Middle English Prose Research Articles

Prescriptivist attempts at a spelling reform in Early Modern English: sociolinguistic and stylistic routes and rates of adoption

ABSTRACT Some late Renaissance scholars, like Smith (1568); Hart (1569; 1570); Bullokar (1580); Mulcaster (1582), attempted to reform English spelling to reflect the pronunciation changes resulting from the Great Vowel Shift. Their goal was to align letters and phonology by devising a more stable and predictable new system. This study explores the impact and diffusion of these spelling proposals. It examines texts from 1300 to 1700, written by authors from different socio-demographic and biological backgrounds, and across various genres, registers and text-types. The sources used as linguistic materials are the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, an archival data source of prose pieces representing different genres from 1150 to 1500 and the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, a collection of 4,970 authored documents written from 1410 to 1681 by informants from different social ranks. This study may allow us to trace the sociolinguistic and stylistic route and rate of adoption (if any) followed by these attempts at reforming the English spelling system within processes of diffusion of linguistic innovations at the level of orthography, as well as to reconstruct the sociolinguistic contexts of language variation and change in past communities.

A search tool based on language modelling developed for The Index of Middle English Prose

Non-standardised early vernaculars present a problem for search tools due to the high degree of variation. The challenge lies in the variation found in orthography, syntax, and lexicon between titles, incipits, and explicits in manuscript copies of the same work. Traditional search methods relying on exact string matching or regular expressions fail to address these variations comprehensively. This project presents a web-based search tool specifically designed to handle linguistic and textual variation. The software is made available as a part of the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP). The search tool addresses the issue of variation by utilizing a database of incipits and explicits, character-based n-gram language models (LMs) built with the Stanford Research Institute Language Modelling (SRILM) toolkit, and a fuzzy search script (IMEP: FSS) written in Python. The tool optimizes for recall, retrieving multiple potential matches for a search string, without attempting to identify the ‘correct’ one. The search process involves looking up exact matches in the database while simultaneously using the fuzzy search script to evaluate the incipits and explicits against a model of the search string, followed by a match of the search string against models of the incipits and explicits. This two-step process shortens the processing time, which would otherwise be unreasonably long, because while using SRILM to match the search string against each incipit or explicit in the IMEP for precision could be time-consuming, running a first step where all texts are matched against a single LM built from the search string allows for faster processing. A web application, built using Django and Docker, combines the results of the direct database lookup and the fuzzy search script, presenting them as a list with exact matches followed by fuzzy matches ordered by increasing model perplexity. The tool is made available Open Access and can be adapted to other datasets.

Consent and Mystical Marriage in the Late Middle English Prose Life of St. Katherine and John Capgrave’s The Life of St. Katherine

ABSTRACT Many studies of mystical marriage depend upon the assertion that writers and readers agreed upon its desirability and usefulness as a devotional paradigm for medieval women. This article challenges the assumption that mystical marriage held an unambiguously positive meaning for medieval audiences by offering a comparison of two Middle English accounts of St. Katherine of Alexandria’s vita: the prose Life (ca. 1420) and John Capgrave’s The Life of St. Katherine (ca. 1445). It argues that these authors use the motif of mystical marriage to opposing social and religious ends. While the former offers an idealized portrayal of Katherine’s marriage, Capgrave, perhaps responding to the concerns of his lay, female readership, instead uses the same episode to critique the efficacy of bridal imagery as a devotional tool. The article concludes by asserting that Capgrave, through his engagement with contemporary discourses surrounding consent, suggests that the concept of marriage to Christ contains problematic theological implications.

A search tool based on language modelling developed for The Index of Middle English Prose.

