Chaucer's Spelling.
- Author/Editor
- Samuels, M. L
- Title
- Chaucer's Spelling.
- Published
- Samuels, M. L. "Chaucer's Spelling." In Middle English Studies: Presented to Norman Davis in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). Pp. 17-37.
- Review
- The scribe of the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the "Canterbury Tales" also copied most of the "Confessio Amantis" in Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.3.2. Samuels terms the scribe's exemplar "conventional" in its orthography, but the scribe ("B") subsequently translated most of this "into the normal Hengwrt-Ellesmere spelling." Whether Hengwrt and Ellesmere reflect Chaucer's own spelling thus remains in doubt: "He transforms Gower's spelling with such obviously practised ease and consistency that it is difficult to believe that he was acting very differently when he copied Chaucer." "Scribe D," in the same Trinity manuscript, made other copies of both the "Confessio" and the "Canterbury Tales," but due to the variability of his exemplars and his own scribal habits, few conclusions can be drawn. [TWM. Copyright. John Gower Society eJGN 41.2.]
- Date
- 1983
- Gower Subjects
- Language and Word Studies
Manuscripts and Textual Studies