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The Fifteenth-Century “Associations of Beasts, of Birds, and of Men”: The Earliest Text with “Language for Carvers”

(A note of the Early Modern English Dictionary)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Hope E. Allen
Hope E. Allen*
Affiliation:
For the Early Modern English Dictionary University of Michigan
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Extract

In the Transactions of the London Philological Society, for 1909, J. Hodgkin printed an article of great importance for lexicography. He there assembled and studied all the known copies of the list of phrases which appears in the Book of St. Albans (1486) under the heading: “The Compaynys of beestys and fowlys.” This, he believed, was an accidentally imperfect title: he thought that the latest editions of the work, which added the words with others, gave the intention of the series, which was, he decided, best described by the title, “Proper Terms,” which he found in B. Mus. Eg. MS. 1995, a copy dated by him c. 1452. Previously, the list was taken as giving “technical” terms for companies.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1936 , pp. 602 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 Inserted above the line, in the original hand.

2 Other MSS swans A.

3 The i inserted above the line.

4 This line is inserted between the preceding and following lines, in smaller writing but evidently by the same scribe.

5 The a inserted above the line, in the original hand.

6 Other MSS insert sight A.

7 Or p[ro]uisione?

8 The y inserted above the line.

9 Or siure, or snire, or sinre, or smre. Other texts smear A.

10 “Language for Carvers,” follows the “Associations” here, as in other MSS. Hodgkin has printed the variant copies (all later than the present one) as Part II of his “Proper Terms” (Trans. Phil. Soc. 1911–16). A.

11 The second r inserted above the line.

12 This (and what follows) is in a different hand of the same period, viz. circ. 1430–50. This important item will be printed in a later note, with variants from other MSS. A.

13 Thus, Walter de Bibbesworth (a. 1290) opened a section giving the nucleus of the ME phrases: “De checune assemblé diversement/ Vus covent parler proprement.” The AF-ME Nominale (c. 1340) carried over the germ as “Assemble de gentz proprement … assemble de bestes … Congregacio Auium”; the AF-ME Femina (c. 1420) as “Capitulum primum docet rethorice loqui de assimilitudine bestiarum.”