The Parlement of the Thre Ages: some notes on the place of origin of one of its manuscripts

Abstract

[Abstract] The central goal of the present study is to explore the geographical origins of T, one of the manuscripts of the medieval alliterative poem. The Parlement of the Thre Ages (British Museum, MS 31042). For this purpose we will make use of Offord’ s edition of the poem as well as of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Following Gillieron’ s proposal (1918: 1– 18) that every word has its own history and dialectal distribution in Middle English we will pay attention to written variations in this text and disregard pronunciation so as to achieve an exact localisation for them. To this end we will make use of the fit-technique. In particular, an effort has been made to demonstrate how this Atlas can be used as well as to show the way in which any medieval manuscript may be located in a particular place in England by means of this powerful tool. A description and analysis of the corpus opens this study. It is followed by a detailed account of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval Englis hand the fit-technique. The next step towards achieving our goal is, perhaps, the most disclosing. The poem is analysed by means of the above mentioned fit-technique and then the place of origin not only of the scribe who copied the T version of The Parlement of the Thre Ages but also that of the author are found out. Some theories about the areas from which the poem originally came will also be contrasted here.