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The article cites an unrecorded copy of a Middle English medical text at Wellcome Historical Medical Library, MS 408, a manuscript described as a 15th-century leechbook, in London, England. A background is provided on the Middle English treatise concerning the administration of certain medicines based on astronomical information and the MS R.14.51 copy preserved in Trinity College Cambridge in England. It attributes tracts on uroscopy in Wellcome 408 to William Kylinghale and William Bokynham.

The article analyzes "Jacob's Well," a late 14th or early 15th-century sermon cycle and discusses the use of the term "catlycked" in association with sin. The author suggests the term references the cleansing of sin and the symbolic relationship between cats and sin.

The author focuses on the Margins of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 978, a modest yet typical manuscript of the Middle English gospel harmony Oon of Foure that comprised of annotations. She argues that the marginal images and keywords together develop a coherent system of annotations practicing a conservative model of scriptural inventio. She considers the key-object annotation as a textual form, arguing that it responds to established forms for the transmission of biblical material in English.

This article examines London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, fols. 4-169, an anthology of "Old" and "early Middle" English religious texts which recent scholarship has argued was compiled around 1150 at Christ Church Canterbury, making it an important witness to the active reuse of Old English materials almost a hundred years after the Norman Conquest. Using an electronic text of the manuscript from the Innsbruck Corpus, an innovative focus (the orthography of high-frequency lexical items) and an innovative method to collect that data (regular expression searches), the article shows that all but two of the items in the manuscript were copied directly from a single pre-existing exemplar or group of related exemplars, dismantling the case for seeing it as the product of a compiler working around 1150. More generally, the article demonstrates the value of electronic methods as a supplement to traditional philology in establishing the production histories of medieval manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers two Middle English texts that each feature a dialogue between Christ and the Virgin Mary; these dialogues examine the purpose of and reasons for their respective suffering during the Passion. One of these texts is the well-known and oft-anthologised lyric 'Stond wel, moder, vnder rode'; the other is a prose text extant in two medieval miscellanies, the 'Doctor of the Church' meditation. The texts display some surprising shared details, despite their different genres and contexts. This article uses these points of difference and similarity to demonstrate how these two texts achieve a similar end by quite different means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discussions of ‘magical’ cures found in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century English pastoral manuals (texts designed to teach the clergy how to preach and hear confessions). It discusses these writers' attitudes to spoken and written charms and non-verbal amulets, and compares them with a selection of charms and amulets found in contemporary medical texts. The paper discusses the reasons why authors of pastoral manuals condemned certain kinds of cure as ‘magical’, and argues that they were more concerned about cures that involved words than about non-verbal amulets. It also argues that a significant number, although not all, of the charms described in thirteenth-century medical texts would have been acceptable to many authors of pastoral manuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the Middle English allegorical narrative poem "Piers Plowman" is presented. It explores the structural use of the "Three Lives: Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest" in the 17 manuscripts of B text. The author considers rubrication and marginal notations of the passus in a close textual analysis.

A literary criticism of the Middle English poem "The Pearl" is presented. The author explores the image of the corpse in the poem as it relates to the image of the pearl. The author concludes that the poem identifies defilement not with death but with sin. Other topics spiritual failings, eternity, and the Eucharist as symbol of regeneration.

The article explores the probable provenance of MS 7 at Bridewell Library in Dallas, Texas. The manuscript is a fifteenth century English Codex which was bound in the earlier decades of the seventeenth century. The binding encompasses three Middle English texts: a Wycliffite New Testament, a lectionary for Dominicals and Ferials, and a text on planting and grafting.

The article discusses the use of the Middle English word Þo as a definite article in several texts originating in the West Riding subdivision of Yorkshire, England. It is reported that Þo was generally used in Middle English as a demonstrative. Various methods that were used to distinguish the two forms of Þo from each other are outlined and linked to the spread of the demonstratives Þoo and Þos(e) in the Middle English lexicon.

The article compares two editions of the Middle English "Lambeth Homilies." It is reported that editor Richard Morris, who edited the homilies in the 19th century, was more conservative in his emendation of the text than Sarah O'Brien, who has compiled a more recent edition of some of the homilies. Details of both Morris and O'Brien's revisions are offered and the author suggests that scholars should continue to study Morris' edition of the "Lambeth Homilies" as it is truer to the manuscript.

This essay describes a satirical letter contained in the Brogyntun MS II.1 dated during the Middle English period. Brogyntyn MS II.1, formerly known as Porkington MS 10, is a miscellany of a kind frequently found in Middle English, containing a wide variety of entertaining, instructive and religious texts. In the first quire, eight scribes contributed a total of nine items on such topics as prognostication, astronomy, astrology, and venesection; in the remaining twenty-six quires, eight other scribes recorded forty-one more texts, including an Arthurian romance and a large number of diverse shorter poems, plus several prose works: some practical treatises, a saint's life, a historical romance, and the unique text edited in this article (Huws 190-91). It and two items in the first quire ("Short chronology of the world from the beginning to 1415" and "Explanation of the calendar; made in 1463") have not been previously edited. None of the scribes have been identified, nor has their patron. However, Daniel Huws has performed the valuable service of analyzing which of the MS's sixteen scribes were most responsible for assembling the compilation: the ones known as O and J. O had the most stints, copied the most items, and filled the most pages. O wrote the extant quire signatures, thus determining the order of the MS's texts; he rubricated almost all the items so similarly that the MS is unified visually; and he did the bulk of the filling-in at the ends of quires when one of the other scribes left pages blank. J was second in the extent of his overall contributions to the MS and filled in after O twice. It seems that O was most likely the compiler, because J began new work at the beginning of a new quire twice.

Explains why Peraldus is the source of the Middle English text `XII Lettyngis of Prayer,' or `Twelve Impediments to Prayer.' Preservation of the manuscript; Comparisons with other texts.

Presents the author's analysis of a phrase in a Middle English metaphor in a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Miscopying of the word sheef; Parallel passage in a Latin text discovered by Christina von Nolcken; Interventions in Middle English devised to elucidate the metaphor; Nolcken's misreading of a Latin phrase.