I still regard the expletive hypothesis as highly problematic, maybe even more so after this genre confirmation.
And perhaps most importantly: even in the 16th century, "poxleber" is only used in dialogues. The author does not say "So mir pox Leber, ich liebe den Pabst nicht!". He has farmers say it, or even the decadent pope himself.
- LFD, Marco and myself are in agreement that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. handwriting points to a period roughly contemporaneous with that of the radiocarbon dating.
- Both attestations have identical genres, which could not be further removed from the genre of "scribe's marginal annotation in an early 15th century codex".
- The impact of the oath is not just that of "goddammit", which has lost all impact on us. To feel the impact, think of the must vulgar curses you can imagine in your language.
- The 15th century reference to pox-swearing I found earlier is a strong condemnation thereof, in the spoken language of the commonfolk (does not mention "leber").
- As far as I'm aware, the full expletive includes the "so mir" part (sammer, sommer, whatever). We don't know if anyone was yelling "pox leber!" in isolation.
- OCR heavily skews towards printed texts, increasing our chances to find the (still rare) 17th century uses.
And perhaps most importantly: even in the 16th century, "poxleber" is only used in dialogues. The author does not say "So mir pox Leber, ich liebe den Pabst nicht!". He has farmers say it, or even the decadent pope himself.