When was Mary Magdalene set 'afeyr'? The phonological representation of ME i in some 15th century plays

According to most contemporary critics, the result of ME ī was either /i/ or /ei/ in 1500. Though the problem whether lowering preceded centralization in the diphthongization process is still far from being resolved, it is undoubtly clear that in 1500 the result of ME ī was sometime orthographically represented as (as revealed by the Welsh scribe in Hymn to the Virgin).This paper is an attempt to analyze whether, in 1475, and in the Norfolk area, there occurred such a phonetical grapheme as to represent the result of ME ī and to what extent.My analysis starts from an accurate study of the language of Mary Magdalene – a morality play written in the Norfolk dialect around 1475 which is contained in the so-called MS Digby 33, and of other plays contained in the MS Digby 33 that are linked to Mary Magdalene because of their regional provenance or their scribal hand, i.e.: St Paul’s Conversion, The Killing of the Children, and Wisdom. For all plays, I thus can point out every single word with radical ME ī and determine its function in the rhythmical pattern – rhyming vs non-rhyming position. Such words are then compared with those with radical ME ī found in The Paston Letters (written in the same dialect as the Digby Plays) and here regarded as a sort of “control group” since the language seems to be, orthographically speaking, more freely used, as it was not constrained with metrical and rhythmical patterns.The result is that both in the Digby plays and in the Paston Letters (surveyed from 1474 onwards) there is a very high percentage of words with radical ME ī which are graphically represented as . Yet, in the plays, there are some interesting cases where ME ī is written , especially when such words do not appear in rhyming positions. There is however a case in which keynd rhymes with mynd in Mary Magdalene, or a case in which the rhyme constrayned / fynd/ paynyde / blynyde / mynd in St Paul’s Conversion though following the metrical pattern ababbcc has the grapheme (blind) which might be either a graphical error by the scribe influenced by the spelling of (pained) or a phonetical error which reveals that the two words do have a different pronunciations but that this difference is felt by the scribe or copyist not so marked as it should be.In conclusion, though it is not possible to define the responsibility of the scribes or copyists, or authors in such graphical variants, it can be proved that already in 1475 the grapheme was used phonetically to represent the result of ME ī.