Old Names – New Growth

For the 2nd ASPNS conference the emphasis regarding the topics of the talks was placed on lexicographic and linguistic matters. In this volume the contributors assess the various problems of working with plant names like foxes glofa and geormanleaf, pulege and psyllium, hlenortear or fornetes folm. A special study analyses the semantic aspects of Old English plant names. More generally plant related discussions deal with the mandrake legend in Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe, the need for a new publication of the Old English Herbarium and of the Medicina de Quadrupedibus, or the tree names in Anglo-Saxon charters. The conference also served as a platform to introduce the Graz-Munich online project Dictionary of Old English Plant Names.

The Editors: Peter Bierbaumer has dedicated a long time of his career to the research of Old English in general and to the botanical vocabulary of Old English in particular. His three volume study Der botanische Wortschatz des Altenglischen (1975-1979) was a pioneer work in this field. Today, in his pension, he is supervising the making of an online dictionary partly based on his previous work. Helmut W. Klug is working on mediaeval plants from a cultural historical point of view since the publication of his diploma thesis on medicinal herbs in Middle High German poetry. In his doctoral thesis he is currently trying to assess the implications of interdisciplinary dependencies concerning mediaeval plants, their names, and their use in a mediaeval European context.

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