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Description
Rossell Hope Robbins collaborated with Carleton Brown in the publishing of the Index of Middle English Verse in 1943. With John L. Cutler, associate professor of English in the University of Kentucky, he has now compiled a supplement to the Index incorporating those texts published since 1943. At the same time, the two have completely revised the Index by including in the Supplement texts previously neglected. The number of entries has been increased to 6,000, and more than half of the 4,500 original entries have been revised.
In addition to this basic revision, the appendices of the Index have been corrected and enlarged, especially the listing and locating of privately held manuscripts. Cross references have been inserted abundantly to facilitate easy use of the combined works. Additionally, reference has been made to related specialized studies.
The large number of new entries is attributable not only to prolonged manuscript research but also to a broadening of the original criteria for the inclusion of poems. Rather than cutting off entries at 1500, which the authors felt impaired the usefulness of the original Index, Robbins and Cutler included genres that had not concluded but continued into the sixteenth century, as well as poems with uncertain dates they felt would be important for scholars. The Supplement overcomes these barriers by including the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century manuscripts such as the “Tudor songbooks,” verse items of only two lines, and tombstone and church bras epitaphs.
Rossell Hope Robbins, collaborator with Carleton Brown in the original Index, is a graduate of the University of Liverpool and holds the Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University. The editor of two major collections of Middle English verse, Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Historical Poems of the XIVth and the XVth Centuries, he has undertaken since 1947 an extensive reexamination of the medieval manuscript collections in England, which were inaccessible for checking when the original Index was published because of the war.
John L. Cutler has been a member of the English faculty at the University of Kentucky since 1938. A graduate of the University of Maine, he received a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.
Publication Date
1965
Publisher
The University Press of Kentucky
Place of Publication
Lexington, KY
ISBN
9780813154381
eISBN
9780813164311
Keywords
Middle English poetry, Middle English verse
Disciplines
Literature in English, British Isles
Recommended Citation
Robbins, Rossell Hope and Cutler, John L., "Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse: Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins" (1965). Literature in English, British Isles. 49.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/49
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