Assessing the Provenance of Constantinus Afrianus' Venerabilis Anatomia in London, MS Wellcome 290 (ff. 1r-41v)

Abstract

MS Wellcome 290 is housed in the Wellcome Library in London. Referenced MS Wellcome 290, it is entitled Pseudo-Galen, Claudius, 131 – 201, and it comprises 56 folios of which, the last three, are blank (Moorat 1962: 186). The volume is divided into two treatises: a) Constantinus Africanus Venerabilis’ Anatomia (ff. 1r-41v); and b) Galen ́s Anatomy (ff. 42r-56v). This paper concentrates on the first part of the volume in order to establish the dialectal provenance of the Middle English version of Constantinus Africanus’ Venerabilis Anatomia (MS Wellcome 290, ff. 1r-41v). The methodology followed for the purpose is grounded in the model supplied by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (McIntosh et al. 1986). Furhermore, some linguistic features will be studied in order to support and corroborate the findings. Following the rationale of the Málaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose (http://hunter.uma.es), this text has been previously tagged so as to contain the lemma, word-class, accidence and meaning of every running word in the text. With the tool Text Search Engine (Miranda-García and Garrido-Garrido 2013), a lemma-based list of allographs have been automatically generated which has been used as the input for the LALME questionnaires.