Review of Marina Dossena and Roger Lass (eds.), 2004. Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang (original) (raw)
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The twenty essays brought together in this volume explore a wide range of perspectives relating to the materiality and textuality of medieval scripts and documents. The textuality and materiality of documents are an essential part of their communicative role. Medieval writing, as part of the interpersonal communication process, had to follow rules to ensure the legibility and understanding of a text and its connotations. This volume provides new insights into how different kinds of rules were designed, established, and followed in the shaping of medieval documents, as a means of enabling complex and subtle communicational phenomena. Because they provide a perspective for approaching the material they are supposed to organize, these rules (or the postulation of their use) provide powerful analytical tools for structural studies into given corpora of documents. Originating in talks given at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds between 2010 and 2012, the twenty papers in this collection offer a precise, in-depth analysis of a variety of medieval scripts, including books, charters, accounts, and epigraphic documents. In doing so, they integrate current developments in palaeography, diplomatics, and codicology in their traditional methodological set, as well as aspects of the digital humanities, and they bridge the gap between the so-called ‘auxiliary sciences of history’ and the field of communication studies. They illustrate different possibilities for exploring how the formal aspects of scripts took their place in the construction of effective communication structures. Table of Contents Preface Introduction–SÉBASTIEN BARRET, DOMINIQUE STUTZMANN, and GEORG VOGELER "Et hec scripsi manu mea propria": Known and Unknown Autographs of Charles IV as Testimonies of Intellectual Profile, Royal Literacy and Cultural Transfer—MARTIN BAUCH The ‘Empire of Letters’: Textualis and Cursiva in Pragmatic Manuscripts of Seville Cathedral, Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries—DIEGO BELMONTE FERNÁNDEZ Official Rules of Writing in the North of France? The Writing of Notarial Documents in Normandy between Practices and Regulations—ISABELLE BRETTHAUER The Practice of Writing in Regensburg: An Overview of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries—CLAIRE DE CAZANOVE Structure et style: observations paléographiques pour l’étude des écritures cursives à Florence aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles—IRENE CECCHERINI Revealing Some Structures and Rules of Book Production (France, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries)—ÉMILIE COTTEREAU-GABILLET Structures of (Mutual) Inspiration: Some Observations on the Circulation of Repetitive Text Formulas in Charters from the Medieval Low Countries (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries)—ELS DE PAERMENTIER The Writing of Obedientiary Account Rolls at Norwich Cathedral Priory (1256-1344)—HARMONY DEWEZ Charte de fondation et date de dédicace: témoignages narratifs et diplomatiques à l’abbaye Saint-Étienne de Caen—TAMIKO FOURNIER-FUJIMOTO Masters of Micrography: Examples of Medieval Ashkenazi Scribal Artists—RAHEL FRONDA Writing Angles: Palaeographic Considerations on the Inclinaison of the Script—MARIA GURRADO Les actes épiscopaux en Bretagne aux XIe et XIIe siècles: une arme pour la réforme?—CYPRIEN HENRY Königsfelden Abbey and Its First Cartulary: Dealing with Charters in the Fourteenth Century—TOBIAS HODEL The Use of Vernacular and its Graphic and Material Shape in the Epigraphic Discourse: Three Case Studies from Western France—ESTELLE INGRAND-VARENNE The Shape of the Letters and the Dynamics of Composition in Syriac Manuscripts (Fifth-Tenth Century)—AYDA KAPLAN The Parchments of Marmoutier Abbey: Preparation, Shaping, Practices (Mid-Eleventh to Mid-Twelfth Century)—CLAIRE LAMY Scribal Activity and Diplomatic Forms in Western Provence (c. 950-c. 1010)—JEAN-BAPTISTE RENAULT Hand Spotting: The Registers of the Chancery of the Counts of Holland, 1316-1337—JINNA SMIT Rule and Variation in Eleventh-Century English Minuscule—PETER STOKES Princely Communication in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Century: A Diplomatic Study of the Charters of the Counts of Hainaut—VALERIA VAN CAMP List of Shelfmarks
京都大學文學部研究紀要, 2012