Non-standardised early vernaculars present a problem for search tools due to the high degree of variation. The challenge lies in the variation found in orthography, syntax, and lexicon between titles, incipits, and explicits in manuscript copies of the same work. Traditional search methods relying on exact string matching or regular expressions fail to address these variations comprehensively. This project presents a web-based search tool specifically designed to handle linguistic and textual variation. The software is made available as a part of the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP). The search tool addresses the issue of variation by utilizing a database of incipits and explicits, character-based n-gram language models (LMs) built with the Stanford Research Institute Language Modelling (SRILM) toolkit, and a fuzzy search script (IMEP: FSS) written in Python. The tool optimizes for recall, retrieving multiple potential matches for a search string, without attempting to identify the 'correct' one. The search process involves looking up exact matches in the database while simultaneously using the fuzzy search script to evaluate the incipits and explicits against a model of the search string, followed by a match of the search string against models of the incipits and explicits. This two-step process shortens the processing time, which would otherwise be unreasonably long, because while using SRILM to match the search string against each incipit or explicit in the IMEP for precision could be time-consuming, running a first step where all texts are matched against a single LM built from the search string allows for faster processing. A web application, built using Django and Docker, combines the results of the direct database lookup and the fuzzy search script, presenting them as a list with exact matches followed by fuzzy matches ordered by increasing model perplexity. The tool is made available Open Access and can be adapted to other datasets.

The Role of Extralinguistic Factors in the Formation of the Lexical-Semantic Group "Fortitude (Courage) " In the English And Spanish Languages of the XIII-XV Centuries

The article discusses the features of the formation of the lexical-semantic group "Fortitude (Courage) " in the English and Spanish languages of the XIII-XV centuries, an important role in the formation of which was played by extralinguistic, in particular, religious factors. The source of the research material in English is presented by manuscripts of the XIII-XV centuries contained in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. The source of the research material in Spanish is presented by manuscripts of the XIII-XV centuries contained in the electronic corpus of the Corpus del español. The lexemes of this group in the languages under study belonged to the core of the lexis of positive moral and ethical evaluation in the period under review. This is explained by the significant role of the Church in the formation of ethical norms in mediaeval society. Mediaeval authors singled out seven virtues, three of which were considered theological (Faith, Hope, Love), and the remaining four were called cardinal: Prudence, Justice, Purity, and Fortitude (Courage). The names of virtues became semantic centers around which lexis of positive moral and ethical evaluation was formed in the English and Spanish languages of the XIII-XV centuries.

The Paper of London, British Library, Royal Manuscript 18 B II

British Library, Royal Manuscript 18 B II is the earliest and most complete surviving witness to the Middle English prose Melusine.1 It is a single-text codex about which very little is known prior to the 17th century. The text is presented in single columns with wide margins and written in an elegant secretary hand on chancery paper folded in folio. The main text and the capitula seem to be the work of a single scribe, likely professional. There are spaces left for initials two or three lines in height and half-page miniatures, though these were never filled. While the most commonly cited date of production for the Middle English prose Melusine is circa 1500, no concrete evidence justifying this estimation is currently available. Robert Nolan argues in his doctoral thesis that the work was translated from the first edition of Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine, which was printed by Adam Steinschaber in Geneva in August 1478.2 This hypothesis is based on the number and placement of the capitula in Royal MS 18 B II, which correspond to those found in the Geneva edition.3 There are also numerous passages in the English translation which diverge from the majority of manuscript versions of the French Mélusine, but which correspond almost exactly to the text produced by Steinschaber. More recently, Lydia Zeldenrust has concurred that Steinschaber’s edition, or another incunable very close to it, was the source for the Middle English Melusine.4

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.

To hele them of somme sekenesses and maladyes and all illness of the stomach. On the rivalry between illness, sickness and malady in Middle English

The present paper analyses the fates of the native nouns illness and sickness and those of the French borrowing malady in Middle English. Focusing on the regional and temporal dimensions of their rivalry, the study uses the evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (ICMEP, Markus 2008), a collection of 129 works of Middle English prose. The analysis also makes use of other databases such as Collins English Dictionary (CED), the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE), Middle English Dictionary online (MED), Merriam-Webster Dictionary (MWD), and the Oxford English Dictionary online (OED). The degree of the adaptability of the terms in question is best reflected in their varied frequency in the ICMEP’s texts. The tentative research results place malady (107 attestations in total) far behind its Germanic equivalent sickness (701 attestations). A single instance of illness testifies to its low recognisability in the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, probably due to its being often replaced by sickness, which leads to a considerable reduction in the use of the term.

