Before it became an indispensable tool for medievalists worldwide, the Middle English Dictionary had a long and often forgotten origin story—one that began with a German philologist, hundreds of thousands of paper slips, and a mission that proved too vast for a single lifetime. At the heart of it all was Ewald Flügel, a driven scholar whose ambitions laid the foundation for what would become the most comprehensive resource on Middle English ever created.
By Richard Utz
Several weeks ago, colleagues on Facebook and elsewhere posted frantic questions about whether the electronic access to the Middle English Dictionary, the largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, had been terminated. It soon turned out that the “forbidden” sign at the MED site was easily repaired by the University of Michigan’s electronic access team. But the shock among numerous scholars got me to think about the time when this invaluable resource did not exist, and how it came to be created.
The history of the MED since 1925 is well known and easily available. But there is a largely forgotten prehistory to this history, mostly because the scholar involved in the beginnings of building a dictionary for Middle English is only known by those with an interest in the genesis of Medieval Studies.
And remembering foundational scholars can take strange turns: In 1961, two Stanford students “borrowed” a bust displayed atop a card catalog cabinet in the Stanford Library and displayed it at their fraternity house. Since nobody seemed to care about the “borrowed” bust, one of them kept the statue after graduation and put it up in his yard, for 40 years. At their 40th class reunion in 2002, the fraternity brothers owned up to their deed and returned the statue. By then, it had been identified as memorializing Ewald Flügel, one of the founders of English studies at Stanford, and the student who had been in possession of the statue for so many years, by now a donor to the university, contributed to preserving the professor’s work. It was Stanford’s Professor Flügel who started much of the early work on what would become the Middle English Dictionary.
Ewald Flügel (1863-1914) was educated in English and German philology at the University of Leipzig. Like John Koch, he was part of the generation of German scholars whose careers were enabled by the German Imperial government in Berlin, which was intent on becoming a world power not only via military spending, but also by creating the largest and most powerful system of higher education. In 1892, Flügel accepted the call to become Professor of English at the newly founded Leland Stanford Junior University, where he labored to introduce his colleagues and students to the practices of German philology.
Imbued with a strong nationalist fervor, he publicly championed the idea that the United States should adopt the practices of the modern German university system, especially philology, by his definition the scientific study of historical texts focusing on prescriptive grammar, lexicography, positivist literary history, and textual criticism. He even expressed his conviction of German intellectual superiority by delivering a rousing speech on San Francisco’s German Day in 1903, admonishing his audience to contribute the virtues of “work, conscientious work” and attention to the “tiniest detail” of one’s work to a country bound to end up becoming Germanized because of the large number of immigrants from the German-speaking world. He ended his speech with the infamous nationalist dictum of his day, “In Germankind the world once more its weal may find.”
Ewald Flügel was born into a family of eminent lexicographers (father Karl Alfred Felix; grandfather Johann Gottfried) who had represented the United States as honorary consuls and the Smithsonian and other North American institutions in his hometown of Leipzig. He studied German and English Philology at Freiburg and Leipzig, writing a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Carlyle and a postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on Sir Philip Sidney. Soon afterwards he became coeditor of the journal Anglia (today the longest running journal in English studies) and founder of the Anglia Beiblatt, the widely respected review arm of the journal. In the absence of a suitable position as chair/professor in Germany, he was open for an appointment elsewhere. When David Starr Jordan, the President of Leland Stanford Junior University inquired about his joining the pioneer faculty charged with founding a new West Coast university, the twenty-nine-year-old jumped at the chance, despite the warnings from U.S. colleagues that Stanford did not have a library.
The adventurous scholar applied his missionary spirit about German philology to his instruction at Stanford, stressing in a commencement speech the need for increased academic rigor and a clearer distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies. He reserved his most ardent critique of the state of U.S. higher education to the fact that he was finding “so much in our educational literature on ‘the university for the student,’ and so little – if anything – on ‘the university for the professor.’”
