Linguistic Evidence for the Compilation of Twelfth-Century Manuscripts containing Old English: the case of Cotton Vespasian D. xiv

Vespasian D. xiv is an anthology of “Old” and “early Middle” English religious texts which recent scholarship has argued was compiled around 1150 at Christ Church Canterbury, making it an important witness to the active reuse of Old English materials almost a hundred years after the Norman Conquest. Using an electronic text of the manuscript from the Innsbruck Corpus, an innovative focus (the orthography of high-frequency lexical items) and an innovative method to collect that data (regular expression searches), the article shows that all but two of the items in the manuscript were copied directly from a single pre-existing exemplar or group of related exemplars, dismantling the case for seeing it as the product of a compiler working around 1150. More generally, the article demonstrates the value of electronic methods as a supplement to traditional philology in establishing the production histories of medieval manuscripts.

Download post-print.

Reference: Mark Faulkner, ‘Linguistic Evidence for the Compilation of Twelfth-Century Manuscripts containing Old English: the case of Cotton Vespasian D. xiv’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 118 (2017), 279-316.