Western Medieval Manuscripts : The Book of Privy Counselling

Western Medieval Manuscripts

IntroductionCambridge, University Library, MS Ii.6.31 contains a copy of the devotional treatise known as The Book of Privy Counselling. It is unique among the ten surviving copies for presenting the text on its own; elsewhere, the text is accompanied by The Cloud of Unknowing or other treatises attributed to the same author. Phyllis Hodgson consulted this copy for her basic text edition, but deemed it 'obviously unsuitable', as the text is 'much modernised in vocabulary and spelling' (Hodgson (1944), p. xxiii). The version of the text in this manuscript is distinctive, since it concludes with an additional passage that only appears in three other extant copies, suggesting that they shared a common exemplar (the manuscripts are: Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.6.41; <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_4609'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 262</a>; and <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_1593'>Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 576</a>) (see Edwards (1999), p. 271). Language and Dialect:The dialect has not been located in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (1986). Given the late date of the manuscript, it is difficult to pinpoint specific localising features, as the language is moving towards a more standardised form (see Date for notes on vowel change and pronouns). It has some southern features, such as the forms 'shall' and 'shulde', which, according to eLALME distribution maps, were most highly concentrated in the Midlands (<a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://archive.ling.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme_scripts/lib/create_feature_map.php?mapid=0220004'>eLALME</a> Dot Maps, 'SHALL, SHOULD: sh- (shal, shulde)' [accessed 12/03.19]). The southern '-eth' third-person singular present verb ending is used throughout throughout the manuscript, but also appears in the first and second person forms ('me thynketh', and 'thee thynketh'). Overall, the manuscript's dialect may be best described as what Jeremy Smith terms 'colourless written English', a less regionally diverse form that arose at the end of the fifteenth century, in line with the increasing elaboration of English (see Jeremy Smith, 'From Middle to Early Modern English', in The Oxford History of English, ed. by Lynda Mugglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 147-79, (p. 165)).Rebecca Field