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

通过结合语言概况(抄写员的方言拼写)和古文字证据(笔迹的相似之处)，我们希望找出负责抄袭中世纪英语主要诗人作品的抄写员。为此，我们将检查所有保存杰弗里·乔叟、托马斯·霍克利夫、约翰·特雷维萨、约翰·高尔和威廉·朗兰作品副本的中世纪手稿，以及当代手稿(例如，不太知名的作家的作品)和文件，以便找到签名作品(以识别抄写员的名字)或由匿名抄写员撰写的手稿语料库(以找出他在哪里工作，也许是为谁工作)。我们将创建一个网站，每个抄写者的笔迹和语言特征都可以搜索到，这样其他学者就可以使用我们的数据来做出进一步的发现，我们将写两本书和六篇文章来介绍我们的发现，以及它们对解释早期英国文学和在这个印刷前时代传播思想的意义。这里提出的项目将首次召集许多学者合作鉴定抄写员，贡献古文字学和语言学这两个领域的知识，共同为鉴定提供最客观的证据。由于到目前为止还没有人系统地研究谁抄袭了什么，在哪里，或为谁，我们的发现将大大增加对最早的主要英语文学语料库的生产，出版和传播的知识，由乔叟和他的同代人写的。

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.