Morphological Spelling

This study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers’ (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of verbs in six editions of The book of good maners (1487–1526), printed by William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. The analysis suggests that early printers could have been interested in regularising spelling already before normative guidance from scholars became available in the form of grammars and spelling books, that is before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, the levels of the printers’ spelling consistency varied, depending on the particular printing house and edition.

Cross-Sections (1)

This chapter studies narrative prose from the early decades of the sixteenth century. It surveys ten texts which constitute the ten known examples of narrative prose printed (and, in some cases, reprinted) between 1516 and 1520. There are three saints' lives, extracted from Jacobus de Voraigne's thirteenth-century Golden Legend (first printed in English by William Caxton in 1483); two ‘tales of the supernatural’; two ‘biographical jest-books’; and three romances. The survey works through each of these broad (and slightly rough and ready) generic categories in turn. The chapter concludes by highlighting some of the shared traits and motifs across all ten texts.

Paving the Way for the Arthurian Revival: William Caxton and Sir Thomas Malory’s King Arthur in the Eighteenth Century

This article examines how Malory’s