A Book of Middle English

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View books by J. A. Burrow, Thorlac TurvillePetre.

Studied text - Rated
I studied this text as the core for my module on middle english language as part of my degree, although turville-petre offers some good information about dialect and other linguistic aspects in his introduction, some of the selections of excerpts from texts are quite week and I felt it would have been better had he chosen more dynamic sections which exmplify the pieces rather than just the opening lines, especially with pieces such as Sir Gawain and The Green Knight

A good textbook - Rated
This is a good selection of texts, accessibly presented with introductions to each text, footnotes for difficult passages and a glossary. Not so much a book for straight reading as for learning the essentials of reading Middle English literature from early texts such as "Ancrene Wisse" to later ones by Chaucer and other writers. My only complaint is that the glossary is a bit arbitrary - it seems that if the editors consider a word in a text is similar to a Modern English word, they don't include it in the glossary, even if they do include a word with the same spelling but a different meaning - this can cause difficulties in translating and understanding some sections of the texts. On the whole though, a good buy.