IN 1654, WILLIAM Somner began receiving funds from Sir Henry Spelman's and Sir Simonds D’Ewes's endowment to support early medieval studies, becoming the second medievalist to be paid for his work. Both he and his predecessor in the endowment, Abraham Wheelock, produced impressive publications. Wheelock produced the first editions of the Old English translation of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica and ASC, described in chapter two, and in 1659 Somner succeeded in compiling and seeing through publication the Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, the first Old English dictionary ever printed. Even though Wheelock gave actual lectures on “Saxon” and Somner did not, Somner was arguably the more important, as his dictionary not only crowned his own intellectual arc but enabled subsequent explorations by those wishing to read the language of England before the Norman Conquest. The foundational nature of this publication, combined with Somner's receipt of funding directly for his historical and lexicographical efforts, has made him seem recognizably professional. At the same time, as this chapter will argue, Somner believed that monuments from the past exerted force in the present. The past he studied was not only relevant but still active; its agency and immediacy made his work urgent in his own day.

Somner's view of the past as an active present force calls into question our assumptions about “professional” medievalism. Dinshaw, in her influential discussion of medievalism, pushes back against the way our modern view of time shapes our beliefs about how medieval studies “ought” to be conducted by professionals in the period:

Dinshaw observes that the human perception of time is often contingent – that is, we do not realize it passes unless something changes, a notion dating back to Aristotle. Nonetheless, our post-Enlightenment heritage still requires us to conceive of time as a series of measurements, minutes passing away into hours and days, irrevocably lost to us as they pass by and demanding that we account for them as a commodity.