Publications
Publication details [#42454]
Pahta, Päivi, Irma Taavitsainen and Martti Mäkinen, eds. 2005. Middle English Medical Texts. John Benjamins.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) is an electronic corpus including 86 texts and 495,322 words from three traditions of medical writing (surgical treatises, specialized texts, and remedy books) from 1375 to 1500, and an appendix of recipes from c. 1330. MEMT provides a new research resource for several kinds of study. Medical writing shows a great deal of variation even at this early phase, and it is possible to trace linguistic and conceptual developments. MEMT is intended for historical linguists, philologists, and historians of medicine. Most text samples come from edited treatises, but new material (unpublished theses, new transcripts) is also offered. The text samples of the corpus cover 79 codices/manuscripts.