Secretary a in Ellesmere’s Latin Quotations

The occasional appearance of the secretary graph for minuscule a in the Latin Quotations provided in the Ellesmere manuscript as annotations to the Canterbury Tales is not (as previously characterized) random. More than 99% of its appearances occur in passages where El shared an exemplar with Gg. The likelihood that those annotations were copied into El from its exemplars is therefore very high, and the likelihood that such annotations derive from a Chaucerian intent is significantly increased. Those facts have important repercussions for our understanding not only of the origins and transmission of the annotations but of the textual nature of the Canterbury Tales.