THE EXTENT OF FIRE DAMAGE TO MIDDLE ENGLISH PROSE IN THE COTTON LIBRARY

The library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1570/1-1631) has been described as the most important collection of manuscripts assembled by a single person in Britain. The collection was partly destroyed in a library fire in 1731. While the Cotton collection has been celebrated (and the damage it suffered lamented) for its Old English manuscripts, the extent of fire damage to Middle English prose within the collection has not been systematically explored. This article aims to address this gap by conducting a comprehensive comparison of surviving manuscripts which are now part of the Cotton collection in the British Library with surviving pre- and post-fire catalogues, book lists and reports of Cotton’s manuscripts. The investigation was undertaken during the compilation of an Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP) volume dedicated to the Cotton collection

THE BRIEF RISE AND FALL OF A SUPERSCRIPT ABBREVIATION FOR THE FIRST PERSON SINGULAR PRONOUN IN THE WEST MIDLANDS BETWEEN 1250 AND 1500

This paper examines the strictly regional distribution in a handful of West Midlands counties of the first person singular pronoun, which contracts the spelling into a superscript variant . The data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LAEME)

Anchorites and abbreviations: a corpus study of abbreviations of Germanic and Romance lexicon in Ancrene Wisse

Manuscript abbreviations are a well-known feature of manuscript culture, which have mainly been studied qualitatively by palaeographers. The present study uses a quantitative corpus-based approach to examine how abbreviations are distributed in the etymologically Romance and Germanic lexicons during the early Middle English period (1150–1350), which saw many developments in the writing systems of English. It applies linear regression with effects coding on a dataset consisting of all the versions of Ancrene Wisse included in the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME). The results reveal a statistically significant distribution in which some abbreviations are used exclusively for Germanic words, some for Romance and some for both, proving that ‘Romance’ and ‘Germanic’ work as diagnostic categories. Further corpus searches reveal a group of abbreviations that are used almost exclusively in the West Midlands

FROM PRACTICA PHISICALIA TO MANDEVILLE’S TRAVELS: UNTANGLING THE MISATTRIBUTED IDENTITIES AND WRITINGS OF JOHN OF BURGUNDY

In a recent article, Patrick Outhwaite discusses censorship in ‘two previously unknown early sixteenth-century manuscript copies of the Middle English translation of the Practica phisicalia, the recipe book of John of Burgundy (circa 1338-1390).’ While this authorial attribution is problematic, it is in fact only the latest instance in a long tradition of mis-crediting works to a fourteenth-century physician known as John of Burgundy, John with the beard (à la barba, cum barba, von barba) or, in some texts, John of Bordeaux. John’s name has been attached to the most widely circulated plague treatise in late-medieval and early-modern England, but also has been mis-attributed to a number of other medical texts, both historically and in recent years. What complicates matters further is that this same ‘John of Burgundy’ has been hopelessly tied up with what is now considered to be a fictional work: Mandeville’s Travels. He is sometimes identified as the real author of the work, sometimes as the narrator, and in other instances as a physician encountered by the narrator. Here we attempt to unpack what is known about the historical John of Burgundy, how a variety of medical works came to bear his name, and why modern scholars need to be wary of such attributions

Abbreviations and standardisation in the Polychronicon: Latin to English and manuscript to print

Abbreviations were an integral part of the writing systems used in the Middle Ages. They were used both to conserve precious writing materials and to alleviate “the labour of writing Latin” (Hector 1958: 37). Proof of how widespread and sophisticated the Latin system had become is that the most comprehensive reference work for medieval Latin abbreviations by Adriano Cappelli ([1899] 1990) contains some 14 000 abbreviations. When vernacular languages like English and Anglo-Norman French began to be written down, the system of abbreviation was applied to them, partly modelled after Latin, partly inventing new abbreviations. The system was especially important in a multilingual society, as abbreviations can be language-independent. Towards the end of the Middle Ages the number of abbreviations began to decrease, simultaneously with technological innovations in book production and the emergence of English in a new nationwide function

Manuscript abbreviations in Latin and English: History, typologies and how to tackle them in encoding

This article discusses the theoretical and practical problems related to encoding manuscript abbreviations in TEI P5 XML. Encoding them presents a challenge, because the correspondence between the orthographic sign indicating abbreviation and what the sign stands for is more complex than in non-abbreviated words. The article consists of a review of the terminology used to describe the abbreviations, looking at their history from antiquity to abolition and taxonomies of abbreviations in paleographical handbooks between 1745 and 2007. It discusses the editorial treatment of abbreviations in printed editions and relates them to the terminology used in the handbooks, offering criticism of it from a linguistic and editorial point of view and how to best represent the abbreviations in TEI P5 mark-up. Traditional taxonomies of abbreviation divide the abbreviations into groups based on the shape of the abbreviating symbol or the position of the abbreviated content. Some of the distinctions, such as the one between contractions and suspensions are not at all relevant for digital encoding. However, the system outlined in this article allows for tagging them in a way which will enable quantitative corpus study of them. The data comes mainly from a digital edition of The Trinity Seven Planets, a TEI P5-based digital edition