The Dialectal Provenance of Hand A in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun.A.3.127

Abstract

This paper analyses the dialectal provenance of Hand A in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun.A.3.127. The codex under study is a late Middle English manuscript that contains medical recipes written by fifteen different hands and which dates to the end of the fifteenth century. The main objective of this paper is to localise geographically the origin of Hand A by means of the model provided in the electronic version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (eLALME). The study carried out signals the border between Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Leicestershire as the possible location of this hand.