2022

A somewhat clickbait title, but, if the Gunpowder plot had succeeded, is there a possibility that, instead of being damaged in a library fire a hundred years later, the famous Old English poem could have been blown sky high along with the rest of the Cotton Library?

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.

The library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton was partly destroyed in a tragic library fire in 1731. Fortunately, a printed catalogue published in 1696 survives. What is less fortunate is that it ignores texts such as two of the most celebrated medieval English literary works.

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).