Excerpt from First Middle English Primer: Extracts From the Ancren Riwle and Ormulum

The extracts have been carefully chosen not only from a linguistic, but also from a literary and social-historical point of view. The student who has carefully worked through them will hardly need to be told that the A. R. Is one of the most perfect models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our language, without it indeed, the history of English prose from the close of the Old E. Period down to the beginning of the seventeenth century would be little more than a dreary blank. As a picture of contemporary life, manners, and feeling it cannot be over-estimated. The passage (p. 34) in which Christ is described as a Norman knight in homeliest English phrase is alone enough to give a vivid idea of that fusion of English and French traditions and sentiments which - in spite of Ivanfioe - was almost completely carried out by the beginning of the thirteenth century. The con elusion (p. 39) of the allegory of Christ's wooing of the soul is, on the other hand, thoroughly Old English in its com bined picturesqueness and grandeur. Thoroughly English.

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