Pursuing Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts: Essays in Honour of Ralph Hanna

These essays offer new insights into the manuscripts of major Middle English writers and on scribal practice, as well as studies of individual codices. Essays cover a wide regional and chronological range, stretching from the beginnings of London literature traced in the works of Peter of Cornwall to the circulation of John Lydgate's Troy Book, and encompassing manuscripts and texts composed and circulated outside the capital. Dialectal studies offer reconsiderations of the evidence for a Wycliffite orthography, the dialect of William Langland, and the vocabulary of the alliterative Morte Arthure. A final section on reading and editing investigates the manuscripts of the A Version of Piers Plowman, and the Prick of Conscience and the Canterbury Tales.