A lexicon of selected works printed by Valentim Fernandes, 1496--1502

For this dissertation electronic, semi-paleographic transcriptions of selected works printed in Portuguese of Valentim Fernandes, by far the most prolific printer of turn-of-the-fifteenth-century Portugal, were prepared from photographic reproductions of the original texts. Seventeen of this Moravian printer's works in Portuguese survive. Fernandes produced between 1495 and 1516 a thematically wide-ranging corpus in Portuguese that consists of 3 legal treatises, a medical text, 4 travel books, 6 religious works, a chivalry novel, and the statutes of a military order, and those of a Lisbon-based religious fraternity. Because of the sheer size of the Portuguese corpus, only secular works up to 1502 were used in the creation of the Portuguese dictionary in this dissertation, although it is my intention to continue this project and eventually include all of his Portuguese works. This cohesive corpus illustrates a variety of lexical usage. The texts included are Regimento proveitoso contra a pestenenca (c. 1496), Historia de mui nobre Vespasiano (1496), O livro de Marco Paulo (1502), O livro de Nicolao Veneto (1502), and Carta de um genoves (1502).;The semi-paleographic transcriptions are based on the procedures developed by the Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies for the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language Project (DOSL). Necessary adaptations were made for representing and processing Old Portuguese. In the spirit of reproducing the original printed text as faithfully as possible, tildes over vowels (a > a ˜) are preserved with very few exceptions. This practice eliminates the need to interpret tildes as either suppressed nasal consonants or representations of nasalized vowels. However, in cases such as aialia and coero, in which the tilde clearly represents full consonants, they are indicated as such (e.g., a⟨ n⟩i⟨m⟩alia and co⟨m⟩ero ˜). Tildes are also expanded in the case of the Portuguese digraph NH, i.e. choicer becomes co⟨n⟩Cerro ˜.;An exhaustive situational dictionary of the Portuguese vocabulary contained in those texts was compiled through the use of computer programs written by DOSL. This dissertation enjoys the good fortune of inheriting over sixty years of experience from the Seminary of Medieval Spanish Studies at the University of Wisconsin and the DOSL project.