The Introduction to Volume II begins by situating the volume within the New Cambridge History of the English Language. The topics of documentation, sources of data and modelling are then introduced. Part I addresses aspects of the textual record and its documentation, from inscriptions via manuscripts and prints to computerised corpora; special attention is paid to the relationship between speech and writing and to diachronic aspects of the English lexicon. Part II focuses on three key works or authors that have been central sources of data in historical studies: Beowulf, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Part III provides detailed accounts of a selection of text categories and their value as sources of data, including a chapter dedicated to texts by women, who are underrepresented in the historical record. Part IV, finally, discusses several important theoretical and methodological approaches to modelling historical language data, including generative, functional, cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches as well as construction grammar, grammaticalisation and advanced statistical treatments. Connections between aspects of the documented historical record, the data scholars can retrieve from it, and the models they apply to their data are highlighted.

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

In "What can be learnt from global traditions of oracy?" the prominent anthropologist Karin Barber explores the intertwined nature of orality and literacy across cultures. Despite the high value placed on literacy, she observes, orality remains a vibrant skill and creative domain in many societies. Recent studies emphasize the coexistence and mutual influence of oral and written traditions, demonstrated through examples like Italian commedia dell’arte and Afghan refugee poets. The chapter focuses first on the Yorùbá culture of Nigeria, where oral traditions shape individual identities and social interactions alongside a vibrant written literature. Further examples from Kenya and the Basque country highlight how informal oral genres integrate into education, fostering creativity, language skills, and cultural preservation. Overall, the chapter underscores oracy’s educational value and cultural significance across contexts, offering insights applicable to promoting oracy skills in the UK.

Hopkins centred his life on the Gospel and the Incarnation from the time of his conversion to Catholicism in 1866 onwards, and the exposition of the faith in the Mass became his life’s central activity when he joined the Jesuits in 1868. His sermons deserve to be read as ardent yet stylish examples of the genre as well as for their relevance to Hopkins as poet and to Hopkins as original thinker. This chapter examines the liturgical context of the sermons and ways in which they relate to the context of Victorian preaching and Jesuit homiletics. Hopkins’s sometimes baroque preaching style was not always orthodox, running counter to the simple language advised by Jesuit preaching manuals. In the texts of his sermons, it is nevertheless possible to find moving autobiographical testimony to Hopkins’s psycho-spiritual struggles, as well as his desire to empathize with his congregants’ lives and work.

This chapter argues that the spoken word had special significance in the Russian literary tradition due to censorship and other constraints on the printed word, and also because of the cultural chasm between a small, educated elite and a weakly literate majority. It begins with Baroque rhetoric in the eighteenth century before examining the role of oral performance and rhetoric in the Romantic era. It then shows a reinvigoration of literature’s oral dimension from the reform era of the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, as writers became public readers of their work and the educated elite sought to render a popular ‘voice’ in literary form. Following a repressive hiatus in the Stalin period, the spoken word had its heyday in the postwar era: guitar poetry, a popular form of urban folklore, entered the field of literature, while poets achieved national fame as performers as well as published authors.

This chapter explores how early prose writers made use of intertextuality, from the emergence of prose until the classical age. First, it considers the earliest writers, especially early Greek mythographers and philosophers, who faced the challenge of dealing with the authoritative world of epic poetry. To inherit this credibility, they could either acknowledge its importance or reject it. In many cases, they tried to improve upon the poets or kept their narratives up to a certain point before swinging in another direction. Second, the chapter studies the developments in the classical age and focuses especially on Herodotus, who cites poets, but never prose writers, favourably. Harsh attacks are reserved for those predecessors whose work was recognised as significant and thus as a direct competitor.

The first section of this introduction sets the scene for the volume as a whole by briefly considering the history of intertextuality within modern classical scholarship, both Latin and Greek, and then highlighting the special methodological and historical challenges that attend on comparative approaches to early Greek literature. As scholars increasingly agree on the need to read early Greek literature in a comparative way, it is argued, this only makes more urgent the question of how best to do so. The second section of the introduction highlights some of the core methodological, historical, and literary preoccupations of this book by exploring in chronological order two contrastive and complementary case studies from early elegy, one from Tyrtaeus and one from Simonides. Rather than providing a set of definitive answers about how these texts relate to epic tradition and/or particular epics, this section aims to give a sense of the sort of questions at stake in the following chapters. The introduction then concludes by summarising each of those chapters and highlighting interconnections between them.

