A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Group of Middle English Manuscripts (Texts and Transitions) (Texts and Transitions, 9)

In this fascinating study, Alpo Honkapohja takes a fresh interdisciplinary approach to the Voigts-Sloane Group of Middle English manuscripts, a group of medical and alchemical manuscripts dating from the 1450s and 1460s. First described by Linda Voigts in 1990, these manuscripts have received attention, since they may be evidence of co-ordinated commercial production of medical and alchemical books, only decades before William Caxton established his printing press in Westminster in 1476. Honkapohja examines these manuscripts with a combination of codicological and linguistic methodologies, looking at different ways which could be used to facilitate the production of manuscripts, including speculative production and copying separate booklets, as well as their dialect and the interplay between Middle English and Latin. The results cast new light on how these codices were copied as well as reveal surprising regularity in the dialects of scientific writing, an area which has received considerably less attention than administrative and literary texts.