Charlotte Brewer (born 1956) is professor of English language and literature at Hertford College, Oxford. Before joining Hertford in 1990, she was a thesis fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has also taught at the University of Leeds and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her teaching covers Old and Middle English literature and the history of the English language.
Brewer began her research career as a medievalist, with publications on the late Middle English poem Piers Plowman and its textual and editing history. The poet appears to have produced several versions of Piers Plowman at different times. Brewer's book Piers Plowman: the Z version [1](edited with A.G. Rigg, Toronto 1983) advanced the view that a disregarded manuscript in Oxford's Bodley Library (Bodley 851) might be an early, or even first, iteration of the poem rather than a conflation of two other versions. In a later book, Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Poem (Cambridge University Press, 1996; reprinted 2006)[2], Brewer looked at how editors producing single printed texts of the poem over the last five centuries assessed the evidence of the poet's original intent from the numerous and lexically varied scribal manuscripts available for scholarly interpretation.
After completing Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Poem, Brewer shifted her research focus to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The OED was first published over several decades in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century but is still being actively revised and extended today by a large team of lexicographers. It uses quotations from books, periodicals and other sources to help build definitions. For most words, the OEDtakes quotations from different centuries to illustrate both the meaning of a word and how it might have changed over time. Brewer's recent research interest has attempted to understand how the OED has chosen the quotations. Her extensive and highly regarded work has shown, for example, that women writers may be under-used as sources for illustrations of the meaning of words in favour of well-known male authors. She also works on the OED 's treatment of contentious terms related to sex, gender, race and religion. These research results are all available on her website Examining the OED.[1]
Her 2007 book Treasure House of the Language: the Living OED (published by Yale University Press)[3] covers the history of the OED from the completion of the first edition in 1926. The book contains much hitherto unpublished material from the Oxford University Press archives and shows for the first time that active work continued on the Dictionary between the publishing of a supplement of new words in the 1930s and the beginnings of work on a second supplement thirty years later. She takes the OED up to the present day, when revision of the dictionary is a continuous process with new words and quotations released online.
In 2009, Brewer holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to explore the OED 's treatment of female-authored quotation sources of the eighteenth century. She is married to the environmental writer Chris Goodall and has three daughters.