The Nature of Knowledge: Evidence and Evidentiality in the Witness Depositions from the Salem Witch Trials

This is the author's accepted manuscript. Also available electronically at http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-1599941This article explores evidentiality (or the linguistic marking of source of information), a topic that has received little attention in studies on the history of English. Using witness depositions from the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692–93 as material, the article reveals that a number of linguistic features are used to indicate source of information, especially verb phrases (e.g., see, hear, tell) and prepositional phrases (e.g., to my knowledge, in my sight). It also shows that direct sensory experience and reports are the most common semantic categories of evidentiality in the documents, while inference and assumption are relatively uncommon. I argue that the depositions use evidential marking in different situations to fulfill a variety of pragmatic functions. For example, the witnesses refer to direct experience (seeing) of the affliction by the apparitions of alleged witches to bring greater credibility to allegations that could usually not be substantiated. More generally, the article demonstrates how concepts such as discourse community, setting, and pragmatic concerns, which have not been systematically considered in studies on early English in North America, are crucial factors for our understanding of the use of English in the period

Textual History as Language History? Text Categories, Corpora, Editions, and the Witness Depositions from the Salem Witch Trials

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2012.66807

From Tongue to Text: The Transmission of the Salem Witchcraft Examination Records

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version can be found here http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2007-005This article explores the problem of using court documents for studies of the spoken language of the past. It discusses three sets of examination records from the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. By comparing records that exist in two or more alternative versions, the article shows that there are substantial linguistic and content-related differences between the versions. It is suggested that the recorders of the examinations paid more attention to the substance of the proceedings than to the exact language used by the participants and that the recorders reconstructed the courtroom dialogue on the basis of (shorthand) notes, mixing their own and the informants' language. The variation in the documents casts doubt on the reliability of the records as accurately reflecting the original courtroom dialogue. The use of the examination records as linguistic sources is thus called into question, especially for historical sociolinguistic studies that attempt to correlate language use and extralinguistic factors such as sex, age, and social status

A Previously Unrecorded Fragment of the Middle English Short Metrical Chronicle in Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica M199

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138380600757778This article presents an edition of a fragment of the Middle English Short Metrical Chronicle found in Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, MS M199 (henceforth BPH M199). BPH M199 is an alchemical miscellany probably compiled in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It mainly contains alchemical prose and verse tracts in English and Latin, but it also includes treatises on magic, a condensed and reworked version of the verse dialogue Sidrak and Bokkus and the fragment of the Short Metrical Chronicle (henceforth Chronicle). To my knowledge, this is a previously unrecorded fragment of the Chronicle. Since the Chronicle has received a great deal of attention in previous scholarship, it is important to make the version of BPH M199 available to scholars interested in the Chronicle. BPH M199 demonstrates that the Chronicle continued to be copied in the early Modern period, and the manuscript provides insights into the reception and interpretation of the text in this period. I will contextualize the BPH M199 fragment by discussing the characteristics of the manuscript, by considering the possible reasons for the appearance of the Chronicle in BPH M199, and by collating the fragment with the other known versions of the Chronicle

The ‘Forgotten’ Language of Middle English Alchemy: Exploring Alchemical Lexis in the MED and the OED

This is the author's accepted manuscript. Copyright 2014 Oxford University Press.Joining recent studies that attempt to re-evaluate the legacy of alchemy, this article explores the recording of alchemical vocabulary from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the MED and the OED. By considering labeling practices in the dictionaries, the alchemical sources that they employ, and principles of inclusion and exclusion, it shows that the dictionaries give only a partial, inconsistent, and sometimes misleading picture of alchemical vocabulary in Middle English. I complement this study of the dictionaries with an investigation of an unedited fifteenth-century codex of alchemical writing, which reveals that numerous alchemical words and meanings remain unrecorded in the MED and OED

The Anatomy of Correction: Additions, Cancellations, and Changes in the Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Trials

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393270701287439The Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 hold a special place in early American history. Though limited in comparison with many European witch persecutions, the Salem trials have reached mythical proportions, particularly in the United States. The some 1,000 extant documents from the trials and, in particular, the pre-trial hearings have been analyzed from various perspectives by (social) historians, anthropologists, biologists, medical doctors, literary scholars, and linguists (see e.g. Rosenthal 1993: 33–36; Mappen 1996; Grund, Kytö and Rissanen 2004: 146). But despite this intense interest in the trials, very little research has been carried out on the actual manuscript documents that have survived from the trials. Instead, studies have focused on the content or language of the documents rather than the documents themselves, and these studies have almost exclusively been based on one of the many available editions. However, the manuscript documents contain a great deal of information about the context and procedure of the trials that it is not possible to glean from the currently available editions

