Scribal geography

Although the dialect atlases of late Middle English (LALME) and early Middle English (LAEME) are an essential resource for researchers working on manuscripts containing Middle English, they need to be used with care as a guide to the provenance of these manuscripts; the orderly continuum of dialect features which they represent cannot always be mapped precisely on to the more uneven—and sometimes unpredictable—geographical distribution of actual manuscript production. The paper examines three case-studies from the West Midlands where there is an apparent tension between dialect mapping and the probable site of manuscript production