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142-538: The Cursor Mundi is more or less completely unknown outside of medievalist and lexicographical circles. Yet, the poem is one of the texts that provides the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown before they appeared for the first time in the Cursor Mundi . The poem has also provided over 11,000 quotations for the published Dictionary, making it

284-593: A Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University ): Richard Chenevix Trench , Herbert Coleridge , and Frederick Furnivall , who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries. The society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844, but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries. In November, Trench's report

426-801: A tributary state of the Ottoman Empire , centered on the city of Constantinople and a few enclaves in Greece . With the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was permanently extinguished. The Bulgarian Empire was in decline by the 14th century, and the ascendancy of Serbia was marked by the Serbian victory over the Bulgarians in the Battle of Velbazhd in 1330. By 1346,

568-748: A 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo , Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary , led by Frank Tompa and Gaston Gonnet ; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation . Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM ;

710-505: A changing market". The Southern edition was published in five volumes between 1978 and 2000. According to Horrall, a new edition of the Cursor Mundi was needed because the transcriptions in Morris' Northern version "were accompanied by a sketchy, inaccurate critical apparatus which is now out of date". In particular, Morris and his collaborators had considered the southern manuscripts ( H , T , L , B ) to be "hopelessly corrupt" copies of

852-411: A fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s 6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff. Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles. Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary was first used. It then appeared only on

994-571: A golden age during the 14th century. In particular the reigns of the Angevin kings Charles Robert (1308–42) and his son Louis the Great (1342–82) were marked by success. The country grew wealthy as the main European supplier of gold and silver. Louis the Great led successful campaigns from Lithuania to Southern Italy, and from Poland to Northern Greece. He had the greatest military potential of

1136-522: A great victory against the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. The victory did not end Tartar rule in the region, however, and its immediate beneficiary was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , which extended its influence eastwards. Under the reign of Ivan the Great (1462–1505), Moscow became a major regional power, and the annexation of the vast Republic of Novgorod in 1478 laid

1278-496: A larger project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. Later the same year, the society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles ( NED ). Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played

1420-511: A limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications. This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works. According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to "key in" the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically. As of 30 November 2005,

1562-700: A military leader changed the course of war in favour of the French, and the initiative was carried further by King Louis XI . Meanwhile, Charles the Bold , Duke of Burgundy , met resistance in his attempts to consolidate his possessions, particularly from the Swiss Confederation formed in 1291. When Charles was killed in the Burgundian Wars at the Battle of Nancy in 1477, the Duchy of Burgundy

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1704-563: A peculiar way". Murray had American philologist and liberal arts college professor Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000. The first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge's sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on

1846-451: A project, that was so incredibly complicated and that met every deadline." By 1989, the NOED project had achieved its primary goals, and the editors, working online, had successfully combined the original text, Burchfield's supplement, and a small amount of newer material, into a single unified dictionary. The word "new" was again dropped from the name, and the second edition of the OED, or

1988-481: A third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which was complete by 2018. In 1988, the first electronic version of the dictionary was made available, and the online version has been available since 2000. By April 2014, it was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary is expected to be available exclusively in electronic form; the CEO of OUP has stated that it

2130-414: A total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B , five for C , and two for E . Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which eventually became a volume break). At this point, it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments; once every three months beginning in 1895 there would be

2272-401: A work intended for oral-didactic performance. In consideration of one particular segment of the poem (lines 12713–17082), it is virtually impossible to complete an exhaustive survey of the poet's source materials. However, several works may be cited with certainty regarding their influence upon it. The Cursor Mundi poem consists of almost 30,000 lines. The short verse form is generally that of

2414-519: Is given throughout the work to the history of the Cross . This may be because St. Helena , the mother of Constantine , was reputed to have been of British birth and was exceptionally popular in England. The Cursor Mundi occupies a unique place, because of its length, its scope, and its author's broad and eclectic knowledge of the traditions of exegesis in his time. As explained by the author, because

2556-514: Is often avoided entirely within Italian historiography. The term "Renaissance" is still considered useful for describing certain intellectual, cultural, or artistic developments but not as the defining feature of an entire European historical epoch. The period from the early 14th century up until – and sometimes including – the 16th century is rather seen as characterized by other trends: demographic and economic decline followed by recovery,

2698-481: Is one of the Late Medieval texts that provides the OED with over 1,000 new words, i.e. words that were unknown before they appeared for the first time in the poem. Examples of the words include: anyway, anywhere, backward, blister, brimstone, chastise, chess, virginity, weakness, wickedness, willing, written, yonder, and zealot. It has also provided over 11,000 quotations for the published Dictionary, making it

2840-486: Is the most-quoted female writer. Collectively, the Bible is the most-quoted work (in many translations); the most-quoted single work is Cursor Mundi . Additional material for a given letter range continued to be gathered after the corresponding fascicle was printed, with a view towards inclusion in a supplement or revised edition. A one-volume supplement of such material was published in 1933, with entries weighted towards

2982-541: Is the principal historical dictionary of the English language , published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, and provides ongoing descriptions of English language usage in its variations around

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3124-466: Is unlikely that it will ever be printed. As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use. Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from

