Studies in the Orthography of Some Early Manuscripts of Chaucer's 'Canterbury tales'

• Main Author: Thaisen, Jacob Ronnow
• Published: De Montfort University 2005
• Subjects: 421
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.502580

The systems of spelling found in the extant manuscripts of a late Middle English text are rarely considered in discussions of the transmission of that text. If they are, scholars have typically used the occurrence of dialectal spellings to allocate manuscripts to geographical areas or the occurrence of identical spellings, often unusual spellings, in corresponding locations across the manuscripts to recover the usage of the presumed archetype. The basis for much of this scholarship has been profiles which rely upon text samples or which list what spellings are found in a manuscript but do not reveal the internal distribution of these spellings in that manuscript. This study considers the spelling and codicology of nine complete, textuallyimportant manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, each of which was copied by a different scribe. The author semi-automatically indexes the electronic transcripts prepared by the Canterbury Tales Project from the spellings registered in the Project spelling databases for one of the tales. He extracts a comprehensive spelling profile for each manuscript from this index. The profiles correspond to the questionnaire used for Angus McIntosh, M.L. Samuels, et aI., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Aberdeen, 1986).