📄 Calle-Martín, Javier & Miguel Ángel Castaño- Gil 2013: A Late Middle English Remedy-book (MS Wellcome 542, ff . 1r–20v). A Scholarly Edition

Summary

This item is a review by Ivalla Ortega-Barrera (SELIM 20, 2013–2014) of Calle-Martín and Castaño-Gil's 2013 scholarly edition of a fifteenth-century medical remedy-book, the first twenty folios of MS Wellcome 542. The edition aims to make an unpublished utilitarian text available to philologists and linguists. It has four chapters:

• The Manuscript: contents, owners, physical description and script.
• The Language: dialect localisation and inflectional morphology with frequency counts.
• The Text: a semi-diplomatic transcription.
• The Glossary: selected Middle English vocabulary.

Irma Taavitsainen's preface places the book within the editing of Middle English medical recipes. The authors locate the scribe's language in Norfolk, close to the Cambridge border. The reviewer considers the volume an outstanding and practical contribution, useful for building future databases of early English texts. She also lists gaps:

• no actual collation with the parallel copies,
• frequency counts that do not point to where each form occurs,
• no Latinate entries in the glossary,
• some missing references.

Key points

• The book is volume 5 of the Late Middle English Texts (LMET) series (Peter Lang, Bern, 183 pp.), with a preface by Irma Taavitsainen.
• The manuscript is a quarto on vellum of 119 folios, written mainly in black ink with frequent red. The script mixes fourteenth-century Anglicana with fifteenth-century Secretary. The scribe abbreviates in four ways: by contraction, by suspension, with superior letters, and with brevigraphs.
• The authors list 21 parallel manuscripts but do not compare them. Dialect localisation by the fit-technique points to Norfolk near Cambridge.
• The edition is semi-diplomatic, following Petti (1977):
  • original spelling and punctuation are preserved;
  • ⟨ff⟩ is rendered as ⟨F⟩;
  • expanded abbreviations are shown in italics;
  • marginalia go into the apparatus;
  • editorial line numbers are added.
• The glossary is built with e-MED and the OED. It gives word class, allomorphs and their counts, and leaves out Latinate terms. The reviewer notes that Carrillo-Linares (2006) and Garrido-Anes (2004) are not cited.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The reviewer objects that frequency counts are given without pointers to the instances, so readers cannot check them; every reported statistic should be traceable to concrete occurrences.
• I2. A semi-diplomatic edition keeps the source exactly as written and makes every editorial addition visibly distinct, as with italicised expansions.
• I3. The glossary groups variant spellings (allomorphs) under one headword with their counts, which turns orthographic noise into structured data.
• I4. The reviewer argues that comparing the 21 parallel witnesses would strengthen the edition, much as agreement across independent copies validates a reading.
• I5. Taavitsainen treats recipes as utilitarian, instruction-giving texts for preparing cures, which defines the genre by its communicative purpose.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (learn): evaluation reports and lexicon statistics should store sentence/token IDs behind each count, so any number can be opened and audited.
• I2 (tokens): keep the raw surface token and the normalised or expanded form as separate layers, flagging what the system supplied versus what was in the text.
• I3 (tokens): lemma entries for archaic or non-standard English could list attested variants with frequencies, helping the lemmatiser on older fables and tales.
• I4 (learn): this mirrors silver data agreed by several witness parsers; disagreements between witnesses could be logged as the edition's "variant apparatus" for later repair.
• I5 (frames): recipe-like imperative sequences can be tagged as directive speech acts with goal frames such as preparing a remedy against an illness, giving a cleaner who-does-what structure.