and a new edition of the famous Early-English Dictionary (English and Latin), Promptoriuim Parvulorum, from the Winchester MS., ab. 1440 a.p.: in this, the Editor, the Rev. A. I. Mayhew, M.A., will follow and print his MS. not only in its arrangement of nouns first, and verbs second, under every letter of the Alphabet, but also in its giving of the flexions of the words, The Society’s edition will thus be the first modern one that really represents its original, a point on which Mr. Mayhew’s insistence will meet with the sympathy of all our Members.
The Texts for the Extra Series in 1906 and 1907 will be chosen from The Three Kings’ Sons, Part II, the Introduction &c. by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner; Part II of The Chester Plays, re-edited from the MSS., with a full collation of the formerly missing Devonshire MS., by Mr. G. England and Dr. Matthews; the Parallel-Text of the only two MSS. of the Owl and Nightingale, edited by Mr. G. F. H. Sykes (at press); Prof. Jespersen’s editions of John Hart’s Orthographic (MS. 1551 a.p.; blackletter 1569), and Method to teach Reading, 1570 ; Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Sowle, in English prose, edited by Prof. Dr. L. Kellner. (For the three prose versions of The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man—two English, one French—an Editor is wanted.) Members are askt to realise the fact that the Society has now 50 years’ work on its Lists,—at its present rate of production,—and that there is from 100 to 200 more years’ work to come after that. The year 2000 will not see finisht all the Texts that the Society ought to print. The need of more Members and money is pressing. Offers of help from willing Editors have continually to be declined because the Society has no funds to print their Texts.
An urgent appeal is hereby made to Members to increase the list of Subscribers to the E. E. Text Society. It is nothing less than a scandal that the Hellenic Society should have nearly 1000 members, while the Karly English Text Society has not 300!
Before his death in 1895, Mr. G. N. Currie was preparing an edition of the 15th and 16th century Prose Versions of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, with the French prose version by Jean Gallopes, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., he having generously promist to pay the extra cost of printing the French text, and engraving one or two of the illuminations in his MS. But Mr. Currie, when on his deathbed, charged a friend to burn all his MSS. which lay in a corner of his room, and unluckily all the E. E. T. S.’s copies of the Deguilleville prose versions were with them, and were burnt with them, so that the Society will be put to the cost of fresh copies, Mr. Currie having died in debt.
Guillaume de Deguilleville, monk of the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis, in the diocese of Senlis, wrote his first verse Pélerinaige de l'Homme in 1330-1 when he was 36.[1] Twenty-five (or six) years after, in 1355, he revised his poem, and issued a second version of it,[2] a revision of which was printed ab. 1500. Of the prose representative of the first version, 1330-1, a prose Englishing, about 1430 A.D., was edited by Mr. Aldis Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1869, from MS. Ff. 5. 30 in the Cambridge University Library. Other copies of this prose English are in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Q. 2. 25; Sion College, London; and the Laud Collection in the Bodleian, no. 740.[3] A copy in the Northern dialect is MS. G. 21, in St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, and this is the MS. which will be edited for the E. E. Text Society. The Laud MS. 740 was somewhat condenst and modernised, in the 17th century, into MS. Ff. 6. 30, in the Cambridge University Library:[4] "The Pilgrime or the Pilgrimage of Man in this World," copied by Will. Baspoole, whose copy "was verbatim written by Walter Parker, 1645, and from thence transcribed by G. G. 1649; and from thence by W. A. 1655." This last copy may have been read by, or its story reported to, Bunyan, and may have been the groundwork of his Pilgrim’s Progress. It will be edited for the E. E. T. Soc., its text running under the earlier English, as in Mr. Herrtage’s edition of the Gesta Romanorum for the Society. In February 1464,[5] Jean Gallopes—a clerk of Angers, afterwards chaplain to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France—turned Deguilleville's first verse Pèlerinaige into a prose Pèlerinage de la vie humaine.[6] By the kindness of Lord Aldenham, as above mentiond, Gallopes's French text will be printed opposite the early prose northern Englishing in the Society's edition.
The Second Version of Deguilleville’s Pélerinaige de ? Homme, A.D. 1355 or -6, was englisht in verse by Lydgate in 1426. Of Lydgate’s poem, the larger part is in the Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xiii (leaves 2-308). This MS. leaves out Chaucer’s englishing of Deguilleville’s ABC or Prayer to the Virgin, of which the successive stanzas start with A, B, C, and run all thro’ the alphabet ; and it has 2 main gaps, besides many small ones from the tops of leaves being burnt in the Cotton fire. All these gaps (save the A BC) have been fild up from the Stowe MS. 952 (which old John Stowe completed) and from the end of the other imperfect MS. Cotton, Tiberius A vii. Thanks to the diligence of the old Elizabethan tailor and
- ↑ He was born about 1295. See Abbé Goujet's Bibliotèque française, Vol. IX, p. 73-4.—P.M. The Roxburghe Club printed the 1st version in 1893.
- ↑ The Roxburghe Club's copy of this 2nd version was lent to Mr. Currie, and unluckily burnt too with his other MSS.
- ↑ These 3 MSS. have not yet been collated, but are believed to be all of the same version.
- ↑ Another MS. is in the Pepys Library.
- ↑ According to Lord Aldenham's MS.
- ↑ These were printed in France, late in the 15th or early in the 16th century.
