Norman Blake (academic) explained

Birth Name:Norman Francis Blake
Birth Date:1934 4, df=y
Birth Place:Ceará, Brazil
Discipline:Linguistics
Sub Discipline:English literature and linguistics
Death Place:Sheffield, United Kingdom

Norman Francis Blake (19 April 1934 – 29 July 2012) was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.

Life

Norman Blake was born in Ceará, Brazil, where his English father worked as a banker at the Bank of London and South America. His mother was half-Brazilian and half-German. In 1938, when he was four years old, he was sent to boarding school in Surrey and then to Magdalen College School in Brackley, Northamptonshire, in 1944. The outbreak of World War II meant that he was not able to see his parents for eight years. Two years after the end of the war his older brother, who attended the same boarding school, died in an accident.[1]

In 1953 he went up to study at Magdalen College where his tutors for Medieval English were, amongst others, C. S. Lewis and J. A. W. Bennett,[2] and for Old Icelandic Gabriel Turville-Petre. During the academic year 1956–1957 he studied Old Icelandic manuscripts at the newly established Arnamagnæan Institute, part of the University of Copenhagen. He finished his studies with a BLitt in 1959. Following his studies at Oxford, he was appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Liverpool where he stayed until 1973, interrupted only by an interval as visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1963–1964. In 1973 Blake was appointed to the Chair of English Language at the University of Sheffield, becoming head of the Department for English Language and Linguistics, a post he held until 1998. When the Department of English Language and Linguistics was amalgamated with the Department of English Literature, Blake moved to De Montfort University, Leicester, taking up a research professorship.

Norman Blake married Susan Valery Miles at Liverpool in 1965.[3] The couple adopted a daughter, Dorinda, born in 1973. He was an ardent user of public transport and enjoyed hiking, particularly in the Peak District.

In May 2004 Norman Blake suffered a massive stroke severely restricting his movement and speaking capabilities. The ensuing years he spent either at home or at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital. Norman Blake passed away on 29 July 2012. He was survived by his wife and daughter.

Scholarship

Blake's finishing project at Magdalen College in 1959 was editing the Jómsvíkinga saga. His edition of the saga was published in 1962. Whilst being at Liverpool University he published an edition of the Old English poem The Phoenix in 1964, and in 1970 an edition of William Caxton's translation of the Middle Dutch version of The History of Reynard the Fox.

In the late 1960s and during the 1970s it emerged that Blake's academic interests were twofold, namely the history of the English Language, particularly late medieval and early modern, and The Canterbury Tales. This led to extensive work not only on William Caxton, but also on William Shakespeare. The publication of a monograph on William Caxton in 1969, Caxton and His World, established Blake as one of the foremost scholars on the subject. In the book he put an emphasis on the larger context in which Caxton was operating and challenged the traditional views on Caxton by positing that Caxton was predominantly a merchant and entrepreneur rather than a craftsman printer. Eventually, he would publish more than 40 books and essays on Caxton.

In 1980 Blake published an edition of The Canterbury Tales, based on the Hengwrt manuscript. This edition was, at the time, not well received as Blake advocated the significance and importance of the Hengwrt manuscript, being the oldest manuscript of the tales, and should take precedence over the Ellesmere manuscript on which most published editions and translations were based. The criticism led him to publish a number of books and articles over the following 15 years enhancing and augmenting his argument.

Blake contributed several articles to the German encyclopaedia Lexikon des Mittelalters and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and was also editor and contributor to the second volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language published in 1992.

From 1994 until 2000 Blake was head of the Canterbury Tales Project. The project was first based at the University of Sheffield and from 1998 onwards at De Montfort University. It was funded by amongst others the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy. Its aim was to make electronically available all the manuscripts and early printed versions of The Canterbury Tales, a total of approximately 80 manuscripts and books elucidating the textual tradition of the work and providing understanding of the reshaping of the English language during an important phase in its history. By the end of the project eight manuscripts were transcribed as well as the best part of seven others as well as all witnesses of The Franklin's Tale, consisting of about 330,000 words. Subsequently, The Wife of Bath's Prologue and The General Prologue were released on CD-ROM, and the Hengwrt Manuscript on CD.[4] No further transcriptions were published until in 2011 the Digital Humanities Institute of the University of Sheffield developed online editions of diplomatic transcriptions of eight of the manuscripts prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project, called the Norman Blake Editions of The Canterbury Tales.[5] [6]

Commemoration

Following his death, the School of English at the University of Sheffield founded a biennial lecture, the Norman Blake Lecture to honour Norman Blake. The first lecture was held in 2013.

Selected publishings

Editions

Monographs

Articles

See also

External links

publishing transcripts, images, collations and analysis of all surviving 15th-century copies

Notes and References

  1. Thaisen . Jacob . 2013 . Obituary: Norman Francis Blake (1934–2012) . . 94. 1. 120–122. 10.1080/0013838X.2012.732770 . 11250/276485 . 161364964 . free.
  2. Web site: Hope in memory of Blake: 30 April 2015 . Hope . Jonathan . 28 May 2015 . . 5 January 2019.
  3. Web site: Index entry. 21 March 2019. FreeBMD. ONS.
  4. Web site: The Norman Blake Editions of the Canterbury Tales . Humanities Research Institute - University of Sheffield. 18 March 2020 .
  5. Web site: Canterbury Tales Project . 11 December 2000. The Digital Humanities Institute, the University of Sheffield . 15 January 2019 .
  6. Web site: Norman Blake Editions of The Canterbury Tales . 8 July 2011. The Digital Humanities Institute, the University of Sheffield . 15 January 2019 .

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