He put his devotion to research and scholarship to practice when Frederick James Furnivall, the founder of the Early English Text Society and the Chaucer Society, asked Flügel to take on the creation of a concordance for the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Two other scholars, Hiram Corson and W. W. Aylward (under the pen name of Wilson Graham), had made early efforts at creating a comprehensive alphabetical list of the principal words in all extant Chaucer manuscripts, but progress had been slow and erratic, and Furnivall thought Flügel was the right scholar for advancing the project beyond its incipient state.
Realizing he needed time off teaching to have any chance at making progress on this major undertaking, Flügel applied for a grant with the Carnegie Foundation in 1904. Supported by three annual grants for $7500 and one for $11,000, he was awarded an extended leave from Stanford and enlisted the paid support of numerous American and European students and scholars (please note that the equivalent purchasing power of $7500 in 1904 is approximately $285,000 today). His grant application showed that the entrepreneurial Flügel had extended Furnivall’s original idea into a much more ambitious project, one that would provide, in addition to a “lexicon to the works of Chaucer” with “scrupulously exact and complete quotations of all the words used in the genuine works,” “full information as to the orthography and morphology of these words and their meaning, usage and construction.”
By 1908, Flügel estimated he and his collaborators had collected about 1,120,000 slips of Chaucerian words. While his colleagues encouraged him to publish each completed section individually, to offer at least partial access as quickly as possible, Flügel hesitated, envisioning an even grander scheme for his project. Despite a serious sunstroke, which forced him to stay in sanatorium for several weeks, he had now set his eyes on creating not just a Chaucer dictionary, but an all-encompassing dictionary of Middle English.
From the article “Specimen of the Chaucer Dictionary. Letter E” by Ewald Flügel, published in 1913
The new plan was for each word entry to record not only every single occurrence in every single manuscript and critical edition, but also commentary on the occurrence of the word and variant forms from Middle English, Old English, Old French, Latin, and other languages, information on all differences in pronunciation, meter, rhyme, and documentation on etymology and semantic history.
When he returned to Stanford in 1913 after his five-year research sabbatical, it dawned on him that the execution of his new plan would take decades, not years:
I have now about three days weekly for the MS. Work, and the MS. so far completed would fill at least two quarto volumes of one thousand pages each (with three columns to each page). If I should now, in order to publish two such volumes in reasonable time, receive weekly the proofs of only thirty columns (ten pages), the mere careful proofreading of thousands of quotations would take the daylight of, at least, two days, leaving me with only one day for new MS.! This would delay the finishing of the MS. in such a way that twenty-one years would elapse, instead of the seven on which I count.
From his communication with others, we may safely conclude that Flügel worked himself into all-out exhaustion, completing a draft of the letters “A” through “E” of his Chaucer Dictionary on about 20,000 quarto sheets, by his own admission toiling “during vacations, on Sundays, and at odd hours.” He advanced to a draft of the letter “H” by 14 November 1914, the day of his death. Arthur G. Kennedy (who assisted Flügel in his final years) and J.S.P. Tatlock used his entries on Chaucer for compiling the Chaucer Concordance they published with the Carnegie Foundation in 1927.
A volume from the Middle English Dictionary (1st ed.), eds. by Hans Kurath and Sherman M Kuhn (University of Michigan Press, 1954)
The rest of Flügel’s foundational efforts found inclusion in the voluminous Middle English Dictionary (MED) published by Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn in 1954. And the MED is the foundation of the Middle English Compendium which, except for the odd service interruption, offers the most comprehensive resource of Middle English texts world-wide.
In addition to his unfinished dictionary, Flügel published several studies on other subjects. For one, a 1902 article on the medieval polymath Roger Bacon, he chose the motto Ad inquisitionem tantarum rerum una aetas non sufficit (“One lifetime is not enough to investigate so many things.”). Nothing better describes what happened to Flügel and his ambitious project. A small number of documents related to Flügel’s biography and scholarship is available at Stanford University.
