Manuscripts of Prick of consciencevariation in late middle english palaeography

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to provide a philological analysis of a late Middle English manuscript from a palaeography perspective. More precisely, the dissertation will focus on the poem known as Prick of Conscience, a religious text written in the fourteenth century in the Northumbrian area of medieval England. The study combines two main strands, described below. (I) Medieval palaeography. The poem Prick of Conscience is said to be one of the manuscripts of which more copies were made in late Middle English (C14th-15th). I will draw a comparative analysis of five artefacts of Prick of Conscience presumably written in different linguistic localisations in medieval England, namely North (‘fully northern’), East Midlands (Essex), West Midlands (South East Shropshire), Kent/South-east (Sussex), and South-west (Wiltshire). I will discuss issues related to literature transmission, scribe schools, and scribal traditions in relation to the process of standardisation of written English. (II) Digital Humanities. In line with recent trends in library archive studies and historical linguistics, I will make use of digital collections of medieval manuscripts and I will provide a transliteration in XML format of the selected folios from Prick of Conscience. I will follow the encoding practices in TEI (lite) P5, which will be accompanied by a translation of the text and a morpho-lexical glossary.