The reference corpus of Late Middle English scientific prose

This paper presents the current status of the project Reference Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose, which pursues the digital editing of hitherto unedited scientific, particularly medical, manuscripts in late Middle English, as well as the compilation of an annotated corpus. The principles followed for the digital editions and the compilation of the corpus will be explained; the development and application of several specific tools to retrieve linguistic information within the framework of the project will also be discussed. Our work joins in with worldwide initiatives from other research teams devoted to the study of medical and scientific writings in the history of English (see Taavitsainen, 2009).