Webpages tagged with «History of the Book»

When I was working with Middle English topics as an undergraduate in Helsinki, I learned that there were two main reference works for finding Middle English works in the department library. These were The Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP) and the Index of Middle English Verse (IMEV). Both could be found in a section entitled Britannica at the department library. Both were consulted fairly regularly by a nerdy student, who had progressed from reading too much Tolkien to developing an interest in the medieval parts of the curriculum. Given the similarity of the names of these series, I naturally assumed they were sister publications. It was only after starting to work for IMEP that I realised there are substantial differences between the two.

Manuscript collections tend to be named after the people who collected them. But who were people such as Sir Robert Bruce Cotton or Archbishop Matthew Parker? What did antiquaries of the past use their manuscripts for? What were their personal reasons and motives for collecting them?

Welcome! This is the first blog of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska Curie project Index of Middle English Prose: Digital Cotton Catalogue Project (IMEP DCCP).

This project began to identify and foreground the "voices" of Scandinavian literary translations.