"A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English"--

Mark Faulkner is Ussher Assistant Professor in Medieval Literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he is Director of the M. Phil in Medieval Studies. He is the author of the entry on Medieval Manuscripts for Oxford Bibliographies Online, and the co-author of the chapter on English in the Oxford Handbook of Language Contact.

Part I. Preliminaries: 1. Introduction; 2. Approaching Twelfth-Century English-Language Texts; Part II. The Affordances of English: 3. English in the Linguistic Ecology of the Long Twelfth Century; 4. English as a Language of Documentary Record; 5. English as a Language for Writing History; 6. English as a Language for Sermon Writing; 7. Conclusion.