The Landscape of Middle English Focusing on the Adverb Even

The study is aimed at exploring adverb even as the information structural component, viz., a Focus marker in Middle English records based on the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. Functioning as an adverb already in Old English (OE), Middle English (ME) provides evidence to gradual transformation of even into an additive marker according to the following pattern: OE degree/manner adverb→ME restrictive particularizer→ME restrictive exclusive→ME scalar additive. The latter meaning in Present-Day English can be singled out on the ground of such semantic criteria of the Focus phrase as [+likelihood], [+additivity], [+scalar], [+givenness] and [+surprise]. The three types of focusing even registered in Middle English texts are analyzed in terms of information novelty and various Foci types marked by the adverb, as well as, syntactic arrangement of sentence constituents. Corpus studies revealed that depending on the sense, even pertains to a specific Focus type and may cause word order to change. Specifically, when the adverb is used in its Present-Day English meaning, it highlights predominantly mirative Focus, and the analysis of word order patterns indicates the fronting of X-element in the clause, which may be put down to the fact that this scalar additive stresses surprising or unusual context for the reader. Therefore, inverted arrangement of elements may be used for stylistic purposes.

Selected Middle English adjectives of happiness: their representation in the Innsbruck Corpus

The present paper analyses the fates of the Middle English synonyms of the adjective happy. The group of the examined words contains adjectives beneurous, benewred, felicious, gracious, seely and the key item happy. Focusing on their fates in the period under question, the study uses data from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English, a collection of 129 Middle English digitised texts, preserved in 159 files, to determine token frequency, text distribution and semantic changes of the examined adjectives. Other sources used in the study are Middle English Dictionary (MED), The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) and AntConc, a freeware corpus analysis program. The evidence from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose shows considerable discrepancies in the token frequency of the analysed terms and the number of attestations employed in the sense ‘happy’. Although the position of the adjective gracious was extraordinarily strong (354 attestations), the termyielded only 13 attestations used in the sense under study. The marginal status of benewred (2 attestations)and lack of beneurous in the Middle English texts examined announce their loss at the end of the period.

Stylistic Use of the Grammatical Tense Category in the Middle English Prose

The paper proposes some observation experience over exploring stylistic resources of the verbal category of tense in the texts of English belles-lettres presented by its prosaic segment dated by High Middle Ages period. Acquiring by the prosaic form of the belles-lettres text the independent status is the important step in the History of European Literature which chronologically coincides with the period of transferring from Middle Ages to Renaissance. After passing the formation period there appeared verbal coverings of one and the same contents different in stylistic, lexical and grammatical characteristics as well as the use of the national language. In consequence of the consciousness secularization, works of literature characterized by practical appropriation of reality, take some practical orientation. This, in turn, causes some necessity in new ways to describe «tactile materiality of consciousness». The category of tense is chosen as the investigation object by virtue of its dependence on proper to textual structures’ contents and compositional features. The work of literature text continuum is considered as distributed into chronological plans reflected in the verbal tense forms. The period of transferring from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the period of translation, supposes establishing evaluative correspondences in the stylistic orientative activity with some etalon presented by the antique rhetorical tradition. Style generating processes in the textual space of English literature, facultative when compared with French belles-lettres, are marked by putting on th etalon position the French rhetorical tradition as well. The most eminent instances of the tradition can be found in the romance genre as one of the most representative in the European literary genre system. The English genre variant is used as illustrative material for the analysis procedure done.

