Whose Letters Are They Anyway? Addressing the Issue of Scribal Writing in Bess of Hardwick’s Early Modern English Letters.

Although often associated with the medieval period, scribes were still widely employed between 1500 and 1700, and grammatical, lexical, orthographic and palaeographical variation was still widespread. This chapter presents a scribal profiling technique that was designed to distinguish between groups of letters written by different scribes in a corpus of Early Modern English (hence EModE) personal correspondence to and from Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, c.1527 – 1608, also known as Bess of Hardwick and henceforth referred to in this chapter as Bess. It argues that scribal composition had a greater influence upon the language used within Early Modern English letters than has previously been assumed, and suggests that scribal profiling can be a way to take such influence into account before and during linguistic analyses.