3266-480: The Historia Scholastica . It was translated and compiled gradually and incrementally from such sources, perhaps over a single writer's lifetime. Over the course of the 200-year period during which it was successively recopied, the text was adjusted to suit the changing circumstances in which it was being disseminated and read, losing many of the original features that mark the earliest extant texts as

3408-470: The Los Angeles Times . Time dubbed the book "a scholarly Everest ", and Richard Boston , writing for The Guardian , called it "one of the wonders of the world ". The supplements and their integration into the second edition were a great improvement to the OED as a whole, but it was recognized that most of the entries were still fundamentally unaltered from the first edition. Much of

3550-716: The Atlantic Ocean to America . As Genoese and Venetian merchants opened up direct sea routes with Flanders , the Champagne fairs lost much of their importance. At the same time, English wool export shifted from raw wool to processed cloth, resulting in losses for the cloth manufacturers of the Low Countries. In the Baltic and North Sea , the Hanseatic League reached the peak of their power in

3692-554: The Balkans fell under the dominance of the Ottoman Empire . Meanwhile, the remaining nations of the continent were locked in almost constant international or internal conflict. The situation gradually led to the consolidation of central authority and the emergence of the nation state . The financial demands of war necessitated higher levels of taxation, resulting in the emergence of representative bodies – most notably

3834-650: The Black Death . Meanwhile, the Norse colony in Greenland died out, probably under extreme weather conditions in the 15th century. These conditions might have been the effect of the Little Ice Age . The death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 threw the country into a succession crisis , and the English king, Edward I , was brought in to arbitrate. Edward claimed overlordship over Scotland, leading to

3976-697: The Czechs , but both the Catholic Church and the German element within the country were weakened. Martin Luther , a German monk, started the German Reformation by posting 95 theses on the castle church of Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The immediate provocation spurring this act was Pope Leo X 's renewal of the indulgence for the building of the new St. Peter's Basilica in 1514. Luther

4118-570: The English aristocracy, such as John of Gaunt , the movement was not allowed to survive. Though Wycliffe himself was left unmolested, his supporters, the Lollards , were eventually suppressed in England. The marriage of Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia established contacts between the two nations and brought Lollard ideas to her homeland. The teachings of the Czech priest Jan Hus were based on those of John Wycliffe, yet his followers,

4260-668: The English Parliament . The growth of secular authority was further aided by the decline of the papacy with the Western Schism and the coming of the Protestant Reformation . After the failed union of Sweden and Norway of 1319–1365, the pan-Scandinavian Kalmar Union was instituted in 1397. The Swedes were reluctant members of the Danish -dominated union from the start. In an attempt to subdue

4402-695: The Hiberno-Norman lords in Ireland were becoming gradually more assimilated into Irish society, and the island was allowed to develop virtual independence under English overlordship. The French House of Valois , which followed the House of Capet in 1328, was at its outset marginalized in its own country, first by the English invading forces of the Hundred Years' War and later by the powerful Duchy of Burgundy . The emergence of Joan of Arc as

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4544-617: The House of Habsburg in 1438, where it remained until its dissolution in 1806. Yet in spite of the extensive territories held by the Habsburgs , the Empire itself remained fragmented, and much real power and influence lay with the individual principalities. In addition, financial institutions, such as the Hanseatic League and the Fugger family, held great power, on both economic and political levels. The Kingdom of Hungary experienced

4686-703: The Hussites , were to have a much greater political impact than the Lollards. Hus gained a great following in Bohemia , and in 1414, he was requested to appear at the Council of Constance to defend his cause. When he was burned as a heretic in 1415, it caused a popular uprising in the Czech lands. The subsequent Hussite Wars fell apart due to internal quarrels and did not result in religious or national independence for

4828-621: The Jews , who were often blamed for the calamities. Anti-Jewish pogroms were carried out all over Europe; in February 1349, 2,000 Jews were murdered in Strasbourg . States were also guilty of discrimination against the Jews. Monarchs gave in to the demands of the people, and the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, from Spain in 1492, and from Portugal in 1497. While

4970-520: The Nobel Prize in Physics ). Also in 1933 the original fascicles of the entire dictionary were re-issued, bound into 12 volumes, under the title " The Oxford English Dictionary ". This edition of 13 volumes including the supplement was subsequently reprinted in 1961 and 1970. In 1933, Oxford had finally put the dictionary to rest; all work ended, and the quotation slips went into storage. However,

5112-512: The OED is neither the world's largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers ' dictionary of the German language , begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612;

5254-659: The OED2 adopted the modern International Phonetic Alphabet . Unlike the earlier edition, all foreign alphabets except Greek were transliterated . Following page 832 of Volume XX Wave -— Zyxt there's a 143-page separately paginated bibliography, a conflation of the OED 1st edition's published with the 1933 Supplement and that in Volume IV of the Supplement published in 1986. The British quiz show Countdown awarded

5396-399: The OED2 is mostly just a reorganization of the earlier corpus, but the retypesetting provided an opportunity for two long-needed format changes. The headword of each entry was no longer capitalized, allowing the user to readily see those words that actually require a capital letter. Murray had devised his own notation for pronunciation, there being no standard available at the time, whereas

