What is it about?
Whenever Middle English texts were copied multiple times, the dialect of the original version was generally modified. This paper demonstrates how the linguistic analysis of the dialects in the several copies of a Middle English herbal (a translation of "De Viribus Herbarum"), and particularly those in copy errors, can be successfully used to trace the original dialect of the translator of the piece.
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Why is it important?
Comparing the different dialects found in the several available versions of the same text has allowed to demonstrate that the original translation of the herbal must have been composed in the North of England or else the South of Scotland, rather than in Hereford (SW England) as previously assumed.
Perspectives
In the field of textual criticism of vernacular texts, it is not strange to find dialectal mixtures that can be quite jarring sometimes, as they combine dialects that are geographically quite apart. This is sadly not an infrequent feature when the text is edited by a literary scholar. In writing this article, I wanted to demonstrate that the study of copy mistakes is not just the basis of textual criticism but should be profitably used to reconstruct how a missing text looked like, dialectally speaking. I hope that the article triggers responses from other people currently working on Middle English editions and who may have been unaware of this important detail.
David Moreno Olalla
Universidad de Malaga
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Reconstructing ‘John Lelamour’s’ Herbal: The Linguistic Evidence, Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, January 2017, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/ang-2017-0067.
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