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Justyna Rogos
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
Email: jrogos at ifa dot amu dot edu dot pl
“The main function of abbreviation is to save time and space, though for the average medieval scribe (...) time was often less important than making the maximum use of the relatively expensive writing surface” (Petti 1977: 22). Naturally, producing copies for general public required from the scribes conforming to a fairly standardised and well-recognized set of rules for abbreviating. However, that scribes tended to be less than consistent in their use of abbreviations is evident in the manuscripts of even most extensively copied texts, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Moreover, it appears that in various copies of this text only specific lemmata (different ones in different manuscripts) were subject to abbreviation. This lack of uniformity offers an interesting research perspective, especially for the editors of electronic versions of medieval manuscripts, whose goal is a possibly faithful rendition of the linguistic conventions employed by the scribe in his vellum/ parchment copy into a modern medium. This paper is the result of the author’s involvement in the Man of Law’s Tale Project, which is aimed at preparing an electronic edition of the Man of Law’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The paper summarises the findings of the analysis of vocalic abbreviations in group d manuscripts of the Man of Law’s Tale and seeks to enquire about the intra-textual motivation for a variable implementation of superscript vowels – one of two most frequent abbreviation types encountered in the manuscripts of Man of Law’s Tale – and attempt a comparison of potential abbreviation patterns.