5538-640: The OED2, was published. The first edition retronymically became the OED1 . The Oxford English Dictionary 2 was printed in 20 volumes. Up to a very late stage, all the volumes of the first edition were started on letter boundaries. For the second edition, there was no attempt to start them on letter boundaries, and they were made roughly equal in size. The 20 volumes started with A , B.B.C. , Cham , Creel , Dvandva , Follow , Hat , Interval , Look , Moul , Ow , Poise , Quemadero , Rob , Ser , Soot , Su , Thru , Unemancipated , and Wave . The content of

5680-443: The Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords , there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives; 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations; 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations ; 249,300 etymologies ; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations . The dictionary's latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989)

5822-631: The Renaissance of the 12th century through contact with Arabs during the Crusades , but the availability of important Greek texts accelerated with the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks , when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West, particularly Italy. Combined with this influx of classical ideas was the invention of printing, which facilitated the dissemination of

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5964-641: The Wars of Scottish Independence . The English were eventually defeated, and the Scots were able to develop a stronger state under the Stewarts . From 1337, England's attention was largely directed towards France in the Hundred Years' War . Henry V's victory at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 briefly paved the way for a unification of the two kingdoms, but his son Henry VI soon squandered all previous gains. The loss of France led to discontent at home. Soon after

6106-552: The World Wide Web and new computer technology in general meant that the processes of researching the dictionary and of publishing new and revised entries could be vastly improved. New text search databases offered vastly more material for the editors of the dictionary to work with, and with publication on the Web as a possibility, the editors could publish revised entries much more quickly and easily than ever before. A new approach

6248-723: The ancient age (via classical antiquity ) and the modern age . Some historians, particularly in Italy, prefer not to speak of the late Middle Ages at all but rather see the high period of the Middle Ages transitioning to the Renaissance and the modern era. The term "late Middle Ages" refers to one of the three periods of the Middle Ages , along with the early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages. Leonardo Bruni

6390-403: The bill of exchange and other forms of credit that circumvented the canonical laws for gentiles against usury and eliminated the dangers of carrying bullion ; and new forms of accounting , in particular double-entry bookkeeping , which allowed for better oversight and accuracy. With the financial expansion, trading rights became more jealously guarded by the commercial elite. Towns saw

6532-453: The condottieri of the Italian city-states. All over Europe, Swiss mercenaries were in particularly high demand. At the same time, the period also saw the emergence of the first permanent armies. It was in Valois France, under the heavy demands of the Hundred Years' War, that the armed forces gradually assumed a permanent nature. Parallel to the military developments emerged also a constantly more elaborate chivalric code of conduct for

6674-491: The 14th and 15th centuries, the central theme was the Renaissance , with its rediscovery of ancient learning and the emergence of an individual spirit. The heart of this rediscovery lies in Italy, where, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt , "Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such." This proposition was later challenged, and it was argued that the 12th century was a period of greater cultural achievement. As economic and demographic methods were applied to

6816-422: The 14th century but started going into decline in the fifteenth. In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, a process took place – primarily in Italy but partly also in the Empire – that historians have termed a "commercial revolution". Among the innovations of the period were new forms of partnership and the issuing of insurance , both of which contributed to reducing the risk of commercial ventures;

6958-480: The 14th century with his enormous armies (often over 100,000 men). Meanwhile, Poland 's attention was turned eastwards, as the Commonwealth with Lithuania created an enormous entity in the region. The union, and the conversion of Lithuania, also marked the end of paganism in Europe. Louis did not leave a son as heir after his death in 1382. Instead, he named as his heir the young prince Sigismund of Luxemburg . The Hungarian nobility did not accept his claim, and

7100-399: The 1998 book The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman ), which was the basis for a 2019 film, The Professor and the Madman , starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn . During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope. They had pages printed by publishers, but no publication agreement

7242-489: The Bible”. In addition to the four main manuscripts, the Northern edition cites most, but not all, of the other manuscripts listed above. It also cites Cotton Galba E 9 , but this is not included in the manuscripts listed the Southern edition. The Northern edition of the Cursor Mundi was the only one available until publication of the Southern Version of the Cursor Mundi almost a century later. The Southern edition has been described as "an attempt to tailor an older text to

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7384-400: The Creation to Doomsday. A number of manuscripts of the poem are extant, but none of them is the original composition attributed to an unknown author from the north of England. According to the philologist James Murray , the poem originated near Durham , about 1275–1300. The author of the Cursor Mundi brings all his events under seven periods or “Seven ages of the world”: Special prominence

7526-407: The English became acquainted with, and adopted, the highly efficient longbow . Once properly managed, this weapon gave them a great advantage over the French in the Hundred Years' War. The introduction of gunpowder affected the conduct of war significantly. Though employed by the English as early as the Battle of Crécy in 1346, firearms initially had little effect in the field of battle. It

7668-427: The English language continued to change and, by the time 20 years had passed, the dictionary was outdated. There were three possible ways to update it. The cheapest would have been to leave the existing work alone and simply compile a new supplement of perhaps one or two volumes, but then anyone looking for a word or sense and unsure of its age would have to look in three different places. The most convenient choice for