The majority of Middle English texts are anonymous, and they do not provide information as to when and where they were produced. It is, therefore, often necessary for Middle English text editors to date and localize the language by analyzing its various features. Fortunately, for late Middle English, the existence of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (see McIntosh, Samuels, and Benskin 1986) is now a great help. By using the "fit-technique" of LALME, one can reach a fairly accurate localization of the language of the scribe at issue. 2 The dating of language, by contrast, is not an easy task, unless some reliable external pieces of evidence are available. In relation to medieval works in general, Damian-Grint(1996: 280) states: "Philological evidence will give a rough approximation of the period in which a work was composed but can rarely indicate a possible date of composition to within even half a century". When a particular manuscript is concerned, the nature of the script together with codicological information can suggest the approximate date of its production, but I have long wondered how linguistic analyses can make a further contribution to this area than they do now. The aim of the present study is to see if some linguistic features can function as linguistic scales to make the "chronological fit" possible. I will analyze for this purpose two different versions of a single text: MS Cotton Tiberius D. VII(MS １ This research was in part supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grantin-Aid for Scientific Research. ２ Iyeiri(forthcoming)illustrates the use of LALME by analyzing the language of the parchment section of MS Pepys 2125, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and shows that there are some caveats to be taken into consideration in LALME's "fit-technique". For details of the "fit-technique" of LALME, see Benskin(1991)among others.
The subject of this paper -architextuality -has little to do with Gérard Gennette's definition of architextuality as part of a larger scheme of 'transtextuality'. In his book, translated in 1997 as P a l i m p s e s t s, architextuality is perceived as the specification of a text as part of a genre or genres. 1 His careful scrutiny of the subdivisions of text is tremendously useful, but here, by 'architextuality' I seek to engage with architectural metaphors in the interpretation of 'text' in its broadest sense, and especially to question the methods employed in editing texts -whether in print or in electronic form. Effectively, my view is that we need a new frame of discourse as we move into the postprint and hypermedia era, a discourse that allows us to think freely about the possibilities of a more realistic electronic replication of 'text' that reflects the cohesion of a building despite its separate parts. 'Architextuality' thus might provide a different model for thinking about text, its representation and interpretation, though, as will become apparent, any hypothetical model requires solving many more issues, and asking many more questions, than this paper can do; indeed, this model is anything but a solid construct at the moment.
The Old English Bede: Transmission and Textual History in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts
2013
An unknown author translated the Old English version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (OEB) around the ninth century. Previous research focused on issues of authorship, and specifically with the Mercian linguistic features in the text’s earliest manuscript, rather than the reception and transmission of these manuscripts (Miller, 1890; Whitelock, 1962; Kuhn, 1972). This thesis concentrates on the scribal performances involved in the OEB, and uses the framework developed for Middle English manuscripts by Benskin and Laing (1981) to assess each manuscript’s scribal behaviour. A detailed linguistic comparison of the four main OEB witnesses combined with a close examination of the physical manuscripts reveals the working methods of scribes involved in their production. The manuscripts examined are: Oxford, Bodleian Library Tanner 10 (T) Oxford, Corpus Christi College 279B (O) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 41 (B) Cambridge, University Library Kk.3.18 (Ca) Each chapter analyses a particular scribal performance. O’s scribe creates a Mischsprache text, with coexisting Mercian and West-Saxon forms; however, the text was extensively corrected, both from the exemplar and according to the linguistic norms of the scribes overseeing the project. While B has been recognised as the product of an independent scribe (Grant, 1989), relict forms shed new light on its exemplar and the methods employed by the scribe to overcome the problems he encountered. Many scholars posit Ca as a direct copy of O, however a detailed comparison of the two manuscripts questions this supposition. Finally, some previously unnoticed and unpublished drypoint annotations to O’s text are presented and explored in the context of other scratched material in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and reasons suggested for their presence in that manuscript. The thesis shows the advantages of approaching medieval texts from a scribal viewpoint, identifying common modes of scribal behaviour across the medieval period, and proposing features that may have belonged to the original translation.