---
title: "Is there a method in this… madness? On variance between two"
description: "The paper asks how much two medieval copies of one English Psalter translation differ in their word choices, and whether… 17 references."
authors: ["Kinga Lis"]
year: 2015
venue: "LingBaW 1"
source: "https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/LingBaW/article/view/5629"
doi: "10.31743/lingbaw.5629"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; LingBaW)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lis-2015-there-method-this-madness-variance/"
---
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# Is there a method in this… madness? On variance between two manuscript copies of a Middle English Psalter

**Authors:** Kinga Lis · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** [LingBaW 1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/linguistics-beyond-and-within-lingbaw/) ([Linguistics Beyond and Within (LingBaW) 2015](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/linguistics-beyond-and-within-lingbaw/2015/)) · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; LingBaW)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5629) · [PDF](https://czasopisma.kul.pl/index.php/LingBaW/article/download/5629/5363) · [DOI 10.31743/lingbaw.5629](https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5629) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2518335042)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks how much two medieval copies of one English Psalter translation differ in their word choices, and whether those differences follow any rule. The two copies are London, BL MS Additional 17,376 (MEGPP L, c. 1330–1350) and Dublin, Trinity College MS 69 (MEGPP D, late 14th century), both read from Bülbring's 1891 edition. Lis first argues that, before print, scribes acted as co-authors who carried the sense of a text rather than its exact wording. She then compares how each copy renders the nouns of the Latin source. For each divergent Latin lemma, she looks for an explanation in the verse context and in the French glossed Psalter the translator likely used. About one noun in ten differs between the copies. For almost all of these differences no motivation can be shown, and only a handful of lemmata allow a tentative explanation. The study is a careful, case-by-case measurement of how unstable "the same text" was in manuscript culture, and it shows that most of this instability resists explanation.

## Key points
- Each copy contains 2877 nouns, and 275 of them (≈10%) differ between MEGPP L and MEGPP D.
- 145 divergent pairs, covering 70 Latin lemmata, met the study's criteria and were analysed in depth.
- Of these 70 lemmata:
  - 33 occurred too rarely to judge;
  - 33 showed no detectable principle (disciplina is a possible exception);
  - only 4 allowed tentative explanations.
- The four tentatively explained cases are:
  - *cor/anima*: heart appears where soul might be expected;
  - *honor*: verse 28.2 is singled out, the only place where the word means reverence owed to God;
  - *miseratio*: the pitē/mercī split matches the French pitié/merci;
  - *sepulcrum*: grāve in verse 5.11 of L lines up with French cercueil.
- The French intermediary survives in Paris, BnF fr. 6260 and London, BL Add. 44,949. The time gap between these copies and the English manuscripts may distort the comparison.

## Interesting ideas
- Align two parallel versions through a shared source unit (here, the Latin lemma) and measure where their choices diverge.
- Sort disagreements into three bins: too sparse to judge, no visible principle, and plausibly principled. Only the last bin is pursued further.
- Use a third related text (the French Psalter) to explain why two copies diverge.
- Test a contextual explanation against counterexamples: the idea that pitē was chosen to avoid repeating mercī fails because verse 39.15 repeats mercī anyway.
- Treat copying as carrying sense rather than surface form, so that one noun in ten can change while the text still counts as the same work.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Witness-parser disagreements could be anchored to the same token or arc, so that a disagreement rate is measured per lemma or construction rather than per sentence.
- **I2** (learn): Silver-data disagreements could be bucketed the same way, so that repair rules are induced only from patterns with enough evidence, and sparse cases are not overfit.
- **I3** (learn): When two parsers split on an analysis, a third independent witness, such as a converted treebank or an LLM teacher, can decide whether the split reflects a real ambiguity or noise.
- **I4** (learn): Every proposed rule could be checked against a set of contexts where it predicts something the data contradict, which works as a built-in negative control.
- **I5** (back): The text → graph → text compressor could be scored on preserved meaning, accepting synonym swaps such as heart/soul or pity/mercy instead of penalizing them as errors.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin](https://ror.org/04qyefj88).

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## Cite

Cite as: Kinga Lis. 2015. Is there a method in this… madness? On variance between two manuscript copies of a Middle English Psalter. LingBaW 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{lis2015is,
  title = {{Is there a method in this… madness? On variance between two manuscript copies of a Middle English Psalter}},
  author = {Kinga Lis},
  booktitle = {LingBaW 1},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.31743/lingbaw.5629},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.31743/lingbaw.5629}
}
```

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## References

17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*