Richard Utz is Interim Dean and Professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Top Image: Ewald Flügel at work. Photo courtesy Stanford Historical Photograph Collection
Before it became an indispensable tool for medievalists worldwide, the Middle English Dictionary had a long and often forgotten origin story—one that began with a German philologist, hundreds of thousands of paper slips, and a mission that proved too vast for a single lifetime. At the heart of it all was Ewald Flügel, a driven scholar whose ambitions laid the foundation for what would become the most comprehensive resource on Middle English ever created.
By Richard Utz
Several weeks ago, colleagues on Facebook and elsewhere posted frantic questions about whether the electronic access to the Middle English Dictionary, the largest searchable database of Middle English lexicon and usage for the period 1100-1500, had been terminated. It soon turned out that the “forbidden” sign at the MED site was easily repaired by the University of Michigan’s electronic access team. But the shock among numerous scholars got me to think about the time when this invaluable resource did not exist, and how it came to be created.
The history of the MED since 1925 is well known and easily available. But there is a largely forgotten prehistory to this history, mostly because the scholar involved in the beginnings of building a dictionary for Middle English is only known by those with an interest in the genesis of Medieval Studies.
And remembering foundational scholars can take strange turns: In 1961, two Stanford students “borrowed” a bust displayed atop a card catalog cabinet in the Stanford Library and displayed it at their fraternity house. Since nobody seemed to care about the “borrowed” bust, one of them kept the statue after graduation and put it up in his yard, for 40 years. At their 40th class reunion in 2002, the fraternity brothers owned up to their deed and returned the statue. By then, it had been identified as memorializing Ewald Flügel, one of the founders of English studies at Stanford, and the student who had been in possession of the statue for so many years, by now a donor to the university, contributed to preserving the professor’s work. It was Stanford’s Professor Flügel who started much of the early work on what would become the Middle English Dictionary.
Ewald Flügel (1863-1914) was educated in English and German philology at the University of Leipzig. Like John Koch, he was part of the generation of German scholars whose careers were enabled by the German Imperial government in Berlin, which was intent on becoming a world power not only via military spending, but also by creating the largest and most powerful system of higher education. In 1892, Flügel accepted the call to become Professor of English at the newly founded Leland Stanford Junior University, where he labored to introduce his colleagues and students to the practices of German philology.
Imbued with a strong nationalist fervor, he publicly championed the idea that the United States should adopt the practices of the modern German university system, especially philology, by his definition the scientific study of historical texts focusing on prescriptive grammar, lexicography, positivist literary history, and textual criticism. He even expressed his conviction of German intellectual superiority by delivering a rousing speech on San Francisco’s German Day in 1903, admonishing his audience to contribute the virtues of “work, conscientious work” and attention to the “tiniest detail” of one’s work to a country bound to end up becoming Germanized because of the large number of immigrants from the German-speaking world. He ended his speech with the infamous nationalist dictum of his day, “In Germankind the world once more its weal may find.”
Ewald Flügel was born into a family of eminent lexicographers (father Karl Alfred Felix; grandfather Johann Gottfried) who had represented the United States as honorary consuls and the Smithsonian and other North American institutions in his hometown of Leipzig. He studied German and English Philology at Freiburg and Leipzig, writing a doctoral dissertation on Thomas Carlyle and a postdoctoral thesis (Habilitation) on Sir Philip Sidney. Soon afterwards he became coeditor of the journal Anglia (today the longest running journal in English studies) and founder of the Anglia Beiblatt, the widely respected review arm of the journal. In the absence of a suitable position as chair/professor in Germany, he was open for an appointment elsewhere. When David Starr Jordan, the President of Leland Stanford Junior University inquired about his joining the pioneer faculty charged with founding a new West Coast university, the twenty-nine-year-old jumped at the chance, despite the warnings from U.S. colleagues that Stanford did not have a library.
The adventurous scholar applied his missionary spirit about German philology to his instruction at Stanford, stressing in a commencement speech the need for increased academic rigor and a clearer distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies. He reserved his most ardent critique of the state of U.S. higher education to the fact that he was finding “so much in our educational literature on ‘the university for the student,’ and so little – if anything – on ‘the university for the professor.’”
