Norman Francis Blake (19 April 1934 – 29 July 2012) was a British academic and scholar specialising in Middle English and Early Modern English language and literature on which he published abundantly during his career.
Life
Norman Blake was born in Ceará, Brazil, where his English father worked as a banker at the Bank of London and South America. His mother was half-Brazilian and half-German. In 1938, when he was four years old, he was sent to boarding school in Surrey and then to Magdalen College School in Brackley, Northamptonshire, in 1944. The outbreak of World War II meant that he was not able to see his parents for eight years. Two years after the end of the war his older brother, who attended the same boarding school, died in an accident.
In 1953 he went up to study at Magdalen College where his tutors for Medieval English were, amongst others, C. S. Lewis and J. A. W. Bennett, and for Old Icelandic Gabriel Turville-Petre. During the academic year 1956–1957 he studied Old Icelandic manuscripts at the newly established Arnamagnæan Institute, part of the University of Copenhagen. He finished his studies with a BLitt in 1959. Following his studies at Oxford, he was appointed assistant lecturer at the University of Liverpool where he stayed until 1973, interrupted only by an interval as visiting professor at the University of Toronto in 1963–1964. In 1973 Blake was appointed to the Chair of English Language at the University of Sheffield, becoming head of the Department for English Language and Linguistics, a post he held until 1998. When the Department of English Language and Linguistics was amalgamated with the Department of English Literature, Blake moved to De Montfort University, Leicester, taking up a research professorship.
Norman Blake married Susan Valery Miles at Liverpool in 1965. The couple adopted a daughter, Dorinda, born in 1973. He was an ardent user of public transport and enjoyed hiking, particularly in the Peak District.
In May 2004 Norman Blake suffered a massive stroke severely restricting his movement and speaking capabilities. The ensuing years he spent either at home or at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital. Norman Blake passed away on 29 July 2012. He was survived by his wife and daughter.
Scholarship
Blake's finishing project at Magdalen College in 1959 was editing the Jómsvíkinga saga. His edition of the saga was published in 1962. Whilst being at Liverpool University he published an edition of the Old English poem The Phoenix in 1964, and in 1970 an edition of William Caxton's translation of the Middle Dutch version of The History of Reynard the Fox.
In the late 1960s and during the 1970s it emerged that Blake's academic interests were twofold, namely the history of the English Language, particularly late medieval and early modern, and The Canterbury Tales. This led to extensive work not only on William Caxton, but also on William Shakespeare. The publication of a monograph on William Caxton in 1969, Caxton and His World, established Blake as one of the foremost scholars on the subject. In the book he put an emphasis on the larger context in which Caxton was operating and challenged the traditional views on Caxton by positing that Caxton was predominantly a merchant and entrepreneur rather than a craftsman printer. Eventually, he would publish more than 40 books and essays on Caxton.
In 1980 Blake published an edition of The Canterbury Tales, based on the Hengwrt manuscript. This edition was, at the time, not well received as Blake advocated the significance and importance of the Hengwrt manuscript, being the oldest manuscript of the tales, and should take precedence over the Ellesmere manuscript on which most published editions and translations were based. The criticism led him to publish a number of books and articles over the following 15 years enhancing and augmenting his argument.
Blake contributed several articles to the German encyclopaedia Lexikon des Mittelalters and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, and was also editor and contributor to the second volume of The Cambridge History of the English Language published in 1992.