7810-435: The European population to regain similar levels of 1300. As the European population was severely reduced, land became more plentiful for the survivors, and labour was consequently more expensive. Attempts by landowners to forcibly reduce wages, such as the English 1351 Statute of Laborers , were doomed to fail. These efforts resulted in nothing more than fostering resentment among the peasantry, leading to rebellions such as

7952-399: The French Jacquerie in 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt in 1381. The long-term effect was the virtual end of serfdom in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, landowners were able to exploit the situation to force the peasantry into even more repressive bondage. The upheavals caused by the Black Death left certain minority groups particularly vulnerable, especially

8094-407: The Great Schism had done irreparable damage. The internal struggles within the Church had impaired her claim to universal rule and promoted anti-clericalism among the people and their rulers, paving the way for reform movements. Though many of the events were outside the traditional time period of the Middle Ages, the end of the unity of the Western Church (the Protestant Reformation ) was one of

8236-414: The Iberian peninsula, but there were also some in France, the Empire, and the Low Countries, as well as London in England. Through battles such as Courtrai (1302), Bannockburn (1314), and Morgarten (1315), it became clear to the great territorial princes of Europe that the military advantage of the feudal cavalry was lost and that a well equipped infantry was preferable. Through the Welsh Wars ,

8378-683: The Jews were suffering persecution, one group that probably experienced increased empowerment in the late Middle Ages was women. The great social changes of the period opened up new possibilities for women in the fields of commerce, learning, and religion. Yet at the same time, women were also vulnerable to incrimination and persecution, as belief in witchcraft increased. The accumulation of social, environmental, and health-related problems also led to an increase in interpersonal violence in most parts of Europe. Population increase, religious intolerance, famine, and disease led to an increase in violent acts in vast parts of medieval society. One exception to this

8520-453: The Materials Collected by The Philological Society ; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant , cost 12 s 6 d (equivalent to $ 82 in 2023). The total sales were only 4,000 copies. The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray. The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford to work full-time on

8662-417: The Middle Ages (1919). To Huizinga, whose research focused on France and the Low Countries rather than Italy, despair and decline were the main themes, not rebirth. Modern historiography on the period has reached a consensus between the two extremes of innovation and crisis. It is now generally acknowledged that conditions were vastly different north and south of the Alps, and the term "late Middle Ages"

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8804-412: The OUP forced the promotion of Murray's assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University. Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns – containing costs and speeding production – to the point where the project's collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported

8946-535: The Serbian king Stefan Dušan had been proclaimed emperor. Yet Serbian dominance was short-lived; the Serbian army led by the Lazar Hrebeljanovic was defeated by the Ottoman Army at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where most of the Serbian nobility was killed and the south of the country came under Ottoman occupation , as much of southern Bulgaria had become Ottoman territory in the Battle of Maritsa 1371. Northern remnants of Bulgaria were finally conquered by 1396, Serbia fell in 1459, Bosnia in 1463, and Albania

9088-406: The Sicilian Vespers had by the early 14th century divided southern Italy into an Aragon Kingdom of Sicily and an Anjou Kingdom of Naples . In 1442, the two kingdoms were effectively united under Aragonese control. The 1469 marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon and the 1479 death of John II of Aragon led to the creation of modern-day Spain . In 1492, Granada

9230-430: The Spanish kingdoms supported the Avignon Papacy, France's enemy England stood behind the pope in Rome, together with Portugal, Scandinavia, and most of the German princes. At the Council of Constance (1414–1418), the Papacy was once more united in Rome. Even though the unity of the Western Church was to last for another hundred years, and though the Papacy was to experience greater material prosperity than ever before,

9372-439: The Swedes, King Christian II of Denmark had large numbers of the Swedish aristocracy killed in the Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520. Yet this measure only led to further hostilities, and Sweden broke away for good in 1523. Norway, on the other hand, became an inferior party of the union and remained united with Denmark until 1814. Iceland benefited from its relative isolation and was the last Scandinavian country to be struck by

9514-497: The United States, more than 120 typists of the International Computaprint Corporation (now Reed Tech ) started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML . A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under

9656-434: The alphabet as before and updating "key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them". With the relaunch of the OED Online website in December 2010, alphabetical revision was abandoned altogether. The revision is expected roughly to double the dictionary in size. Apart from general updates to include information on new words and other changes in

9798-427: The book overruns almost all the course of the world's history, it was to be called ‘cursur o werld’ i.e. over-runner of the world, hence Cursor Mundi . The Cursor Mundi is not signed, and no author's name is given anywhere in the text. However, the author does reveal that he is a “pastor” and, according to the Rev. Morris (1892), was evidently a cleric “as modest as he was learned”. Heinrich Hupe's theory, that his name

9940-404: The colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX , was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo , in Canada, volunteered to design the database. A. Walton Litz , an English professor at Princeton University who served on the Oxford University Press advisory council, was quoted in Time as saying "I've never been associated with a project, I've never even heard of

