French lexis in the Auchinleck Manuscript: A digital-philological approach

Abstract The Auchinleck Manuscript was produced in the 1330s London and is best known to scholars of Middle English literature on account romances that it transmits. Several these texts treat establishment defense England has been argued their interest history matched by language which almost all manuscript’s are written: English. This article reconsiders Englishness via a quantitative analysis its lexis. We show comparatively large proportion lexicon connections French that, words with connections, many do not appear have much used writing before 1300s. Our statistics derived program scripts match items headword entries Dictionary collect data pertaining word etymology earliest dates citation from those entries. Where previous studies emphasized porous boundaries between 14th-century contexts, we posit some poets might aim make creative capital out deliberate juxtaposition languages. argument supported series visualizations; interactive versions visualizations they based archived at our project website (https://solliryc.github.io/AuchinleckDataViz/).