scholarly journals Digital editing of Early Modern English medical manuscripts: scribal errors and corrections

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Esteban-Segura ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Specialized Texts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
University Of Manchester

An important philological question is how to edit texts. An edition always entails interpretation of the text and also of the sociocultural context in which the manuscript was created and used. In new philological theory, and contrary to more traditional approaches, the individual manuscript versions, i.e., the textual witnesses, are regarded as valuable in their own right, as every textual witness tells us something about the culture of manuscripts (Carlquist, 2004: 112). This is the approach followed for the digital editing of Early Modern English scientific writing in The Malaga Corpus of Early Modern English Scientific Prose. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that producing such type of edition pose. We will particularly focus on the issue of scribal errors and corrections and how the editor can treat and capture them in the edition. MS Wellcome 213, one of the texts included in the above-mentioned corpus, will be analysed for the purpose. The corpus consists of manuscripts from the Hunterian Collection (Glasgow University Library), the Wellcome Collection (London Wellcome Library) and the Rylands Collection (University of Manchester Library). With regard to text types, these manuscripts hold specialized texts, surgical and anatomical treatises, as well as recipe collections and materia medica

scholarly journals Punctuation in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of Two Scientific Text Types in Gul, Ms Hunter 135

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Jesús Romero Barranco
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Scientific Writing ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Different Levels

AbstractAmong the different topics studied by palaeography, punctuation has traditionally been disregarded by scholars for being considered arbitrary and unsystematic (Salmon 1988: 285). However, some studies carried out over the last few decades have demonstrated that the English punctuation system underwent a process of standardisation which started in the Middle English period, from a purely rhetorical to a grammatical function. Moreover, it was towards the sixteenth century when a set of punctuation marks was introduced (i.e. the semicolon), a fact that restricted the functions of major punctuation marks up to that time, such as the period and the comma (Salmon 1999: 40). The present paper analyses the punctuation system in Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 135 (ff. 34r–121v), a volume that is most suitable for such a study as it contains two different text types belonging to the genre of medical writing: a surgical treatise and a collection of medical recipes. The results confirm that the different punctuation marks are unevenly distributed in the texts under study and, more importantly, their main functions are found at different levels within the text.

scholarly journals Affirmatives in Early Modern English

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-264
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culpeper
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Negative Questions

Abstract This study examines the affirmatives yes, yea and ay in Early Modern English, more specifically in the period 1560 to 1760. Affirmatives have an obvious role as responses to yes/no questions in dialogues, and so this study demanded the kind of dialogical material provided by the Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. I examine the meanings and contexts of usage of each affirmative: their distribution across time and text-types, their collocates and their occurrence after positive and negative questions. The results challenge a number of issues and claims in the literature, including when the “Germanic pattern” (involving yes and yea after positive or negative questions) dissolved, whether yea or ay were dialectal, and the timing of the rise of ay and the fall of yea.

Special issue on English intensifiers

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
BELÉN MÉNDEZ-NAYA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Grammatical Change ◽  
Degree Modifiers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Degree modifiers, degree words or intensifiers are linguistic elements which convey the degree or the exact value of the quality expressed by the item they modify. They are typically adverbs, as in very hot, really interesting, greatly appreciate or completely absurd, but adjectives may also fulfil this function, as in utter nonsense. As noted by Bolinger (1972: 18), degree words offer a picture of ‘fevered invention’, and without any doubt constitute one of the major areas of grammatical change and renewal in English (Brinton & Arnovik 2006: 441), especially from the Early Modern English period onwards (Peters 1993). It is therefore no surprise that degree modifiers have attracted so much scholarly attention from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day. Pioneering studies, such as those by Stoffel (1901), Borst (1902) and Fettig (1934), provide comprehensive inventories of intensifying adverbs in both modern and earlier English, as well as valuable insights into how they originated. In the last decade, however, intensifiers have become the object of renewed interest; this can be attributed in part to the development of computerized corpora, and also to advances in theoretical linguistics, more specifically in the study of semantic change and of grammaticalization processes. This renewed interest has focused, for example, on the individual histories of particular degree items as seen from the perspective of grammaticalization, on the competition of different intensifiers within a given period and across time, and on their distribution across different social groups, varieties or registers.

scholarly journals Transparently Hierarchical

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-30
Author(s):  
Jacob Thaisen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Principal Function ◽  
Structural Hierarchy ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
English Manuscript

The three scribes of a mid-seventeenth-century collection of medical recipes resemble each other in how they have punctuated the recipes, although they did not work simultaneously. They draw on similar repertoires of marks and they mark similar functions, but they do not use the same marks for the same functions. The principal function is the global one of indicating where the constitutive elements of the recipes begin and end. This function of indicating a text’s structural hierarchy goes back centuries and can seem old-fashioned for an Early Modern English manuscript produced when grammarians had started to discuss whether punctuation should mark syntactic units. A key observation is that recipes stand out among text-types by having a fixed, transparently hierarchical structure. This feature of them facilitates the researcher’s appreciation of how the punctuation functions and dismisses any impression of the scribes having deployed the marks haphazardly.