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Word-Initial Prevocalic [h-] in Middle English

Abstract The present contribution discusses the phonological reality of initial fricative h- in words of Germanic and French origin in dialectally identified 106 texts from the Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose (Markus 2008), with the focus on native words where initial h- is frequently mute, as confirmed by (a) h-less spellings like ouse for house or especially (b) the use of the article an before h-nouns. In the early texts a phrase like an house may testify to the survival of the historical determiner (OE ān) put before both initial vowels and consonants, but in later texts this position may indicate mute initial h- in the following noun (or in an adjective before a noun). The paper offers numerical data concerning such distributions in particular Corpus texts as well as analogous data referring to the adjectives MIN and THIN (later on my and thy), where the final nasal consonant was lost when used in the function of an attribute. Consequently, this development led to the rise of a set of possessive adjectives with a syntactic, not phonological, distribution The data from the Innsbruck Corpus seem to indicate that an early loss of initial prevocalic h- in Middle English words of Germanic origin took place in particular texts rather than in texts from the whole region. The evidence from the Corpus shows that the implementation of the contemporary distribution, i.e., a before consonants and an before vowels, had a partly regional character, its first traces coming from as early as the 13th century.

Johnson, Eleanor. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. viii+256 pp. $30.00 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsJohnson, Eleanor. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. viii+256 pp. $30.00 (paper).Matthew VanderpoelMatthew VanderpoelUniversity of Chicago. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 101, Number 4October 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715777 Views: 12Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

‘The wickede secte of Saracenys’ – Lexico-semantic means of strengthening the English Christian Self in texts from the Middle English period

This paper focuses on the conceptual category of the Saracen as portrayed in medieval English texts, and the semantic potentials of lexical units used to refer to this ethnic and religious out-group. On the basis of references gathered from broader contexts provided by the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, both the frequency of usage of relevant referring expressions will be looked into. From a historio-pragmatic perspective, it shall be shown that the selected samples present one of many strategies used to strengthen the image of the Christian self by systematically decomposing the image of the ‘misbelieving’ other by means of lexical choice.

Information-structural transformations of additive adverb EVEN (a case study of the English language written records and corpora of the XII-XVII с.)

The paper presents the study of the adverb even in Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse and Early English Books Online, which texts and digital solutions help investigate the impact of sentence information structure on adverbial development. Corpus and semantic analysis of the XII-XVII c. written records have been the basis for singling out even as a focusing adverb outlining its distinctive features as an additive. The author proposes a new methodology to annotate information structure of the sentences with the adverb retrieved from the corpora taking into account the word-order change over the span of the 1150s-1690s of the English language development and introduces its corpus annotation. There has also been tested the elaborated scheme of tagging given / new information in multi-layer corpora based on Discourse Representation Theory (1st layer) as well as sentence Topic / Focus (2nd layer). It has been assumed that as a result of changes of the underlying word order in Middle English, the language requires the emergence of such new sentence information structure markers as a ‘therapy’, viz. additive even. It has been discovered that it functions as the degree and manner adverb in Old English, while in Middle English it operates as a restrictive (either exclusive or particularizer) or scalar additive adverb. The study specifies that when carrying out the latter function, it marks the sentence component which exemplifies mirative Focus emphasizing the surprising information in the discourse; this triggers the inverted word order in the clause with X-element left dislocation. Corpus data analysis in the English language through the 2nd half of the XV–XVII c. shows that due to the fixed SVO order in this period there is a considerable increase in the frequency of using even as a focusing adverb that mostly highlights mirative Focus.

Corpus-based studies of Middle English adverb largely: syntax and information-structure

The study aims at exploring the adverb largely in late Middle English based on the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, in terms of its functioning as a sentence Focus marker. The article considers syntactic changes in English from the language with V2 tendencies to the one with verb-medial order. Such differences make sentence information structure disrupted, and new elements arise in the language as ‘therapy.’ The assumption made in this paper is as follows: the word largely emerging in English in ca. 1200 starts functioning as a focusing adverb in 1400 as a result of the shift in the main word order patterns. Moreover, investigating late Middle English syntactic structure and taking into account different types of foci based on information structure tagging throughout the Corpus, the study found that positional variations of adverb largely are used as a mechanism of marking a peculiar type of Focus and are governed by its position in relation to the word it modifies.

