Sidenote on Close Reading


Close reading is normally an activity that keeps you focused on and within a text -- making meaning out of your appraisal of individual words, shapes of thought, rhetorical devices, patterns of description and characterization, and so forth.  

But sometimes, looking outside a text can enrich a close reading, adding depth and complexity to your exegetical efforts.

Resources like the ones profiled on this page can make words "matter" in interesting ways.


Bartolomeus Anglicus, Book on the Properties of Things (Barthélemy l'Anglais: Livre des propriétés des choses.) Fol.211. Birds. 1479-1480. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Image available in ARTstor


Tools for Close Reading


Oxford English Dictionary (OED):  The OED is widely accepted as the most complete record of the English language ever assembled – and that makes it an essential companion for work with literary texts. Unlike typical language dictionaries, which only define words in terms of their current uses and meanings, the OED is a historical dictionary, tracing a word from its earliest known use forward. For each of the more than 600,000 entries that comprise it at present, the OED provides a pronunciation key and etymology (in Old or Middle English, for example), lists its changing meanings (including those now obsolete), and illustrates those changes with quotations from literary texts and other historical records.


Fun facts from the OED: Reginald Pecock is among the top 1000 most quoted sources in the OED, coming in at number 201.  Among the familiar words Pecock introduced or made important uses of: metaphysical, oratory, peripatetic, and philosophic.



Click on the image to explore this entry or to search the OED



Middle English Dictionary:  described as the “greatest achievement of medieval scholarship in America,” the MED traces word origins and usage for the period between 1100 and 1500.  In print form, the dictionary is vast -- 24 volumes and some 15,000 pages. The online version makes searching a bit easier, but you’ll still sometimes need to try several different spellings before you get a “hit.” Imaginacioun works in the MED, for example, but ymaginacioun yields no results. If you cannot find the word in the MED, use the OED and look through the history of the word. This way, you may find obsolete meanings that will illuminate the medieval usage of the word.

 

Some of the texts we are reading are modernizations of original Middle English texts. While many spellings have been modernized, some words may still seem unfamiliar to you in the contexts in which they are presented.


A good example of this is in Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’ On the Properties of Things, in which Trevisa, writing in the fourteenth century, uses the word vertue to denote “mental faculty.” In this situation, the best course of action is to look the word up in the Middle English Dictionary or the OED.