Abstract
Manuscript spellings are rarely taken into account when editors trace the stemma of their text for, if considered at all, they are used to localise the various manuscripts. From an evaluation of two Canterbury Tales manuscripts, Christ Church, Oxford, MS 152 and British Library MS Harley 7334, we seek to establish that this is an important omission in textual studies, for changes in the spelling system of a manuscript can signal whether these represent a change of exemplar and thus can control other methods of determining how many exemplars were used in its production. This conclusion is supported by evidence that changes in the spelling system coincide with changes in these manuscripts' codicology.
Highlights
Editors of medieval English texts discuss the genealogy of their text and the possible exemplars that an individual scribe used to prepare his manuscript
Our research into the variations in spelling within H a 4 confirms, independently of the codicological analysis, that this is the case: the pattern that we see in the spelling data indicates that a change of exemplar has taken place after quire 20 and that quires 12-19 were copied later than quires 1-11 and 20, for when taking the whole text into consideration and allowing for a process of "working in" at the beginning of both stints, we can distinguish two spelling systems from the proportional usage of spellings for common lemmata
Spelling may not be useful for textual purposes unless it shares certain boundaries with features of a manuscript's codicology, for the interpretation of a spelling profile without outside support is complex and liable to error
Summary
Editors of medieval English texts discuss the genealogy of their text and the possible exemplars that an individual scribe used to prepare his manuscript. It is probable that Gamelyn was inserted in the manuscript later, though the occurrence of six blank folios in quire 8 suggests the scribe expected to get something to fill them.
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