University of Munich, GermanyHans Sauer
Hans Sauer is professor emeritus of English Philology at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany. He has also taught at many other universities, e.g. for several years at the Gallus Academy in Katowice, Poland, at the Vistula University in Warsaw, Poland, and at Würzburg University, Germany. His research interests and publications include editions and studies of medieval English texts, e.g. Beowulf, furthermore word-formation, glosses, glossaries and lexicography, plant names, interjections and binomials. Some of his recent book publications are: Binomials in the History of English, ed. J. Kopaczyk & Hans Sauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Aspects of Medieval English Language and Literature, ed. M. Ogura & Hans Sauer (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018); Hans Sauer & E. Kubaschewski, Planting the Seeds of Knowledge: An Inventory of Old English Plant Names (Munich: Utz, 2018); Hans Sauer & Kerstin Majewski, My First Door to English Linguistics (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2020).
Published with Æ Academic:
――, Piotr Chruszczewski (eds.) (2020) Mostly Medieval: In Memory of Jacek Fisiak. San Diego, CA: Æ Academic Publishing.
―― (2020) “Medieval Multitasking: Hoccleve translates Christine de Pizan and imitates Chaucer, for example his binomials.” [In:] Hans Sauer, Piotr P. Chruszczewski (eds.) Mostly Medieval: In Memory of Jacek Fisiak. San Diego, CA: Æ Academic Publishing; 175‒202.
Christine de Pizan wrote her French poem Epistre au dieu d’amours ‘Letter of the God of Love’ in 1399; Thomas Hoccleve rendered it into Middle English only three years later, in 1402, under the title Epistre de Cupide ‘Letter of Cupid.’ He shortened Christine’s 822 lines to 476 lines and also changed many details; therefore the two versions are difficult to compare. I concentrate on Hoccleve’s use of binomials and multinomials, analyzing their word-class, etymology, semantic structure, sequence of elements, and their formulaicity. I also briefly mention later versions and translations. It is well-known that Hoccleve was a Chaucerian, which also shows in his use of binomials: Hoccleve shares 13 binomials with Chaucer, e.g. (in Modern spelling) ‘crop and root,’ ‘a duchess or a queen,’ ‘labour and travail,’ ‘last and endure.’ It is perhaps more striking that many of Hoccleve’s binomials also occur in the poetry of his contemporary Lydgate. It would be interesting to pursue this in greater detail.