10082-401: The complete dictionary to 16 volumes, or 17 counting the first supplement. Burchfield emphasized the inclusion of modern-day language and, through the supplement, the dictionary was expanded to include a wealth of new words from the burgeoning fields of science and technology, as well as popular culture and colloquial speech. Burchfield said that he broadened the scope to include developments of

10224-415: The covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in 10 bound volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as 12 volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes. Since 2000, compilation of

10366-487: The death rate caused by this epidemic range from one third to as much as sixty percent. By around 1420, the accumulated effect of recurring plagues and famines had reduced the population of Europe to perhaps no more than a third of what it was a century earlier. The effects of natural disasters were exacerbated by armed conflicts; this was particularly the case in France during the Hundred Years' War . It took 150 years for

10508-548: The dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor. The fourth editor was Charles Talbut Onions , who compiled the remaining ranges starting in 1914: Su–Sz , Wh–Wo , and X–Z . In 1919–1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED , researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range; later he parodied the principal editors as "The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" in the story Farmer Giles of Ham . By early 1894,

10650-459: The dictionary. In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year. 20 years after its conception, the dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete. Late in his editorship, Murray learned that one especially prolific reader, W. C. Minor , was confined to a mental hospital for (in modern terminology) schizophrenia . Minor

10792-600: The discovery of the Americas in 1492. Around 1300–1350, the Medieval Warm Period gave way to the Little Ice Age . The colder climate resulted in agricultural crises, the first of which is known as the Great Famine of 1315–1317 . The demographic consequences of this famine , however, were not as severe as the plagues that occurred later in the century, particularly the Black Death . Estimates of

10934-496: The distinguishing characteristics of the medieval period. The Catholic Church had long fought against heretic movements, but during the late Middle Ages, it started to experience demands for reform from within. The first of these came from Oxford professor John Wycliffe in England. Wycliffe held that the Bible should be the only authority in religious questions, and he spoke out against transubstantiation , celibacy , and indulgences . In spite of influential supporters among

11076-532: The earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and the time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones. The format of the OED ' s entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED , such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch , had initially provided few quotations from

11218-520: The early 16th century, when the King Louis II of Hungary was killed in the Battle of Mohács in 1526 against the Ottoman Empire . Hungary then fell into a serious crisis and was invaded, ending its significance in central Europe during the medieval era. The state of Kievan Rus' fell during the 13th century in the Mongol invasion . The Grand Duchy of Moscow rose in power thereafter, winning

11360-412: The economy and power of European nations. The changes brought about by these developments have led many scholars to view this period as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern history and of early modern Europe . However, the division is somewhat artificial, since ancient learning was never entirely absent from European society. As a result, there was developmental continuity between

11502-427: The eight-syllabled couplet , but when writing of the passion and death of Christ, the poet uses alternately rhyming lines of eight and six syllables. The discourse between Christ and man, which follows the account of the crucifixion, consists largely of six-lined mono-rhymed stanzas. A total of nine complete or fragmentary manuscripts of the poem are extant although none of them is the original composition attributed to

11644-595: The end of Western religious unity and the subsequent emergence of the nation-state , and the expansion of European influence onto the rest of the world. The limits of Christian Europe were still being defined in the 14th and 15th centuries. While the Grand Duchy of Moscow was beginning to repel the Mongols , and the Iberian kingdoms completed the Reconquista of the peninsula and turned their attention outwards,

11786-511: The end of the war in 1453, the dynastic struggles of the Wars of the Roses (c. 1455–1485) began, involving the rival dynasties of the House of Lancaster and House of York . The war ended in the accession of Henry VII of the House of Tudor , who continued the work started by the Yorkist kings of building a strong, centralized monarchy. While England's attention was thus directed elsewhere,

11928-421: The finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E–G , L–M , S–Sh , St , and W–We . By then, two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie started in 1901 and was responsible for N , Q–R , Si–Sq , U–V , and Wo–Wy. The OUP had previously thought London too far from Oxford but, after 1925, Craigie worked on

12070-673: The first edition of Dictionnaire de l'Académie française dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Royal Spanish Academy ), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi Dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716. The largest dictionary by number of pages is believed to be the Dutch Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal . The dictionary began as

12212-715: The following year under the administrative direction of Timothy J. Benbow, with John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner as co-editors. In 2016, Simpson published his memoir chronicling his years at the OED: The Word Detective: Searching for the Meaning of It All at the Oxford English Dictionary – A Memoir (New York: Basic Books). Thus began the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project. In

12354-631: The foundations for a Russian national state. After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Russian princes started to see themselves as the heirs of the Byzantine Empire . They eventually took on the imperial title of Tzar , and Moscow was described as the Third Rome . The Byzantine Empire had for a long time dominated the eastern Mediterranean in politics and culture. By the 14th century, however, it had almost entirely collapsed into

12496-501: The four manuscripts ( C , F , G and T ) together meant “quadrupling the value of the text, not only as a subject for linguistic study, but also as an instance of how scribes dealt with their early originals”. Also, because the manuscripts are presented side by side (i.e. four columns across two pages, allowing a line-by-line comparison), “the four texts give an opportunity for comparison of form and word such as no other existing English book affords, except perhaps some editions of parts of

