IFA Scholarly Meeting, Friday 19 February 2010
MAN OF LAW’S TALE PROJECT
Thanks to a successful grant application made to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, members of the IFA HEL department started to prepare the sixty extant fifteenth-century scribal copies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale for electronic publication back in 2007 in collaboration with the University of Birmingham. The work is now nearing completion, and at the Scholarly Meeting we seek to illustrate both the non-triviality of the problems involved in the transcription of the materials and the research potential they offer. Electronic publication is a buzzword of today, but the distinctive feature of our corpus is that it comprises all the known witnesses to a single text, which makes it possible to trace the flow of linguistic variants through a century of that text’s manuscript tradition. We are going to depart from the standard format of Friday talks by giving a series of shorter presentations by members of the Project group, as follows:
Dr Jacob Thaisen: Introduction to the Project, its transcription principles and editing system
Mgr Justyna Rogos: “Lost in translation: Digitizing manuscript orthography for the Man of Law’s Tale Project”
ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the relation between Middle English manuscripts and their modern editions, Roger Lass (2004: 22) remarked that “[not even] the most careful and expert diplomatic transcription will yield a text wie es eigentlich war”. This inherent inadequacy of editorial efforts to “transcend what the [manuscripts] actually offer us” (Edwards 2000: 78), coupled with editors’ concern for the ‘readability’ of their editions, has resulted in texts which do much more than just normalize variable orthographies. Although characters appearing in Middle English manuscripts like, e.g. <þ>, <ƿ> or <ȝ> can be quite uncontroversially rendered by modern <th>, <w> and <z> or <gh> respectively, no such direct translatability obtains for characters like <łł>, <ď>, <ħ> or abbreviation symbols. Thus, modern editing, which imposes upon the orthographic layer of a manuscript a specific alphabetic (and – by implication – phonic) interpretation, trivialises the relationship between the form and function of the symbols in question. This presentation is offered as a reflection on the interpretative aspect of transcribing the manuscripts of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale for the purposes of an envisaged electronic edition. By transcription here is understood “a series of acts of translation from one system of signs [that of the manuscript, JR] to another [that of the computer, JR]” (Robinson – Solopova 1993: 26), which involves the transcriber in the process of encoding the prodigal spelling systems of the manuscript on the one hand and on the other decoding those systems into a computer-readable format.
References:
Edwards, A. S. G. 2000. “Representing the Middle English manuscripts”, in: Derek Pearsall (ed.). New directions in later medieval manuscript studies. Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, 65-79. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press.
Lass, Roger. 2004. “Ut custodiant litteras: editions, corpora and witnesshood”, in: Marina Dossena – Roger Lass (eds.). Methods and data in English historical dialectology, 21-48.
Robinson, Peter – Elizabeth Solopova. 1993. “Guidelines for the transcription of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue”. Canterbury Tales Project Occasional Papers I: 19-52.
Dr Hanna Rutkowska: “Some remarks on orthography in the Man of Law’s Tale: Classification and distribution of abbreviations”
ABSTRACT
In this presentation, I will discuss one particular aspect of Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale scribes’ (and early printers’) orthographic systems, namely their use of abbreviations. I am interested in their frequency, distribution among the MSS and incunabula, and the possibility of determining any recurring patterns and their potential dependence on particular factors, including chronology, dialect, and way of production: handwritten vs. printed, relationships between the MSS). I will also deal with the difficulties encountered in classification of abbreviations recorded in the witnesses.
Mgr Anna Antkowiak: “Scribal treatment of the (to)-infinitive in the 15th century manuscripts of three selected tales from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”
ABSTRACT
The previous research on the Middle English infinitive has focused on two separate plains: the morphological properties of the verbs (Mossé 1952; Mustanoja 1960; Fisiak 1965) and the absence or presence of the accompanying to (Mustanoja 1960; Kerkof 1966; Fischer 1992). The present study aims at a blend between the two perspectives hoping to corroborate the existence of a relation between the usage of (for)to and bound morpheme -(e)n assuming a negative correlation, i.e. should (for)to appear, -(e)n ought not to mark the verb.
Two of the tales from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales analysed in the present study come from the two previous digital editions: the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (Thomas 2006) and The Miller’s Tale (Robinson 2004), whereas the third is part of the materials being prepared by the Man of Law’s Tale Project.
