Talk:Laurence Nowell

Merger

I created Laurence Nowell as a stub when I expanded Nowell Codex, since I didn't realise Lawrence Nowell already existed. Now another user has kindly expanded it - but the new information contradicts that at the other page!

Clearly the two need merging, but it's not a simple case: someone will have to find relevant academic discussions, identify which theory is the predominant one, and incorporate the other theory in a subsidiary section (unless it's been well and truly debunked). As for me, I don't even know which name is more common...  :/

— Haeleth Talk 22:33, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Hi! Yes, they definitely should be merged. I should have created a redirect when I made the "w" article. My main source was the (old) DNB, I think, and every other place I've checked (even some fairly recent scholarship) seems to think that the Dean of Lichfield and the antiquarian are the same person. I'd be very interested to find out if everyone has been wrong about this all along and especially I'd like to see a reference. I think this really has to be straightened out before we can merge. (Either name would be fine with me--we'd just make redirects.) PRiis 21:41, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

I admit I always thought they were the same person too - in fact that's what my tiny stub said, IIRC. But it looks like the user who expanded my stub may have been correct to say that opinions have changed. I've only found one reference so far, and unfortunately it's a tertiary source that we can't really cite: Nowell's entry in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: 2000), p.336, says: "Until recently he was mistakenly identified as the Dean of Lichfield, who was actually his cousin."

Irritatingly, it doesn't provide individual citations for each fact, just monolithic article bibliographies, so I guess I'll have to chase up the references and try to find the actual scholarship on the matter now. I do note that I too have seen the assumption that he was the same person as the dean made in more recent works, so there may well still be some controversy... — Haeleth Talk 19:50, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Google Book Search turns up trumps. "(lawrence|laurence) nowell lichfield" finds references for both theories. Particularly interesting is the overview in Raymond Grant, Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Laws of the Anglo-Saxons (Amsterdam: 1996), pp. 11ff.

The article that first suggested that there were two Nowells appears to be Retha M. Warnicke, 'Note on a court of requests case of 1571', in English Language Notes xi (1974), pp. 250-256, which I should be able to get hold of easily enough.

What I haven't found is any counter-arguments that might explain why the Lichfield theory is still being referred to as the accepted account by some scholars to this day. I'd be happier if I could find some actual debate, instead of a theory that seems to have been accepted without question by some, and simply ignored by the rest... — Haeleth Talk 20:08, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Here's another one: "Mrs. Retha M. Warnicke has shown recently in her "Note on a Court of Requests Case of 1571" (English Language Notes xi (1974) 250-6) that Lambarde's friend was not, as was supposed Laurence Nowell, dean of Lichfield (Brasenose c 1536; MA 1544, died 1576), but a kinsman." -The History of the University of Oxford, Vol III: The Collegiate University, p.513, OUP, 1986, which I could read two pages of through Google Print. The DNB had them as one person--I wonder what the new ODNB says. PRiis 04:51, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

OK, I was able to find and read three pages of the Raymond Grant book. Doesn't it seem like he's coming down pretty firmly on the side of there being two? Anyway, I never thought this little article would get this complicated! PRiis 05:31, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Sounds like you're reading it the same way as I am. So the status quo - as I understand it - is that people who are interested in the biography know about Warnicke's paper and are in agreement that there were two Nowells, while people who are only interested in Nowell as a footnote to Beowulf aren't looking any further than DNB, so they're assuming the one-Nowell theory is still current.

I should be able to get into a decent library soon and get a copy of Warnicke's actual paper, and possibly a copy of Grant to see whether he does go on to mention any caveats, but in the meantime I reckon we could safely go ahead and do a merge based on what's readable on Google. I'm thinking probably one article based largely on your existing one, but explaining at the start that we're probably dealing with two people of the same name, and drawing on Grant to identify parts of the biography that can safely be assigned to one or the other of them. — Haeleth Talk 20:28, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Sounds good! It seems like the two-person theory is well-accepted. I guess a lot of people (like me, unfortunately) who didn't look too deeply just believed the DNB. Here's another paper given this year at the Society of Antiquaries of London [1] (non-members can't get in to see the paper, but it's there in the Google cache) where the author says "Tracing Nowell's life is complicated further by the fact that biographers began to confuse him with another Laurence Nowell — the Dean of Lichfield — from the 1700s [a confusion that survives, for example, in the Dictionary of National Biography]." There's a Q and A afterwards, and nobody questioned that point. PRiis 23:52, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Nice find! That would seem to clinch it.

Tangential: from that and the other sources we've found so far, it's looking like "Laurence" is the commoner spelling (for the antiquary, at least), so this is probably the article that should be the target of the merge, when one of us gets round to that. — Haeleth Talk 19:12, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Merge/revision

OK, the merge is done, and the article's been completely revised in light of the disentanglement of the biographies. Also, Lawrence N. has been made a redirect to Laurence N. PRiis 02:13, 25 February 2006 (UTC)