12638-429: The general public. Wordhunt was a 2005 appeal to the general public for help in providing citations for 50 selected recent words, and produced antedatings for many. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle . The OED ' s readers contribute quotations: the department currently receives about 200,000 a year. Late Middle Ages The late Middle Ages or late medieval period

12780-547: The group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis , aged 30. Thereupon Furnivall became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but temperamentally ill-suited for the work. Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project, as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips were misplaced. Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate

12922-614: The growing power of guilds , while on a national level, special companies would be granted monopolies on particular trades, like the English wool Staple . The beneficiaries of these developments would accumulate immense wealth. Families like the Fuggers in Germany, the Medicis in Italy, and the de la Poles in England and individuals like Jacques Cœur in France would help finance the wars of kings, achieving great political influence in

13064-529: The harassment, particularly the Saturday Review , and public opinion backed the editors. Gell was fired, and the university reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish. Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A–D , H–K , O–P , and T , nearly half

13206-689: The inauguration in June 2005 of the "Perfect All-Singing All-Dancing Editorial and Notation Application ", or "Pasadena". With this XML -based system, lexicographers can spend less effort on presentation issues such as the numbering of definitions. This system has also simplified the use of the quotations database, and enabled staff in New York to work directly on the dictionary in the same way as their Oxford-based counterparts. Other important computer uses include internet searches for evidence of current usage and email submissions of quotations by readers and

13348-422: The information in the dictionary published in 1989 was already decades out of date, though the supplements had made good progress towards incorporating new vocabulary. Yet many definitions contained disproven scientific theories, outdated historical information, and moral values that were no longer widely accepted. Furthermore, the supplements had failed to recognize many words in the existing volumes as obsolete by

13490-526: The intention of producing a third edition from them. The previous supplements appeared in alphabetical instalments, whereas the new series had a full A–Z range of entries within each individual volume, with a complete alphabetical index at the end of all words revised so far, each listed with the volume number which contained the revised entry. However, in the end only three Additions volumes were published this way, two in 1993 and one in 1997, each containing about 3,000 new definitions. The possibilities of

13632-436: The key role in the project's first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor. On 12 May 1860, Coleridge's dictionary plan was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid. In April 1861,

13774-655: The language in English-speaking regions beyond the United Kingdom , including North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean. Burchfield also removed, for unknown reasons, many entries that had been added to the 1933 supplement. In 2012, an analysis by lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie revealed that many of these entries were in fact foreign loanwords, despite Burchfield's claim that he included more such words. The proportion

13916-488: The language, the third edition brings many other improvements, including changes in formatting and stylistic conventions for easier reading and computerized searching, more etymological information, and a general change of focus away from individual words towards more general coverage of the language as a whole. While the original text drew its quotations mainly from literary sources such as novels, plays, and poetry, with additional material from newspapers and academic journals,

14058-419: The leather-bound complete version to the champions of each series between its inception in 1982 and Series 63 in 2010. The prize was axed after Series 83, completed in June 2021, due to being considered out of date. When the print version of the second edition was published in 1989, the response was enthusiastic. Author Anthony Burgess declared it "the greatest publishing event of the century", as quoted by

14200-549: The letter M , with new material appearing every three months on the OED Online website. The editors chose to start the revision project from the middle of the dictionary in order that the overall quality of entries be made more even, since the later entries in the OED1 generally tended to be better than the earlier ones. However, in March 2008, the editors announced that they would alternate each quarter between moving forward in

14342-492: The new edition will reference more kinds of material that were unavailable to the editors of previous editions, such as wills, inventories, account books, diaries, journals, and letters. John Simpson was the first chief editor of the OED3 . He retired in 2013 and was replaced by Michael Proffitt , who is the eighth chief editor of the dictionary. The production of the new edition exploits computer technology, particularly since

14484-479: The original ( C ) poem. Horrall disagreed with Morris' assumptions and argued that someone in the south central Midlands came across a copy of the Cursor Mundi similar to the extant G manuscript. This copy was systematically revised and "as a result, southern England acquired not a corrupt copy of a northern poem, but a new poem, substantially changed in language and scope from its original". The Cursor Mundi

14626-434: The outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else. The 125th and last fascicle covered words from Wise to the end of W and was published on 19 April 1928, and the full dictionary in bound volumes followed immediately. William Shakespeare is the most-quoted writer in the completed dictionary, with Hamlet his most-quoted work. George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

14768-583: The population to around half of what it had been before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare . France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt , as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War . To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church

14910-681: The printed word and democratized learning. Those two things would later lead to the Reformation . Toward the end of the period, the Age of Discovery began. The expansion of the Ottoman Empire cut off trading possibilities with the East. Europeans were forced to seek new trading routes, leading to the Spanish expedition under Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492 and Vasco da Gama 's voyage to Africa and India in 1498. Their discoveries strengthened

15052-441: The process. Though there is no doubt that the demographic crisis of the 14th century caused a dramatic fall in production and commerce in absolute terms, there has been a vigorous historical debate over whether the decline was greater than the fall in population. While the older orthodoxy held that the artistic output of the Renaissance was a result of greater opulence, more recent studies have suggested that there might have been

