Dictionary of Old English & Dictionary of Old English Corpus for Historians

Dictionary of Old English & Dictionary of Old English Corpus for Historians

doe; doe corpus

How to use the DOE and the Corpus to mine primary texts and research history, law, medicine--even without a background in Old English

Alexandra Bolintineanu

7-May-14

Welcome to the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. Old English is the earliest form of the English language, spoken and written between 600 and 1150 AD. The DOE Corpus contains at least one version of every known Old English text. So when you search the Corpus, you search almost every word of Old English in the world. This video shows you how to use the Dictionary of Old English and the Corpus even if you don’t have a background in Old English: for example, if you are researching the law or medicine of Anglo-Saxon England. In this video, we explore how you can use the DOE and the Corpus to research eye disease in primary sources. First step: go to the DOE and find Old English words related to eye disease. Second step: go to the Corpus nand find all passages in Old English where the “eye disease”-related words occur. So let’s turn to the DOE. First, let’s look at the Old English word “eye” itself: from the search screen, select “Definition” and “eye”. You get a list of words that contain the modern English word “eye” in their definitions. Scroll down to the word “eage,” Old English for “eye.” Now look at the definition, sense 1b: You find Old English terms for a variety of eye problems: for example, the more general “pain in the eyes”: sar or sarnes eagena or on eagum (pain in the eyes); eagena ece, eagena wærc; or the more specific “fleah on eagan” (white spot on the eyes: cataract). Scroll down from the definitions to see what texts these terms occur in. You’ll note that your main Old English sources on eye disease are: LCHII (Bald’s Leechbook); LCHI (Pseudo-Apuleius’ Herbarium and Medicina de quadripedibus); Peri Didaxeon. If you want to focus on one specific ailment, time to turn to the Corpus. Take “eagena untrumnes”, infirmity of the eyes. Search for eag* and untrumn*: wildcards instead of word endings give you more flexibility. What you get is a helpful index to the expression’s occurrence in the corpus: Its components occur once in Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary; four times in the Herbarium; once in Bald’s Leechbook; and once in Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine. If you are researching “weakness or infirmity of the eyes,” this is a reliable list of primary sources to begin your inquiry. This video showed you how to combine the DOE and the Corpus to mine primary sources for historical research. For more information, please see the DOE Help Manual. Happy searching with the Dictionary of Old English!