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 2019, and now brought to fruition by his colleague, Andrew Cooper.

Publisher: The Early English Text Society via Oxford University Press.

About the authors

Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor Emeritus, Department of English, Stockholm University. Director of the Ormulum project, from 1993 until his death in 2019.

Dr Andrew Cooper, Lecturer, Department of English, Stockholm University. Director of the Ormulum project from 2020.