Saturday, July 02, 2005

Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse: Abbas non debet esse nimis rigidus. Vnde Anselmus

The title link is to a story in the "Alphabet of tales: an English 15th century translation of the Alphabetum narrationum... from Additional MS. 25,719 of the British Museum" as reprinted by the University of Michigan.

From the words that seem similar enough to modern English to guess at, it looks to be a nice little chat between an "abbott" and "Saynt Anselme", with the abbott explaining that he tries every manner of instruction both night and day to improve the young people around him but isn't getting good results, and with Saynt Anselme advising that you can no more expect good results overmanaging a young man than you can get a profitable tree if you put a young tree in a garden and "closyd it rownde aboute..."

But, mind you, I don't know Middle English, so your guess is as good as mine on this, most likely.

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