The Ormulum

The first edition since 1878 of a primary twelfth-century text, the only example of a key transitional dialect between Old and Middle English. The first re-edition of this important work since 1878.

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The Ormulum consists of metrical English sermons, composed and phonetically written by a late twelfth-century priest, Orm, in the East Midlands, and surviving in his autograph manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1, and now newly edited from a fresh transcription, The text has previously only been available for study in Holt and White's edition, now over 140 years old. The editors have been able to recover all known missing parts of the manuscript from Jan van Vliet's seventeenth-century copy (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), and place them in context. These two manuscripts have now been combined in a single edition, and the result gives a new and fuller picture of the Ormulum than ever before. The Ormulum is the sole witness to a unique transitional dialect, long recognized for its importance in understanding the developments between Old and Middle English. It provides essential information for linguists, philologists, students of literature, and historians of religion. New fonts have been specially designed to represent Orm's elaborate spellings and punctuation. The edition represents Nils-Lennart Johannesson's work on this text over many years before his death in 2018, and now brought to fruition by his colleague, Andrew Cooper.