An "Alphabet of Tales": The genre, background, date, and provenance of the text, with an annotated glossary. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

The lengthy northern Middle English text called the Alphabet of Tales, trans-literated from the manuscript (British Library Additional MS. 25,719) by Mary MacLeod Banks for the Early English Text Society (Original Series 126 and 127, 1904 and 1905), presents a wealth of fifteenth-century colloquial words. However, the extra material Mrs. Banks promised in her "Note" at the beginning of the second volume, "an introduction, glossary, index and general clearing-up for Part III," was not completed at the time. Now, in a new study of the text, an attempt has been made to at least partially repair that omission with an introduction to the genre of sermon exempla, an examination of the background of the Latin Alphabetum narrationum upon which the translation is based, an analysis of the date and dialect of the text of the translation, and an annotated glossary containing the spelling variants. On the basis of the scribal spelling data presented in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English as well as a companion phonological examination of the forms in the text, it appears that the dialect represents the mixture of linguistic elements present during the fifteenth century in the Ribble valley on the border of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. As the content of the work appears to be monastic, specifically Cistercian, it is probable that the translation was done at Salley Abbey, a Cistercian monastery in the area that had a reputation for scholarly activity. The extensive analysis necessary to support these conclusions would not have been possible without the computer database program which churned out a variety of lists on demand. These lists not only facilitated the phonological analysis but also made possible the statistical analysis that appears to confirm the validity of the "fit" technique for localizing scribal characteristics that is presented in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English.