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson

Reviewed by: Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play by Julie Paulson Matthew Sergi Julie Paulson. Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. x, 229. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. While morality plays "are regularly described as didactic or instructional dramas that dispatch easily discerned moral truths using 'flat' abstract types and predictable stories of temptation," Julie Paulson's excellent Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play argues, convincingly, that "the opposite is true" (2). The engine of that argument is Paulson's application to the morality plays of Wittgenstein's work on language and consciousness: "there appears to be little exploration in the morality play of the interior life or mental processes of its characters" (33), not because the playmakers failed to understand the inner workings of human consciousness, but rather because "[h]uman subjects have no a priori identity that exists outside human exchange" in the first place (123). The medieval morality plays, Paulson writes, "imagine a self that is first and foremost performed: constructed, articulated, and known through communal performances" (6, emphasis hers), which are central to and instrumental to the very "formation of Christian subjects" (7, 86). For Paulson, the definitive communal performance, a ritual through which the self takes form (rather than only being revealed or discovered), is penance: "the plays illustrate how penance provides penitents with a particular kind of training that shapes their understanding of the meanings of moral and ethical words central to a conception of a Christian self" (33). Starting from a user-friendly primer on Wittgenstein, interwoven with premodern writing about the soul and being (20–33), Theater of the Word demonstrates that morality play characters emerge gradually, through "sensible and communal processes of generating meaning" (66) in which "words are redefined through human interactions" (139), into the fullness of what they allegorize. Paulson's Wittgensteinian interpretation not only fuels the book's major theses, but also produces some gorgeous close readings along the way, notably of Caro in The Castle of Perseverance (48–49), Anima in Wisdom (which "stages the processes through which its protagonist learns the meaning of her own name" [65–66, 79–85]), Mercy in Mankind (throughout Chapter 3, articulated especially well at 111–12), Goods and Good Deeds in Everyman (126–29, 132–35), and Adulation in Respublica (138–39). [End Page 434] Chapter 1 finds in Castle "a case for the essential role of penance … in defining what it means to be 'humankind' … a version of human selfhood produced by, and utterly dependent upon, the institutions and social performances in which it participates" (40). For Paulson, Castle's version of penance deflects Lollard heterodoxy, both by asserting the necessity of the sacrament and by "decentraliz[ing] the priest's role" (47) in its communal ritual: "repentance is both an interior and a social process" (52, emphasis hers). She points out that Shrift's priestly absolution of Humankind, as pivotal as it is in Castle, still fails—"Shrift's warning does not hold" (60)—without social and experiential learning. Andrea Louise Young's Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of "The Castle of Perseverance" (2015) might be read productively alongside this chapter, particularly where Paulson discusses physical space and audience interactions. Similarly, Chapter 2's interpretation of Wisdom, which touches often on medieval contemplation and participation, might be read as a complement to Eleanor Johnson's Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018). In this chapter, Paulson establishes a strong foundation for her broader thesis that moralities demonstrate "the role of penitential ritual in shaping [the] interior" of the medieval self "and the impossibility of splitting the interior from the exterior practices that define it" (71). In Wisdom, "in the same moment penance reforms the soul to God's image, the soul learns what a soul is" (86): the play is thus "less an attempt to demonstrate that the soul is defiled through sin and purified through penitential ritual than an attempt to reveal how the formation of the Christian soul takes place through … visible ritual practices...

Palatalization as a Non-uniform Phonological Process: A Diachronic Analysis

The aim of this study is to analyse a non-uniform process of palatalization in the Mid- dle English Northern dialect, with the main focus on the range of operation of the pro- cess, its conditioning environment and the direction of the change in the four lemmas: EACH, MUCH, SUCH, and WHICH. The fact that palatalization was an active process in the North has been proved by 47% of the Northern texts from the Innsbruck Cor- pus of Middle English Prose, which have demonstrated cases of palatalization in the forms of the lemmas. Referring to the studies of a perceptually motivated sound change and observing certain correlations between the palatalization processes occurring now and in the past, one may infer that the scope of palatalization in the North might have been even wider.