Edurne Garrido Anes

Universidad de Huelva

Chancery English and Late Medieval Medical Texts: on the way towards a standard

The object of this paper is to raise several points concerning a phenomenon that has not really been focused upon so far, although it has occasionally been hinted at. This is the fact that there might be some sort of relationship between the flood of medical manuscripts that were being translated and copied during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the emerging seeds of what would lead to the development of a standard language. This assumption does not intend to suggest that medical literature was the kind of writing that set up the basis for the late medieval developing standard. It only wants to call attention to the fact that, in spite of keeping some obvious dialectal features, these medical texts were not wholly disconnected from the incipient regularizing processes that were taking place in the English language of the Late Middle Ages. This is due to the fact that they actually reflect the same kinds of choices that are found in texts of an apparently very different nature, namely in Chancery documents and literary works. Therefore, it might be said that the medieval translations of educated medical literature also played some part in the establishment of standard features.