The essays presented here pay tribute to Hans Sauer as a specialist on English medieval literature and culture. This book shows what we can safely infer from medieval texts and where we need to be cautious or should reassess what has hitherto been suggested. It shows what the Middle Ages inherited from earlier days and transformed during their own time, what they gave to later eras, and what clearly belongs into the realm of fantasy films. The essays mainly concentrate on Old and Middle English prose and poetry, also including theoretical approaches to understanding medieval culture.

Including both synchronic and diachronic approaches, the essays pay tribute to one of Hans Sauer s main specialist fields, namely English lexicography and lexicology. The contents of the articles range from insights into current lexicographical projects to glimpses into the work of eminent (and also lesser known) philologists. They range from lexical studies based on manuscripts and printed editions to those based on electronic data and include morpho-syntactic, semantic, taxonomic and etymological theories and approaches."

This investigation is a qualitative analysis of the etymological, the morphological and the semantic history of the Old English complex plant names as a lexical field, and an in-depth study of the plant names as individual entities. Their particular interest results from the fact that they encode a wealth of information on the plants and their perception by the people, as well as on the psychological processes and the linguistic strategies that were used in the naming processes. Their analysis requires the interplay of various disciplines morphology and word-formation, structural and...