A Study and Modern Engish Rendering of PATIENCE, A Fourteenth Century Alliterative Poem or the West Midland Dialect
Graduation Date
Spring 1959
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Document Form
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Degree Granting Institution
Catholic University of America
Program Name
Humanities
Abstract
The manuscript, Cotton Nero A x, which contains Patience, the subject of this study, was first brought to the notice of scholars in 1S39 by Sir Frederic Madden who, after giving a brief account of the volume, noted that the four poems contained in it possessed unusual merit and deserved to be printed. They were printed in 1864 as the first volume of the newly-founded Early English Text Society under the title, Early English Alliterative Poems in the West Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century, edited by Richard Morris. A second and revised edition was issued in 1369, and has been several times reprinted by the Society.
The value of the volume was immediately recognized by both literary and linguistic scholars. Ten Brink, in Volume One of his English Literature, was the first to notice its literary merit; other general and special problems of the four poems have been dealt with by lexicographers, metrists. grammarians (Morris, Meaner, Huibert, Morsbach. Gollancz), and philologists (Puhrmann, Luick, Pischer. Trautmann, Zupitza, MacLean, Wulker, Kluge).