The Present Participle as a Marker of Style and Authorship in Old English Biblical Translation

This dissertation investigates evidence of multiple authorship in the Old English Hexateuch translation of Genesis and in the Old English Gospels by examining how the translations render the Latin present participle into Old English. These are two of the longest extant Old English texts, and there is growing scholarly recognition that both may be products of multiple authorship; however, the translators, except one in Genesis, are anonymous, and the number and locations of shifts in authorship are widely disputed. Past scholarship has employed qualitative, philological evidence, counted features possibly indicating shifts in authorship, and variously proposed breaks between and within texts, but qualitative studies have not fully exploited the present participle as a marker, and quantitative results have not been verified with statistical tests. This dissertation addresses these gaps by conducting a full inventory of Latin present participles in the Old English Genesis and the Old English Gospels, identifying how they are rendered into Old English, and then categorizing them by case and position. The dissertation then applies a statistical "proportion test" to search for the locations of statistically significant shifts in the rate of translating the Latin present participle with its OE counterpart, both overall and in several subcategories. Last, the study engages in qualitative syntactic and philological analysis to evaluate breaks indicated by the proportion test. The results independently corroborate previously asserted textual breaks in Genesis and the Old English Gospels with new syntactic and statistical evidence, revise an existing theory of intra-textual shift in the OE Matthew, and detect evidence of other intra-textual shifts not previously asserted in scholarship. These results also suggest Old English biblical translators engaged in interpretation and authorship, not merely mechanical translation. The study's approaches further explore how traditional and non-traditional methods of authorship attribution can investigate a wide variety of authorship problems.