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The language and geography of Middle English documentary texts

Tildelt: kr 4,0 mill.

The project 'The Language and Geography of Middle English Documentary Texts' has reached the following goals by its closing date: We have compiled a corpus of administrative/legal texts and letters from the period 1399-1525: the Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD). The corpus forms the basis of the research carried out by the team and is also made available as an open access resource in its own right. It consists of 2,000 texts transcribed from facsimile reproductions (mainly digital photographs taken by ourselves) or from the original, and is provided in four versions designed for different uses (easy reading, quantitative analysis, studying the visual form and checking the detailed manuscript context). The corpus is the product of 72 visits to archives in England and of a thorough process of transcription, proofreading and historical research. It is accompanied by a scholarly introduction, a manual and a catalogue, and is now being prepared for publication in May 2017. Based on the corpus work, the team have produced a substantial research contribution. In terms of concrete results so far, two PhD theses have been completed: one defended in 2013 and the other in the process of submission. The team have also published their work in scholarly articles/chapters; altogether 24 were published and several more have been accepted for publication. As the research has been of a highly exploratory nature, it was considered crucial to present work regularly at relevant scholarly meetings and conferences: altogether 78 such presentations were given. The team have arranged annual research symposia as well as many smaller seminars, and contributed several popular lectures and articles locally. In terms of content, the following research has been carried out: The most fundamental task has been to produce a classification system of the forms and functions of medieval documents, allowing us to make sense of and categorise the vast variety of different types of document. Further, as geographical variation was a central concern in the project, the team had to develop a sound theoretical and methodological framework for relating medieval documents to geography. These frameworks have been developed and applied in the theses and papers, and are discussed fully in the Corpus Introduction. Based on this groundwork, the team have carried out linguistic/philological studies making use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Firstly, in both PhD theses and several articles, we have carried out surveys of orthographic, morphological and paleographic variation and related the findings to processes of centralization and standardisation; two articles have also dealt with reconstructing late medieval phonologies. In addition, a survey of word geography in land documents was carried out by Stenroos, relating the linguistic and cultural landscapes by tracing the geographical spread of landscape terms and units of measure. Secondly, several studies have focused on text communities and individual documents, reconstructing literacy practices and networks. The most substantial of these is the major study of medieval Cambridge as a text community that is the focus of Bergstrøm's PhD thesis. In addition, Thengs has produced studies of specific localities in the West Midlands as well as of Oxford churchwardens accounts, and both Smith and Stenroos have produced pragmatic studies of individual letters and correspondences. A general finding confirmed by all studies is that 'standardisation' in the history of English is a highly complex process, and that the role of administrative texts has to be reconsidered. While the present materials show administrative texts as generally innovative, the innovation is not necessarily in the direction of a standard, but is more likely to reflect a different process of production from that of literary texts. Very strongly local language also survives in administrative use throughout the period and continues to fill important functions. The material shows that the adoption of English as a medium for administrative writing took place at different times in different areas, being much earlier in the North than in the South. Standardisation, however, shows no overall geographical pattern: rather, innovative spellings cluster in urban centres. It is also clear that documents were produced everywhere and that the smallest villages had access to competent scribes; networks were therefore complex and centralising processes slow. The research results are made publicly available in the Corpus Introduction, the two PhD theses and the published papers. We are also currently finishing a book volume that brings together and discusses the implications of the findings, to be published by John Benjamins.

The aim of the project is to carry out a sociolinguistic and philological study of late medieval English documentary texts (legal/administrative documents and personal letters). This material is of central interest for the regional variation and the begin ning standardisation of written English during this period. Documentary texts in English appear in large numbers from the early 15th century. Their appearance reflects a process of vernacularisation (shift from Latin and French to English) as well as a growth in administration and pragmatic literacy. Most of the material is unprinted and much has never been studied before. The project will produce an electronic corpus of transcriptions of some 3,000 texts. It will carry out a detailed study of this material, the results of which will be published in book volumes, articles and a PhD thesis. A major research question is to what extent the language and physical form of the texts reflect centralizing processes, and how such effects vary regionally and over time. The orientation of the project is sociolinguistic, but its focus on historical context makes it interdisciplinary. It combines quantitative methods (corpus linguistics; variationist studies) with qualitative ones (analysis of individual texts ; philological approaches). The enquiry will cover several aspects of the documents, including orthographic and morphological variation, phonological reconstruction, word geography, text type analysis, scripts and scribal practices and the reconstruction of networks of text production. Such a broad approach is deemed crucial for a balanced view of the material and is made possible by the collaboration of scholars with a range of specializations. The main book publication will bring together studies of the different aspects of the corpus and provide a synthesizing chapter that outlines the findings. The project forms part of a long-term research programme, the Middle English Scribal Texts programme (MEST).

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