A study of the manuscript contexts of Benedict Burgh's Middle English 'Distichs of Cato'

This thesis aims to establish an impression of the readership and reception of Benedict Burgh’s Middle English Distichs of Cato. The intended outcome of this research is to demonstrate the layer(s) of society in which the text was read and the ways in which it was presented by scribes and marked by its readers. Presentation and annotation are viewed as the best way of identifying the esteem and attention paid to the Distichs and thus of evaluating its cultural importance. These research goals are therefore achieved through examination of the Distichs’ manuscript contexts. The first chapter delineates the text’s background as a translation of a late Classical Latin original, heavily used in primary education throughout Europe both for its practical advice and its suitability for teaching basic Latin grammar. The chapter discusses the authorship of the Latin Disticha Catonis, the translator of the Middle English version under investigation, and the medieval theories of translation and authorial ‘authority’ which impact on the nature of Burgh’s translation efforts. The second and third chapters focus on specific manuscripts, collating and discussing information on their contents, the circumstances of their production, and the likely audience for which they were produced. In chapter two, British Library MSS. Harley 7333 and Harley 2251 are examined in light of their relationship to the miscellanies of fifteenth-century secretarial clerk, John Shirley. Through examination of the likely audience of Shirley’s manuscripts and the nature of other volumes copied from them, it is argued that manuscripts such as the two Harley volumes are likely to have been owned by members of the gentry and/or the literate ‘middle class’ of clerks and merchants. Chapter three focusses on Glasgow, University Library MS. Hunter 259 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. poet. e.15, both of which are in the hand of the Carthusian monk Stephen Dodesham. Dodesham was resident at the Charterhouse of Sheen, which had strong connections to neighbouring Bridgettine nunnery, Syon Abbey. This chapter considers the possibility that these manuscripts were made for Syon nuns but, through comparison with other comparable Distichs volumes, also suggests that their audience may have lain more in the network of pious lay patrons surrounding Sheen and Syon. The members of this patronage milieu were predominately from the gentry, and thus overlapped with the audience of the Harley volumes. Chapter four considers patterns of presentation and use of the manuscripts across the group to support the gentry/middle-class audience established in chapters two and three, and to draw a general picture of the Distichs’ reception by this audience. This includes establishing that both male and female readership was common, and that the dissemination of the text may have been aided by close association with the poetry of John Lydgate. Selection/excerption of stanzas for copying, annotation of particular stanzas, and evidence of wear on the manuscripts are presented as evidence that medieval readers did engage with the text, and continued to value it as previous centuries had valued the Latin source text. A concluding chapter summarises the main points of the argument, and offers directions for future research

The Seven Words of the Virgin: Identifying Change in the Discourse Context of the Concept of Virginity in Early Modern English

No abstract available

A time-sensitive historical thesaurus-based semantic tagger for deep semantic annotation

Automatic extraction and analysis of meaning-related information from natural language data has been an important issue in a number of research areas, such as natural language processing (NLP), text mining, corpus linguistics, and data science. An important aspect of such information extraction and analysis is the semantic annotation of language data using a semantic tagger. In practice, various semantic annotation tools have been designed to carry out different levels of semantic annotation, such as topics of documents, semantic role labeling, named entities or events. Currently, the majority of existing semantic annotation tools identify and tag partial core semantic information in language data, but they tend to be applicable only for modern language corpora. While such semantic analyzers have proven useful for various purposes, a semantic annotation tool that is capable of annotating deep semantic senses of all lexical units, or all-words tagging, is still desirable for a deep, comprehensive semantic analysis of language data. With large-scale digitization efforts underway, delivering historical corpora with texts dating from the last 400 years, a particularly challenging aspect is the need to adapt the annotation in the face of significant word meaning change over time. In this paper, we report on the development of a new semantic tagger (the Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger), and discuss challenging issues we faced in this work. This new semantic tagger is built on existing NLP tools and incorporates a large-scale historical English thesaurus linked to the Oxford English Dictionary. Employing contextual disambiguation algorithms, this tool is capable of annotating lexical units with a historically-valid highly fine-grained semantic categorization scheme that contains about 225,000 semantic concepts and 4,033 thematic semantic categories. In terms of novelty, it is adapted for processing historical English data, with rich information about historical usage of words and a spelling variant normalizer for historical forms of English. Furthermore, it is able to make use of knowledge about the publication date of a text to adapt its output. In our evaluation, the system achieved encouraging accuracies ranging from 77.12% to 91.08% on individual test texts. Applying time-sensitive methods improved results by as much as 3.54% and by 1.72% on average

The Dehumanized thief

Metaphors for theft and thieves in Mapping Metaphor’s ‘Taking’ category suggest that thieves are very commonly viewed as animals. This chapter enumerates some of these examples, investigating groupings of terms which suggest that small-scale opportunistic theft is conceived of as similar to the acts of vermin, particularly rodents and insects, whilst more aggressive robbers are linked with the vocabulary of predation (albeit rarely with specific animals). Birds are considered to be an interesting subset for their ability to straddle the line between petty thief and predator. The patterns in the ‘Taking’ data appear to be related to society’s tendency to view criminals or ‘outsider’ groups as less than human, with speakers establishing a psychological distance between themselves and those who act against the law

Lexis

This chapter focuses on lexis as a core topic of concern for the digital study of language. In particular, we discuss the key issue of what lexical items represent in digital humanities (DH) research. Very little work in DH is interested in lexical items for their own sake – instead, lexis is used as a proxy for measuring cultural significance, an author’s style and how much attention is being paid to a concept within a text. We therefore organise our ‘Critical issues and topics’ section of the chapter around three themes: what lexis can tell us about the language (as noted), what is key in the study of lexis (including frequency, usage, collocation, semantic prosody and metaphorical extension) and what problems we face when using lexical items in English language research (such as polysemy, homonymy and spelling variation). In the ‘Current contributions and research’ section, using the perspective of degrees of ‘curation’ of data, we overview the sources of information about lexis – dictionaries and thesauri such as the OED, the Historical Thesaurus of English, Wordnet, and the other major dictionaries of English – followed by sources of lexical data, primarily corpora and finally major tools for the study of lexis, focusing on semantic tagging software, lemmatisers and spelling normalisers. Finally, we demonstrate major research techniques in this area (from lexis to corpora, from corpora to lexis or both through the perspective of a connected semantic field) by a study of lexis in a category of the Historical Thesaurus (nouns in 03.12.15 Money), showing its variation in terms of semantic prosody, its evolution, its internal structure, its metaphorical extensions to other types of lexis and how its evidence of use shapes our understanding of the field

The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005

No abstract available

Writing with the Historical Thesaurus of English

No abstract available

(Re)connecting Complex Lexical Data: Updating the Historical Thesaurus of English

Abstract of paper 0395 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019

The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005

No abstract available