Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England

Examining the Evidence: The Witch-Trials at the Bury Assize, 1645

“…MS. 27402, has been transcribed by Ewen (1929), and recently by Kytö, Grund and Walker (2011) as part of An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560-1760 (ETED), which will be discussed further below. In his later publication Witchcraft and Demonianism, Ewen (1933: 260) also accepts the figure of eighteen executed, on the basis of A True Relation, despite its confusion over Anne Leech.…”

Historical Sociopragmatics

“…The pragmatic analysis of punctuation and other scribal features, such as corrections or abbreviations, is becoming facilitated by a new generation of text editions which show new standards in historical sociopragmatics for faithful transcriptions of manuscripts and printed texts and the inclusion of facsimile images to study visual features (e.g. Kytö et al, 2011, Taavitsainen and Pahta, 2013, Rosenthal et al, 2009.…”

The Voice of the Dead

“…Kytö, Walker, and Grund (2007:69-70) also address the question of scribal and editorial interference in written records of witness depositions and seek to determine how faithfully trial depositions reflect the actual speech of the witnesses. In their discussion of the process of editing these texts, Kytö, Grund, and Walker (2007; see also Kytö, Grund & Walker 2011) further point out some of the problems that should be taken into account in the analysis of this text type, such as the possibility that amanuenses might have leveled the regional language of the original depositions:Although the presence of dialectal vocabulary does show that all regionalisms were not sifted out by the scribe, it is frequently difficult to determine whether the language reported by the scribe is indeed that of the witness: the language may in fact be partly or wholly that of the scribe. (Kytö, Grund & Walker 2007:np)…”