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A Reconsideration of the Dialectal Provenance of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57

Abstract This paper is a linguistic study of the copy of the Prick of Conscience in Oxford, St John’s College, 57 (SJC). The principal aim is to determine the provenance of the text’s scribal language. SJC was made by a professional scribe, also responsible for copying other popular contemporary works. These include manuscripts of the prose Brut Chronicle, some of the stories of the Canterbury Tales and the unique Tale of Beryn in Alnwick Castle, Duke of Northumberland, 455, the source of the designation of this scribe as the ‘Beryn Scribe’. In LALME, only the language of the last-mentioned of this scribe’s productions was analysed, and localised to South Essex. It has been assumed that the Essex localisation of Alnwick Castle 455 is valid for all this scribe’s texts, including SJC, and that he was a ‘consistent translator’ into his own scribal dialect. Nevertheless, the language of SJC shows features whose distributions are not characteristic of Essex. The original Prick of Conscience was composed in Northern Middle English. The retention of a deal of Northern features in SJC casts doubt on the idea of its scribe as a ‘consistent translator’. The exemplar used by the SJC scribe is unknown and was not necessarily written in the same variety as the original. Still, some information about it can be gleaned by comparing SJC’s language with those of four other manuscripts to which it is closely related within the stemma of the Prick of Conscience.