--------------------------------

Emily Runde
University of California at Los Angeles
Email: erunde at ucla dot edu

Scribal Orthography and Dialect in the Auchinleck Manuscript

This paper takes on the troublesome problem of scribal intervention in the transmission of medieval manuscripts. Though what generally survives of the authorial text is buried within layers of scribal adjustment, translation, and error, scribal contributions to, or even corruptions of, a text may provide a great deal of information regarding the manuscript’s audience, place of origin, circumstances of production, and cultural significance.

I have chosen to work with the Auchinleck Manuscript (NLS Adv MS 19.2.1) in part because it looms large in the history of English’s rise to literary preeminence, but also in order to show that this familiar and well-studied manuscript can yield more insights into the linguistic history of its contents and creators. The paper focuses on the complete bodies of work of the two most prolific Auchinleck scribes, commonly known as Scribes 1 and 3. Scribe 3 copied a total of six texts and Scribe 1 copied a total of thirty texts, including, among others, popular romances like Sir Guy of Warwick, some common miscellany materials like The Harrowing of Hell, and the Auchinleck’s version of The Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle.

I trace these two scribes’ practices through all of the texts they copied in order to determine their internal linguistic consistency as well as the extent to which their practices throughout their complete corpora reflect their linguistic profiles in LALME. I will attempt to determine what these scribes have contributed of their own orthographic and lexical material to the texts they copied for the Auchinleck and consider what these contributions reveal about the standardizing tendencies of the scribes and the origins of the texts they copied. Already my preliminary results show an abundance of northern forms in rhyming position in two out of Scribe 1’s thirty texts. These forms, most of which are completely absent from any other text he copied for the Auchinleck, provide some basis for revisiting claims that Sir Tristrem and Horn Childe & Maiden Rimnild originated somewhere in the north of England.

This study will enable valuable connections to be made between the large and sometimes unwieldy data sets of LALME and the more narrowly focused studies of the Auchinleck’s individual texts. Until quite recently, the complete corpora of Scribes 1 and 3 have gone without close linguistic scrutiny, but I hope my work will reveal some valuable applications to which these corpora may be put.

References :