As scholars look increasingly for the traces of intertextuality and allusion in early Greek poetry, Homer remains the prime focus of interest, and the relationship between the Iliad and Odyssey especially so. This chapter suggests that, though direct allusion between texts should not be ruled out a priori, an intertextual dynamic which stems from the traditionality of the texts is a more reliable and rewarding first interpretative step. The discussion reviews two examples which have served as important planks in the case that the Odyssey explicitly refers to the Iliad, and finds wanting the allusive arguments normally used to make that case, before suggesting a more methodologically and historically sound form of interaction. Interpretation, meaning, and appreciation all remain possible, and are indeed much richer in their appreciation of the poetry.

Suspecting it was more widely known for its sporting prowess than its culture, Australia decided to stage four arts festivals prior to hosting the 2000 Olympics. The first, held in 1997, celebrated the indigenous cultures of the world, with prominence given to Aboriginal Australia. Conceived as the “Festival of the Dreaming,” it featured, in addition to dance, storytelling, and art, performances of Waiting for Godot in Bundjalung. It was hoped parallels between the play’s universal themes and historical Aboriginal experience – a politics of waiting and existential despair – would reveal indigenous culture. In the event, this was not realized. This chapter explores some of the reasons why. Audiences heard Bundjalung spoken but it proved so mellifluous that the expected interplay of antagonism and resignation voiced in English did not take place. Audiences could follow the English text cued as sur-titles but given ignorance of Bundjalung they could not appreciate they were hearing a transliteration. Audiences could see the cast interacting, but they were not aware that the protocols of Aboriginal conversation had been set aside. While the Bundjalung Waiting for Godot was years ahead of its time, it continues to raise issues for the notion of global Irish studies.

In its broadest sense, book history is concerned with all the media – electronic, printed, handwritten, oral – in which dictionaries have been preserved and circulated. Lexicography began at a particular point in the development of the book, and many topics in the global history of lexicography are book-historical topics. One of the most fundamental of these is the distinction, seen in western and non-western traditions alike, between dictionaries which are made to support ready reference, and dictionaries which are made to support slower, more thorough, study. Another is the distinction between the dictionary text as a single entity, and the body of lexicographical material as a repertoire from which different selections can be made on different occasions. Another is the dependence of the textual structure of the dictionary as we know it on the physical structure of the codex (as opposed to scrolls, clay or wooden tablets, and other media). These topics are of evident continuing relevance to the compilers, publishers, and users of dictionaries in electronic form.

Ancient literary-historical narratives commonly envisage developments in poetry and music in terms either of gradual technical progress, or of decadence and hyper-sophistication. This chapter argues that Lucretius strikingly combines these two perspectives in the concluding paragraphs of the culture-history at the end of De Rerum Natura 5: the invention of carmina as songs (5.1379–1411) is associated with simple pleasures, emphatically unsurpassed by later refinements in technique which are linked in turn to the insatiable and destructive desire for novelty and luxury; whereas carmina as (epic?) poems are mentioned amongst the refinements listed in the book’s closing lines as steps on the way to a ‘peak’ (cacumen) of artistic and cultural progress (5.1448–1457). The dual narrative adumbrated here may be linked in turn with the dichotomy between text as written artefact and poem as disembodied ‘song’, which has been a focus of attention in recent scholarship on Latin poetry: both models of textuality, like the conflicting models of cultural development that shape the finale to Book 5, are important to Lucretius’ poetics and his Epicurean didaxis. Lucretius’ poem thus exemplifies the manifold ways in which literary-historical narratives may be determined by the discursive demands of the text in question.

This chapter is focused on a battle in the Athenian law-court between two great orators. Aeschines was trained as a tragic actor who worked in a mask, and brought the skills of the stage to the democratic arena. He argued for making peace with the new rising imperial power, Macedon, and tried to persuade the jury to position themselves as authentic democrats. Demosthenes was a skilled writer who wrote speeches for others, and later learnt how to present himself as a public speaker. He won the debate for two reasons. He persuaded the jury to position themselves in nationalistic terms as Athenians, and he also persuaded them that he was sincere while his opponent was merely acting. The reputation of Demosthenes has undergone many changes, and it was only in the nineteenth century that he emerged as an archetypal democrat. In Demosthenes’ day the drive for sincerity was tied to a shift from communitarian thinking to a higher degree of individualism, in a political context where the city was losing its power of self-determination. I end by drawing on Peter Brook’s minimalist definition of theatre to create a definition of democracy.