Why Old English was first deciphered
Sunday, March 15th, 2026 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manThe first printer in England, William Caxton, wrote people bringing him manuscripts to print, and how he would modernise the English in them, replacing "thridde" for instance with "third"; but also that he would turn away manuscripts in Old English, because he could not understand them at all.
Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.
Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.
It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.
Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.
Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.
It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.
Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 09:20 pm (UTC)Obv this is a bit after the scholars you name, but at least in the eighteenth century there was also an interest in looking at old languages in order to understand the development processes of language - if you're systematically comparing say English and German and looking at the differences and similarities, you're going to want to have older forms of both languages to inform your studies.
A bit of searching found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_philology which has sixteeenth and seventeenth examples of scholarly documentation of historic German and Norse. Obv that might entirely plausibly have had reformation motivations as well, but I think the desire to understand the workings of language in general was fairly widespread.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-15 09:21 pm (UTC)(I know that Parker in particular for sure had religious/political motivations, but I'm not convinced that was the only reason that people had to pursue these studies)