Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The Ormulum is a long and complex early Middle English text extant in a single medieval manuscript. The majority of the text comprises verse homilies, making for a total of around twenty thousand regular lines. In addition, the manuscript is the author’s working draft and includes intervention showing development of the text over what may have been several decades. The thousands of revisions, some individual, some systematic, have never been fully catalogued. The present article highlights systematic changes in the manuscript which have an influence on metrical features and proposes typological categories into which they may be divided according to scope, exemplified by reference to the most salient revisions. It is concluded that changes below the level of a morpheme (type 1) rarely have a metrical effect, although there are some minor examples. Grammatical revisions which remove or replace affixes (type 2), typically the result of language change, are compensated for with various rewriting strategies to keep the meter regular. Similarly, it is unusual for revisions of individual lexical items with synonyms (type 3) to cause metrical changes, but that changes to whole verses (type 4) can have metrical causes, including as strategies for reducing the repetition of formulae.
Author: Andrew Cooper
Institution: Stockholm University
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7169047298