Identification of the Scribes Responsible for Copying Major Works of Middle English Literature

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By combining linguistic profiles (the dialect spellings of scribes) with palaeographic evidence (likeness of handwriting), we hope to identify the scribes who were responsible for copying the works of the major Middle English poets. We shall do this by examining all of the medieval manuscripts that preserve copies of works by Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Trevisa, John Gower and William Langland, together with contemporary manuscripts (e.g., of works of lesser-known writers) and documents in order to find a signed piece of writing (to identify the scribe by name) or a corpus of manuscripts written by an anonymous scribe (to find where he was working, perhaps for whom). We shall create a website with searchable characteristics of the handwriting and linguistic features of each scribe so that other scholars can use our data to make further findings, and we shall write two books and six articles about our discoveries and what they mean for interpretation of early English literature and the dissemination of ideas in this pre-print era. The project proposed here will for the first time bring together a number of scholars to collaborate on identification of scribes, contributing knowledge from the two fields of palaeography and linguistics which together can offer the most objective evidence for identification. Since thus far no one has systematically studied who copied what, where, or for whom, our findings will greatly increase knowledge of the production, publication, and dissemination of the earliest major corpus of English literature, written by Chaucer and his contemporaries.