15194-699: The project in ten years. Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the " Scriptorium " which was lined with wooden planks, bookshelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips. He tracked and regathered Furnivall's collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. For instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion as for abuse . He appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report "as many quotations as you can for ordinary words" and for words that were "rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in

15336-472: The project, which he did in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected in the back garden of his new property. Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling that he would accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of

15478-651: The quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts. Furnivall's preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for the use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic,

15620-758: The reforming movements with what has been called the Catholic Reformation, or Counter-Reformation . Europe became split into northern Protestant and southern Catholic parts, resulting in the Religious Wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The increasingly dominant position of the Ottoman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean presented an impediment to trade for the Christian nations of the west, who in turn started looking for alternatives. Portuguese and Spanish explorers found new trade routes – south of Africa to India , as well as across

15762-596: The result was an internal war. Sigismund eventually achieved total control of Hungary and established his court in Buda and Visegrád. Both palaces were rebuilt and improved, and were considered the richest of the time in Europe. Inheriting the throne of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire, Sigismund continued conducting his politics from Hungary, but he was kept busy fighting the Hussites and the Ottoman Empire , which

15904-633: The return of the Pope to Rome in 1378, the Papal State developed into a major secular power, culminating in the morally corrupt papacy of Alexander VI . Florence grew to prominence amongst the Italian city-states through financial business, and the dominant Medici family became important promoters of the Renaissance through their patronage of the arts. Other city-states in northern Italy also expanded their territories and consolidated their power, primarily Milan , Venice , and Genoa . The War of

16046-793: The second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether. The first modern edition of the Cursor Mundi was published in six volumes by the Reverend Richard Morris between 1874 and 1892 in the Early English Text Society series. The Cursor Mundi (or ‘ Over-runner of the World ’) is an early 14th-century religious poem written in Northumbrian Middle English that presents an extensive retelling of Christian history from

16188-617: The second most heavily quoted work in OED1/2 after the Bible and the fifth most quoted source altogether. According to recent (2021) OED data, the figures are 1,433 words and 11,901 quotations respectively. However, the Cursi Mundi is less frequently quoted in the more recent 'OED3' because the latter relies on the Middle English Dictionary , which favours Chaucer as a quotation source. Oxford English Dictionary The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED )

16330-399: The second supplement; Charles Talbut Onions turned 84 that year but was still able to make some contributions as well. The work on the supplement was expected to take about seven years. It actually took 29 years, by which time the new supplement (OEDS) had grown to four volumes, starting with A , H , O , and Sea . They were published in 1972, 1976, 1982, and 1986 respectively, bringing

16472-526: The start of the alphabet where the fascicles were decades old. The supplement included at least one word ( bondmaid ) accidentally omitted when its slips were misplaced; many words and senses newly coined (famously appendicitis , coined in 1886 and missing from the 1885 fascicle, which came to prominence when Edward VII 's 1902 appendicitis postponed his coronation ); and some previously excluded as too obscure (notoriously radium , omitted in 1903, months before its discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie won

16614-427: The study of history, the trend was increasingly to see the late Middle Ages as a period of recession and crisis. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne continued the subdivision of Early , High , and late Middle Ages in the years around World War I . Yet it was his Dutch colleague, Johan Huizinga , who was primarily responsible for popularising the pessimistic view of the late Middle Ages, with his book The Autumn of

16756-510: The time of the second edition's publication, meaning that thousands of words were marked as current despite no recent evidence of their use. Accordingly, it was recognized that work on a third edition would have to begin to rectify these problems. The first attempt to produce a new edition came with the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, a new set of supplements to complement the OED2 with

16898-587: The unknown poet: The first modern edition of the Cursor Mundi was published in six volumes by the Reverend Richard Morris between 1874 and 1892 under the auspices of the Early English Text Society series. Morris and his associates transcribed five manuscripts, four of which represent Northern or North Midland dialects, hence becoming known as the 'Northern' edition. Different segments of the poem were presented in volumes 1 to 5, with additional materials in volume 6. According to Morris, publishing

17040-422: The user would have been for the entire dictionary to be re-edited and retypeset , with each change included in its proper alphabetical place; but this would have been the most expensive option, with perhaps 15 volumes required to be produced. The OUP chose a middle approach: combining the new material with the existing supplement to form a larger replacement supplement. Robert Burchfield was hired in 1957 to edit

17182-466: The volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor. In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray , who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing

17324-460: The warrior class. This newfound ethos can be seen as a response to the diminishing military role of the aristocracy, and it gradually became almost entirely detached from its military origin. The spirit of chivalry was given expression through the new ( secular ) type of chivalric orders ; the first of these was the Order of St. George , founded by Charles I of Hungary in 1325, while the best known

17466-494: The world. In 1857, work first began on the dictionary, though the first edition was not published In until 1884. It began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society . In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on

17608-538: Was John of Lindebergh, which place he identifies with Limber Magna in Lincolnshire, is based on a misreading of an insertion in one of the manuscripts by the scribe who copied it. The Cursor Mundi was founded on the works of late 12th-century Latin writers who wrote various pseudo-histories made up of hagiographic, legendary, and biblical material. It borrows heavily from pre-existing Latin and French biblical versions with additional material drawn primarily from

