viii Javier E. Díaz-Vera, Rosario Caballero

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3 Introduction More than ten years ago, David Crystal (1997: 106) stated that most of the scientific, technological and academic information in the world is expressed in English and over 80% of all the information stored in electronic retrieval systems is in English. In the last decades, the use of English has in fact extended greatly to most scientific and technical fields. However, it is seldom recognised that the first steps towards the vernacularisation of scientific and technical writing took place already in the Anglo-Saxon period, which implies that nowadays English is the living language with a longer tradition in specialised writing. As the growing body of research published in recent years has shown, analysing the language of specialised texts is an opportunity to obtain access to the early history and vernacularisation of learned written styles. Moreover, we need to know more about earlier stages of language use in order to understand the characteristics of presentday specialised writings. This volume comprises a number of significant contributions to the field of specialised writing in Old and Middle English. The papers collected in this volume offer a wide number of specific interests and approaches to the historical analysis of English specialised texts. This is an area of study in which all the contributors have considerable expertise, which affords them to present data findings while discussing important methodological issues. In addition, in most cases data derive from specially-designed second-generation corpora, reflecting state-of-the-art approaches to historical linguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. In Null Objects in Middle English Medical Texts (pp. 1-27), Francisco Alonso-Almeida proposes an approach to null objects (i.e. zero complementation) in Middle English. The interest of his work lies on several factors. In the first place, the study has been conducted using corpus tools and techniques (the Middle English Medical Texts or MEMT corpus, thus basing the results on real data rather than on isolated examples. In the second place, the author contextualises his

4 viii Javier E. Díaz-Vera, Rosario Caballero research by using real texts and, more specifically, various genres from the realm of medicine in order to see the motivations underlying the phenomenon under survey. By so doing, the author points to the role of context and culture in the disambiguation of zero complementation, as well as to the weight of register and genre in the distribution and use of null objects. Graham D. Caie provides a brief survey of the work done with the Hunterian Collection at the library of the University of Glasgow in his paper The Hunterian Collection at the University of Glasgow (pp ). After introducing Dr William Hunter and providing some interesting facts of his biography and the reasons that led him to donate his collection of old manuscripts to the University of Glasgow, Caie focuses on some of the medical manuscripts donated, describing them in some detail. In his paper Line-final Word Division in Late Middle English Fachprosa: G.U.L. MS Hunter 497 (V.7.24) (pp ), Javier Calle-Martin deals with word division in Middle English manuscripts a phenomenon often attributed to (a) the apparently erratic practice of mediaeval scribes and, therefore, disregarded, and (b) the rule described by some authors that only two completing letters could be carried over to the second line of the text. Drawing upon research that looks into some of the morphological and/or phonological rules underlying the aforementioned practice, in this paper Calle-Martin attempts to characterize the concept of syllable boundary for mediaeval scribes by classifying the type of splitting and offering a taxonomy of the main word-division rules and, by so doing, shed new light on the phenomenon against other classical works. Mark Chambers ( What is this, a betell, or a batowe, or a buskin lacyd?: Lexicological Confusion in Medieval Clothing Culture, pp ) focuses on the knotty topic of clothing and textiles in medieval allegorical drama. In an attempt to disentangle the confusion that the aforementioned fashion topic usually creates to commentators of medieval history and literature, Chambers looks at several graphic and textual data to provide an explanation of some terms which goes from tracing their history to describing in some detail their etymology and use in different periods. The paper ends with an overview of the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project launched

