Last updated by tymon on 2008-11-06. Originally submitted by dradek on 2008-01-15.
On Friday, 18th January at 5 p.m. in room 612 a
Justyna Rogos
will talk on
When time (and space) is money: vocalic abbreviations in 6 manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale
"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). Thus, abbreviation was employed as a response to the growing demand for a greater number of manuscripts in general circulation on the one hand and the need to economise on the material used for copying on the other. Importantly, 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. This lack of uniformity, potentially exasperating for an editor of medieval manuscripts, offers an interesting research perspective for parties engaged in preparing electronic editions of scribal copies, whose goal is to provide the contemporary reader with a modernised version of the manuscript, yet preserve linguistic conventions employed by the scribe in his vellum/ parchment copy. This presentation is an ‘offshoot' 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 presentation summarises the findings of the analysis of abbreviations in 6 manuscripts of the Man of Law's Tale and seeks to enquire about the 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.
