In their focus on East Anglian English, the essays in this volume demon- strate the variety of approaches to language study, in both modern and historical contexts. This contribution is a study of the uses of English in medical books from East Anglia, adapting analytical models used for the study of present-day texts. It is intended to be a step towards establishing what Richard Beadle has termed the ‘literary geography’ of later medieval England (Beadle 1991: 89).

The later Middle Ages saw the increased use of written English. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries English began to be used in areas such as science and medicine, where Latin had previously been dominant. The extension of the uses of English has been termed ‘elaboration’ by Einar Haugen, and is one of the four steps Haugen considered necessary for a language to be standardised (Haugen 1997 [1966] ).

Recent work has suggested that the process of standardisation is more complicated than had previously been supposed. The concept of a ‘colourless’ language, where distinctly dialectal forms are dropped in favour of non-standard but non-localisable forms, is one example of the complexity involved (Samuels 1981). The relationship between colourless and dialect forms will be discussed further in this article. However, the elaboration of English did not only occur in the form which was eventually to become standard English. In various parts of the country, including the prosperous and densely populated East Anglia, local dialects also became elaborated in function, although this was a temporary situation for the most part. An example of this is the body of medical texts in East Anglian English, which served to disseminate classical medical knowledge to the wider community.

The identification of such texts is made possible by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (hence LALME). Although the primary function of LALME is to map the distribution of variant forms of written Middle English in the later Middle Ages, there is great potential for the broader use of its findings in many areas of study.