Norman Blake

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.

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, 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. 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. Eventually, he would publish more than 40 books and essays on Caxton. 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.

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 publications Editions The Saga of the Jomsvikings, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd 1962. The Phoenix, Manchester, Manchester University Press 1964. The History of Reynard the Fox, Oxford, Oxford University Press 1970. Selections from William Caxton. With an introduction, notes and glossary, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1973. Caxton's Own Prose, London, Andre Deutsch 1973. Quattuor Sermones. Printed by William Caxton, Heidelberg, Winter 1975. The Canterbury Tales: From the Hengwrt Manuscript, London, Edward Arnold 1980.

Monographs Caxton and His World, London, Andre Deutsch 1969. Middle English Religious Prose, London, Edward Arnold 1972. Caxton. England's First Publisher, London, Osprey Publishing 1976. The English Language in Medieval Literature, London, Dent 1977. Non-standard Language in English Literature, London, Andre Deutsch 1981. Shakespeare's Language. An Introduction, London, Macmillan 1983. Re-issued as The Language of Shakespeare, New York, Palgrave 1989. ISBN 978-0-333-49778-4 English Historical Linguistics. Studies in Development, (with Charles Jones), Sheffield, Department of English Language 1984. The Textual Tradition of the Canterbury Tales, London, Hodder Arnold 1985. William Caxton. A Bibliographical Guide, New York, Garland Publishing 1985. Index of Printed Middle English Prose, New York, Garland Publishing 1985. Traditional English Grammar and Beyond, Basingstoke, Macmillan 1988. An Introduction to the Language of Literature, Basingstoke, Macmillan 1990. William Caxton and English Literary Culture, London, A&C Black 1991. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume II (editor and contributor), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1992. An Introduction to the English Language (with Jean Moorhead), Basingstoke, Macmillan 1993. A New Concordance to The Canterbury Tales Based on Blake's Text Edited from the Hengwrt Manuscript, Okayama, University Education 1994 A History of the English Language, Basingstoke, Macmillan 1996. The General Prologue, Geoffrey Chaucer (edited by Elizabeth Solopova), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2000. A Grammar of Shakespeare's Language, Basingstoke, Palgrave 2001. Shakespeare's Non-Standard English. A Dictionary of his Informal Language, London, Continuum 2006.