Textual Alchemy: The Transformation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s Semita Recta into the Mirror of Lights

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version can be found here http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/000269809X12529013496257This article explores the strategies of and the reasons behind the reworking of pseudo-Albertus Magnus's Semita recta into the Mirror of Lights. I argue that the redactor sought to provide a more comprehensive defence of the legitimacy of alchemy than found in the Semita recta. In the process of doing so, he reshaped the original text so as to present three units that addressed different parts of the alchemical opus: first, theory and justification of alchemy; second, basic information on substances and procedures; and, third, practice. The redactor employed sophisticated textual tools identical to those seen in scholastic texts. These strategies, I argue, constitute part of the redactor's attempt to bring authority and credibility to his project and to alchemy in general. Certainly, much more attention needs to be paid to these experiments of textual alchemy in order to understand the practice of alchemy in the late medieval period

'ffor to make Azure as Albert biddes’: Medieval English Alchemical Writings in the Pseudo-Albertan Tradition

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/174582306X93174The aim of this article is to explore the unresearched body of manuscript texts on alchemy in medieval English (fifteenth century). More specifically, it is concerned with texts that are commonly attributed to the famous medieval scholar Albertus Magnus. Taking as its starting point the work done by Pearl Kibre on Latin alchemical writings attributed to Albertus, the article shows that the English manuscript texts (some thirty) are all related to one text in the Latin corpus, the Semita recta. (Kibre lists about thirty texts in Latin.) However, the English texts display varying affinities to the Semita recta: there are literal translations as well as major adaptations, and there are texts that appear to exploit the authority of the Semita recta for advancing completely unrelated discussions. It is also evident that the early English translators and redactors of alchemical texts were particularly interested in practical aspects of alchemy: many of the texts exhibit an emphasis on practical details, whereas the theoretical parts have been excised. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that although the English manuscripts derive from a pseudo-Albertan text, most of them do not contain an overt attribution to Albertus. It is thus unclear whether Albertus's renown as an alchemist played a significant part in the circulation of the texts in a vernacular context

Sidrak and Bokkus: An Early Modern Reader Response

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from doi:10.1515/ANGL.2007.217The Middle English version of the encyclopedic verse dialogue Sidrak and Bokkus has received little attention in recent scholarship, and hence questions about its organization and appeal to readers remain unanswered. Discussing a previously unexplored version of the text in the early modern alchemical miscellany Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, Amsterdam, MS M199, this article demonstrates how the text was read and interpreted by one late sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century reader in particular. Although the copyist took his text from the edition of the Middle English Sidrak and Bokkus printed in the 1530s by Thomas Godfray, he abbreviated and restructured the text to fit his own interests and needs. The numerous marginal annotations reveal that the copyist/annotator interpreted at least parts of the text as having alchemical or metallurgical significance. He also saw parallels in Sidrak and Bokkus to literary texts, most notably Chaucer's Monk's Tale, adding references to William Thynne's third edition of the Canterbury Tales (c. 1550). The article thus provides detailed information both on the interpretation of Sidrak and Bokkus in early modern England and on reading practices in the period more generally

Manuscripts as Sources for Linguistic Research: A Methodological Case Study Based on the Mirror of Lights

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0075424206290255This article explores the problematic issue of using editions as sources for studies of English historical morpho-syntax. It presents a methodological case study of the variation between he and it in reference to inanimate objects (such as mercury) in Mirror of Lights, an alchemical text that survives in multiple copies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The study reveals that the manuscript versions differ greatly in how they employ he and it, underscoring that linguistic studies based on one version would provide very different results from those using another version as the source. The article argues that it is crucial that such manuscript variation is taken into consideration in morpho-syntactic studies. It suggests that an electronic edition that incorporates all copies of the text would make the full variation available to linguists, while a traditional critical edition would highlight the pattern of one version but obscure or ignore the patterns of other manuscripts. The article also discusses the more general problem of including a multiversion text such as the Mirror of Lights into a corpus and suggests some possible solutions