5 Introduction iiiix in 2007, whose aim is to create a searchable database of lexical, graphic and archaeological evidence of medieval cloth and clothing and its lexis in several languages (e.g. Anglo-Norman, Cornish, Flemish, Irish, Middle English, Norn, Norse, Old English, etc.). The ultimate goal is to build a useful and polyglot resource for scholars of clothing history, material culture and historical linguistics. Javier Diaz-Vera s contribution, Analysing the Diffusion of Scientific Metaphors through a Corpus of Middle English Medical Texts (pp ), draws upon the approach to metaphor expounded by George Lakoff to describe the origin, usage and diffusion of medical metaphors as these appear in a variety of genres compiled in the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) corpus. Thus, after a brief survey of work done on metaphor in specialised texts, Diaz-Vera explores the metaphors in the surgical texts, specialised texts, and remedies and materia medica in the MEMT, sometimes tracing the metaphors back to other types of non-specialised texts. Among his findings, we have the target domain of medicine construed in architectural terms as in THE BODY IS A CASTLE, in textile terms as in THE SKIN IS A GARMENT or in mechanicist terms as in THE BODY IS AN INSTRUMENT. The first metaphor suggests a pervasive use of WAR as the source for medical metaphors such as MEDICINES ARE WEAPONS or SICKNESS IS A CONQUEROR/DEVOURER, all of which illustrate conceptual metaphor as this is described within the Lakoffian tradition. In her paper Punctuation Practice in G.U.L. MS Hunter 509 (pp ), Laura Esteban-Segura provides an analysis of the punctuation system found in a Middle English medical manuscript, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 509. A description and classification of the use and function of the scribal marks of punctuation is also offered. The resulting data are helpful in order to reach conclusions about the coherence of medieval punctuation practice. When possible, correspondences with modern counterparts are supplied. María Teresa Marqués-Aguado proposes a dialectogical analysis of the same manuscript in her paper The Dialectal Provenance of G.U.L. MS Hunter 513 (ff.1r 37r) (pp ). Following Dossena and Lass suggestion that texts other than literary

6 x Javier E. Díaz-Vera, Rosario Caballero should be examined from a dialectal perspective, she presents an analysis of the written variants found in the medical treatise under study in an attempt to provide a likely place of provenance. In An Annotated Corpus of Middle English Scientific Prose: Aims and Features (pp ) David Moreno-Olalla and Antonio Miranda-García introduce the Annotated Corpus of Middle English Scientific Prose (ACMESP), a new annotated corpus that records several late Middle English Fachprosa treatises. The aims of the project are not only to develop a corpus, but also to recreate the physical browsing experience of a MS in a virtual environment, yet transcending the merely visual intentions of similar proposals by offering a) a physical description of the MSS, to make the visitors experience all the more rewarding and informative through the coverage of some features that are not immediately evident in virtual environments (for example, measures, quiring or watermarks), and b) transcriptions of the texts, for the benefit of those untrained in mediaeval palaeography. Nadia Obegi-Gallardo s contribution to this volume, Lexical study of The Book of Operation (G.U.L. MS Hunter 95 (T.4.12) ff. 82r -156v): illnesses and treatment (pp ), aims at a) classifying the remedies mentioned in BO, mostly plant names, into compound or simple nouns and, more specifically, analysing the etymology and permanence of these words through time together with their collocations; b) providing a classification of the illnesses mentioned in the treatise, attending to their survival until Present Day English; c) studying those verbs which help the scribe explain the surgical operations and other ways of healing; and d) explaining the main surgical instruments and treatments which are employed in BO. In her paper Orality in the Middle English Medical Recipes of G.U.L. Hunter 185 (pp ), Elena Quintana-Toledo explores the degree of orality which may have been transferred from spoken language to a corpus of medical recipes excerpted from the fifteenthcentury manuscript G.U.L. Hunter 185, an example of a medieval remedy book. The search for data relies on Ong s characterisation of orally based expression as specified in his seminal work Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word (1982) as it stands as one of the few texts that offers a fairly detailed description of oral style

7 Introduction iiixi features, though from a macro level viewpoint. Then, she provides a micro level analysis by concentrating on their possible pragmatic interpretation. Finally, in Early English Scientific Writing: New Corpora, New Approaches (pp ), Irma Taavitsainen shows in detail how corpus-linguistic methods can be combined with qualitative contextual assessments. Her focus is on new developments in corpus compilation, and how the new material collected using these developments can be applied to answer new research questions that deal with the diachronic development of genres and discourse forms and, even more profoundly, with the changing thought-styles of medical writing. The author presents some new insights and demonstrates how a more diversified picture of the developments in the medical register has emerged, with an emphasis on the communicative function of genres in the sociohistorical framework of the period. The result is a collective volume which illustrates the work of a wide range of scholars in different fields of English Historical Linguistics and their approaches to the analysis and description of medieval English medical and technical writings.