17750-660: Was North-Eastern Europe, whose population managed to maintain low levels of violence due to a more organized society resulting from extensive and successful trade. Up until the mid-14th century, Europe had experienced steadily increasing urbanization . Cities were also decimated by the Black Death, but the role of urban areas as centres of learning, commerce, and government ensured continued growth. By 1500, Venice, Milan, Naples, Paris, and Constantinople each probably had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Twenty-two other cities were larger than 40,000; most of these were in Italy and

17892-538: Was a Yale University-trained surgeon and a military officer in the American Civil War who had been confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. He invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of how Murray and Minor worked together to advance the OED was retold in

18034-512: Was becoming a menace to Europe in the beginning of the 15th century. King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary led the largest army of mercenaries of the time, the Black Army of Hungary , which he used to conquer Moravia and Austria and to fight the Ottoman Empire . After Italy, Hungary was the first European country where the Renaissance appeared. However, the glory of the Kingdom ended in

18176-419: Was called for, and for this reason it was decided to embark on a new, complete revision of the dictionary. Beginning with the launch of the first OED Online site in 2000, the editors of the dictionary began a major revision project to create a completely revised third edition of the dictionary ( OED3 ), expected to be completed in 2037 at a projected cost of about £ 34 million. Revisions were started at

18318-587: Was captured from the Moors , thereby completing the Reconquista . Portugal had during the 15th century – particularly under Henry the Navigator  – gradually explored the coast of Africa , and in 1498, Vasco da Gama found the sea route to India . The Spanish monarchs met the Portuguese challenge by financing the expedition of Christopher Columbus to find a western sea route to India, leading to

18460-586: Was challenged to recant his heresy at the Diet of Worms in 1521. When he refused, he was placed under the ban of the Empire by Charles V . Receiving the protection of Frederick the Wise , he was then able to translate the Bible into German . To many secular rulers, the Protestant Reformation was a welcome opportunity to expand their wealth and influence. The Catholic Church met the challenges of

18602-431: Was completed, it was clear that the full text of the dictionary would need to be computerized. Achieving this would require retyping it once, but thereafter it would always be accessible for computer searching—as well as for whatever new editions of the dictionary might be desired, starting with an integration of the supplementary volumes and the main text. Preparation for this process began in 1983, and editorial work started

18744-409: Was estimated from a sample calculation to amount to 17% of the foreign loan words and words from regional forms of English. Some of these had only a single recorded usage, but many had multiple recorded citations, and it ran against what was thought to be the established OED editorial practice and a perception that he had opened up the dictionary to "World English". By the time the new supplement

18886-462: Was finally subordinated in 1479 only a few years after the death of Skanderbeg . Belgrade , a Hungarian domain at the time, was the last large Balkan city to fall under Ottoman rule, in the siege of Belgrade of 1521. By the end of the medieval period, the entire Balkan peninsula was annexed by, or became vassal to, the Ottomans. Avignon was the seat of the papacy from 1309 to 1376. With

19028-448: Was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries , which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries: The society ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to

19170-479: Was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set , which required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses (430 for the bare verb, the rest in phrasal verbs and idioms). As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the record was progressively broken by the verbs make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011 with 645 senses. Despite its considerable size,

19312-730: Was probably the English Order of the Garter , founded by Edward III in 1348. The French crown's increasing dominance over the Papacy culminated in the transference of the Holy See to Avignon in 1309. When the Pope returned to Rome in 1377, this led to the election of different popes in Avignon and Rome, resulting in the Western Schism (1378–1417). The Schism divided Europe along political lines; while France, her ally Scotland, and

19454-672: Was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press were approached. The OUP finally agreed in 1879 (after two years of negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray) to publish the dictionary and to pay Murray, who was both the editor and the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four volumes, totalling 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish

19596-675: Was reclaimed by France. At the same time, the County of Burgundy and the wealthy Burgundian Netherlands came into the Holy Roman Empire under Habsburg control, setting up conflict for centuries to come. Bohemia prospered in the 14th century, and the Golden Bull of 1356 made the king of Bohemia first among the imperial electors , but the Hussite revolution threw the country into crisis. The Holy Roman Empire passed to

19738-613: Was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism . Collectively, those events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages . Despite the crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress in the arts and sciences. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began. The absorption of Latin texts had started before

19880-470: Was the period of European history lasting from AD 1300 to 1500. The late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renaissance ). Around 1350, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues , including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death , reduced

20022-690: Was the first historian to use tripartite periodization in his History of the Florentine People (1442). Flavio Biondo used a similar framework in Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire (1439–1453). Tripartite periodization became standard after the German historian Christoph Cellarius published Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, and New Period (1683). For 18th-century historians studying

20164-446: Was through the use of cannons as siege weapons that major change was brought about; the new methods would eventually change the architectural structure of fortifications . Changes also took place within the recruitment and composition of armies. The use of the national or feudal levy was gradually replaced by paid troops of domestic retinues or foreign mercenaries . The practice was associated with Edward III of England and

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