He put his devotion to research and scholarship to practice when Frederick James Furnivall, the founder of the Early English Text Society and the Chaucer Society, asked Flügel to take on the creation of a concordance for the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Two other scholars, Hiram Corson and W. W. Aylward (under the pen name of Wilson Graham), had made early efforts at creating a comprehensive alphabetical list of the principal words in all extant Chaucer manuscripts, but progress had been slow and erratic, and Furnivall thought Flügel was the right scholar for advancing the project beyond its incipient state.
Realizing he needed time off teaching to have any chance at making progress on this major undertaking, Flügel applied for a grant with the Carnegie Foundation in 1904. Supported by three annual grants for $7500 and one for $11,000, he was awarded an extended leave from Stanford and enlisted the paid support of numerous American and European students and scholars (please note that the equivalent purchasing power of $7500 in 1904 is approximately $285,000 today). His grant application showed that the entrepreneurial Flügel had extended Furnivall’s original idea into a much more ambitious project, one that would provide, in addition to a “lexicon to the works of Chaucer” with “scrupulously exact and complete quotations of all the words used in the genuine works,” “full information as to the orthography and morphology of these words and their meaning, usage and construction.”
By 1908, Flügel estimated he and his collaborators had collected about 1,120,000 slips of Chaucerian words. While his colleagues encouraged him to publish each completed section individually, to offer at least partial access as quickly as possible, Flügel hesitated, envisioning an even grander scheme for his project. Despite a serious sunstroke, which forced him to stay in sanatorium for several weeks, he had now set his eyes on creating not just a Chaucer dictionary, but an all-encompassing dictionary of Middle English.
The new plan was for each word entry to record not only every single occurrence in every single manuscript and critical edition, but also commentary on the occurrence of the word and variant forms from Middle English, Old English, Old French, Latin, and other languages, information on all differences in pronunciation, meter, rhyme, and documentation on etymology and semantic history.
When he returned to Stanford in 1913 after his five-year research sabbatical, it dawned on him that the execution of his new plan would take decades, not years:
I have now about three days weekly for the MS. Work, and the MS. so far completed would fill at least two quarto volumes of one thousand pages each (with three columns to each page). If I should now, in order to publish two such volumes in reasonable time, receive weekly the proofs of only thirty columns (ten pages), the mere careful proofreading of thousands of quotations would take the daylight of, at least, two days, leaving me with only one day for new MS.! This would delay the finishing of the MS. in such a way that twenty-one years would elapse, instead of the seven on which I count.
From his communication with others, we may safely conclude that Flügel worked himself into all-out exhaustion, completing a draft of the letters “A” through “E” of his Chaucer Dictionary on about 20,000 quarto sheets, by his own admission toiling “during vacations, on Sundays, and at odd hours.” He advanced to a draft of the letter “H” by 14 November 1914, the day of his death. Arthur G. Kennedy (who assisted Flügel in his final years) and J.S.P. Tatlock used his entries on Chaucer for compiling the Chaucer Concordance they published with the Carnegie Foundation in 1927.
The rest of Flügel’s foundational efforts found inclusion in the voluminous Middle English Dictionary (MED) published by Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn in 1954. And the MED is the foundation of the Middle English Compendium which, except for the odd service interruption, offers the most comprehensive resource of Middle English texts world-wide.
In addition to his unfinished dictionary, Flügel published several studies on other subjects. For one, a 1902 article on the medieval polymath Roger Bacon, he chose the motto Ad inquisitionem tantarum rerum una aetas non sufficit (“One lifetime is not enough to investigate so many things.”). Nothing better describes what happened to Flügel and his ambitious project. A small number of documents related to Flügel’s biography and scholarship is available at Stanford University.
Richard Utz is Interim Dean and Professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Top Image: Ewald Flügel at work. Photo courtesy Stanford Historical Photograph Collection
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