Scribe D's SW Midland Roots: A Reconsideration

Description: The authors analyze the spelling and dialect evidence of manuscripts attributed to Scribe D (including CT) and argue that the southwestern dialect features derive from exemplars rather than from the scribe's own dialect. This argument, in turn, raises questions about the relative chronology of the manuscripts and challenges assumptions that scribes converted copytexts into their own dialects. More generally, the rise of a London standard may have been slower than previously thought.