The Brief Rise and Fall of a Superscript Abbreviation for the First-Person Singular Pronoun in the West Midlands Between 1250 and 1500

Abstract

PALAEOGRAPHY has been defined as 'dating and localizing manuscripts by establishing patterns in the development of characteristic letter forms and abbreviations'. 1 The traditional means for dating and localising has been archival work by individual scholars who have acquired a high level of familiarity and competence in scribal practices. However, it has also been suggested that these approaches based on the authority of an experienced scholar could be enhanced by more quantitative methods developed for historical dialectology. Wakelin notes the following: Dialectology can help by identifying spelling patterns, and it might identify variation in script styles as well as in spelling. But so far only a few suggestions have been made, such as a tendency to form þ in different ways in the north and south of England in the fourteenth and 1