scholarly journals Linguistic Complexity across Two Early Modern English Scientific Text Types

2020 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-71
Author(s):  
Jesús Romero-Barranco
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Scientific Text ◽  
Language Typology ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Early English

In linguistics the concept of complexity has been analysed from various perspectives, among them language typology and the speech/writing distinction. Within intralinguistic studies, certain key linguistic features associated with reduced or increased complexity have been identified. These features occur in different patterns across various registers and their frequency is an indicator of the level of complexity of different kinds of texts. The concept of complexity has not, to date, been evaluated in early English medical writing, especiallyin terms of different text types. Thus, the present article analyses linguistic complexity in two Early Modern English medical texts, a surgical treatise (ff. 34r-73v) and a collection of medical recipes (ff. 74r-121v) housed as MS Hunter 135 in Glasgow University Library. Since they represent two different types of medical text, they can be productively compared in terms of linguistic complexity. The results obtained confirm that the surgical treatise is more complex than the collection of medical recipes owing to the higher presence of linguistic features denoting increased complexity in the former and of those indicating reduced linguistic complexity in the latter.

'Stray[ing] lower where the pleasant fountains lie'

2016 ◽  
pp. 332-346
Author(s):  
Will Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Writing ◽  
Oral Sex ◽  
Women's Sexuality ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
The Individual ◽  
English Culture

This article examines the passage in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis where Venus invites Adonis to perform cunnilingus on her, situating it in relation to other representations of this act from ballads, pornography, medical writing, and moralizing literature. Viewed together, these representations qualify two oft-repeated generalizations about oral sex in early modern English culture: (1) that the act was virtually unknown, and (2) that it was consistently viewed with disgust or disapprobation. By contrast, the texts assembled here demonstrate that cunnilingus was frequently portrayed as being quite pleasurable, and not only for the woman who received the gesture, but also for the individual who performed it. Moreover, these texts suggest that there may have been more cultural room for the acceptance of women’s sexuality—and of acts that were ‘serviceable to the ladies’—than has previously been acknowledged.

Epistemic Disjuncts in Early Modern English

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores González-Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
High Probability ◽  
Transitional Period ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Text Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
Low Probability

This paper offers a description of epistemic disjunct adverbs in Early Modern English. Section I outlines the development of epistemic disjuncts in the history of English, concentrating on the kinds of comment they could lexicalise.. Briefly, OE epistemic adverbs only encoded the speaker's comment on the high probability or importance of the proposition they related to. ME allowed a new type of comment, namely on the low probability of the adjoined proposition. In the second section, the data drawn from the computarised Helsinki Corpus suggest that though Early Modern English is a transitional period in epistemic disjunct development, it shows greater semantic diversification than OE and ME. Syntactic and distributional features are considered in every case. Finally, sociolinguistic variables and the registers and text types which favour the occurrence of these adverbs are also specified.

Representations of orality in Early Modern English trial records

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sociocultural Context ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Turn Taking ◽  
Initial Hypothesis ◽  
Discourse Strategies

The paper aims at answering some questions essential for a historical pragmaticist. It examines to what extent the written records available nowadays reflect the language spoken in the past, i.e. what their degree of orality is. The data are two Early Modern English texts: The trial of Titus Oates and The trial of Lady Alice Lisle. Trial records are relevant for this analysis since they are closer to the original sources than other texts and they are interesting for linguistic reasons, e.g. the formulaic expressions or the discourse strategies used in court. The search for traces of orality is based on two features: turn-taking and closeness to the sociocultural context. The study corroborates my initial hypothesis that the two trial records have preserved many traces of orality. Moreover, they are rich sources of information about the political, social and cultural life of the period.

Initiating Direct Speech in Early Modern English Prose Fiction and Witness Depositions

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-72
Author(s):  
Ursula Lutzky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
English Language ◽  
Prose Fiction ◽  
Direct Speech ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Text Types ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores direct speech representation in Early Modern English prose fiction and witness depositions. The focus is on the preface position in direct speech turns—that is, the very first position at speech onset. The aim is to discover how the beginning of direct speech was signalled in the presence or absence of speech-external quotatives, at a time when transitions in voice were not yet consistently marked by punctuation. I investigate similarities and differences between the two text types, drawn from A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760, to understand how an impression of direct speech was created for literary purposes as opposed to (re)constructed in a legal context. This study thus provides new insights into the relationship between the construction and reconstruction of speech and thereby contributes to the research agenda of enhancing our understanding of speech (re)presentation during past periods of the English language.

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