The Middle English Version of De Viribus Herbarum (GUL MS Hunter 497, ff. 1r-92r)

Odo de Meung’s De Viribus Herbarum was one of the most widely known pieces of Fachliteratur in the latter part of Middle English, corroborated on account of the number of translations hitherto preserved in the different European vernacular languages such as French, German and Danish. In Middle English, there are up to nine complete versions of Macer Floridus’ rendering, together with a number of fragmentary pieces. Still, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 497 (ff. 1r-92r) is the only English version of the text which remains so far unedited.
The present edition offers the diplomatic transcription of MS Hunter 497, also accompanied by a glossary, notes and introduction. The latter has been conceived as a state of the art of the Hunterian witness, containing the textual transmission of the text, a codicological/palaeographic description together with a comprehensive analysis of its linguistic provenance and scribal practices. Therefore, the edition conforms itself as a primary source for research not only in Historical Linguistics but also in other related fields such as History of Medicine or Ecdotics.

Javier Calle-Martin is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Malaga (Spain). His research interests are Historical Linguistics and Manuscript Studies, focusing on early English documents. He is also the leading researcher of a project for the electronic edition of hitherto unedited late Middle English Fachliteratur, including the critical edition of Gilles of Corbeil’s Treatise on Urines. Dr Calle-Martin has published in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen (2004), Folia Linguistica Historica (2005) and The Review of English Studies (2008).
Antonio Miranda-Garcia is Reader in the Department of English at the University of Malaga (Spain). He is the leading researcher of a project for the electronic edition and compilation of an annotated corpus of late Middle English scientific prose and is currently developing an automatic POS-tagger of Middle English texts. Dr Miranda-Garcia has also an interest in stylometric approaches to Authorship Attribution, publishing in journals like Language Resources and Evaluation (2005), Literary and Linguistic Computing (2007) and Ecdotica (2008).