses on an aspect of intensification which has not, so far, received due attention in the extensive literature on the topic: intensifier iteration (very very hot) and co-occurrence (very extremely hot), with a special focus on Old, Middle and Early Modern English as represented in the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose and the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. The results show that in earlier English, intensifier iteration is less frequent than co-occurrence; that while the former is clearly associated with emphasis, the latter also intersects with grammaticalization and renewal; and that co-occurrence is particularly salient in periods of instability when the competition of intensifiers is at its height. Iteration and co-occurrence of intensifiers are analysed in this article as cases of the widespread cross-linguistic phenomenon of accretion.

Download Full-text

Verbo-nominal constructions of necessity with þearf n. and need n.: competition and grammaticalization from OE to eModE

English Language and Linguistics ◽

10.1017/s1360674310000122 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 373-397 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

LUCÍA LOUREIRO-PORTO

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

Middle English ◽

Old English ◽

High Frequency ◽

English Prose ◽

Semantic Competition ◽

History Of ◽

Current Article ◽

Early English ◽

Nominal Sets

The evolution of verbs expressing necessity in the history of English, such as *þurfan and need, has been studied in detail, especially their semantic competition and their grammaticalization (see Molencki 2002, 2005; Taeymans 2006; Loureiro-Porto 2009). However, analogous verbo-nominal expressions involving the morphologically related nouns þearf and need and the verbs be and have have received little attention, despite their relevance as semantic competitors of the verbs and their subsequent fossilization in high-frequency expressions such as if need be and had need. The current article fills this gap by studying the development of verbo-nominal expressions with þearf and need from Old to early Modern English, and asks: (i) whether the verbs and the verbo-nominal expressions undergo similar processes of grammaticalization, and (ii) whether there is any connection between the evolution of the verbal and the verbo-nominal sets. Analysis of these verbo-nominal constructions in a 4.1 million-word corpus (including the Helsinki Corpus and fragments of the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, the Lampeter Corpus and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler) shows that, firstly, both idiomaticization and grammaticalization are relevant in the development of verbo-nominal constructions; secondly, their evolution is key to the understanding of the development of the necessity verbs *þurfan and need; and finally, the competition between constructions with þearf and need calls into question the well-known hypothesis that phonological confusion with durran caused the disappearance of *þurfan in the ME period (see Visser 1963–73: 1423, §1343).

Download Full-text