Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer

Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise

The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale has five parts of quite different lengths. As Helen Cooper notes, in the Ellesmere and Hengwrt manuscripts the Prologue is divided by the insertion of two Latin titles, "Invocatio ad Mariam" and "Interpretacio nominis Cecilie quam ponit Frater Jacobus Januensius in Legenda" (359). These insertions divide the Prologue into three parts of differing lengths: (Pr1) Introduction, lines 1-28; (Pr2) Invocation to Mary, lines 29-84; and (Pr3) Interpretation of the name Cecilia, lines 85-119. As Sherry Reames has shown ("The Sources"), the Tale proper comes from two different versions of the Vita of St. Cecilia, and the break after line 343 produces two parts of relatively similar lengths. Part 1 of the Tale (T1), lines 120-343, has 224 lines, and Part 2 (T2), lines 344-553, has 210.

For this study, first I downloaded the five-part poem from the Labyrinth website onto the spreadsheet in Appendix I, identified the Romance words, and calculated the percentage of Romance words per line. These line-by-line percentages appear on the spreadsheet in Appendix I solely to illustrate a point in the following paragraphs. Then I analyzed the Romance vocabulary in two steps: first, the preparation of the initial data to be used in the statistical analysis, and second, the production of confidence intervals for all five parts of the Second Nun's Prologue and Tale. Confidence intervals, which indicate the likely range of numbers within which data lie, were used in this analysis as a tool in comparing the percentages of Romance vocabulary of the five parts.

In the first step, I have followed the approach for evaluation of evidence in content analysis recommended by Barron Brainerd in Weighing Evidence in Language and Literature (128). This approach uses blocks of poetry lines instead of individual lines to produce the initial or "raw" data for the subsequent statistical analysis. The three parts of the Prologue, Pr1, Pr2, and Pr3 are so much shorter than the two parts of the Tale, T1 and T2, that six-line blocks are used for the analysis of the parts of the Prologue and twenty-line blocks for the parts of the Tale. For a given block, the percentage of Romance words is calculated as raw data. Thus, the five parts of the Prologue and Tale, Pr1, Pr2, Pr3, T1, and T2, produce 5, 9, 6, 11, and 10 blocks of data and can be seen in Appendix II. For each part, these blocks of raw data are used to calculate the mean (or average), indicated by [Mu], and also the standard deviation (SD), the quantity that describes the distribution of data around the mean.

The purpose of using blocks of lines is to produce data with small standard deviations. Both the number of lines in a given block and the number of blocks should be as high as possible in order to obtain the smallest possible standard deviation. Otherwise, the amount of scatter (or dispersion) in data, corresponding to higher values of standard deviation, would render the statistical analysis useless for deriving clear conclusions. Thus, in this case, larger sections of poetry yield more precise statistical parameters which in turn will produce conclusions with higher probability. This is analogous to the smaller margin of error in public opinion polls: when larger populations of people are polled, poll results contain smaller margins of error. If, in this analysis, lines were used instead of blocks of lines, the amount of scatter would be too large to produce any meaningful analysis and would yield no firm conclusions. This is obvious in the line-by-line percentages in Appendix I, in which the percentages range from 0 to 60. In order to further reduce the amount of scatter, I have followed a common practice in statistical analysis and discarded the lowest and the highest data in Pr2, T1, and T2. This procedure will have little effect on the mean ([Mu]) but will produce smaller values for the standard deviation. Pr1 and Pr3 have too few raw data to undergo this treatment.