Conservation, Authenticity, Dissemination

“Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities” , 2001

The application of electronic media to the study of medieval manuscripts is a concept only recently considered by scholars and teachers of the Middle Ages. 1 The implications for the shape of future scholarship are both enticing and hair-raising: the visionary proclaiming that the Internet will universalize access for anyone wishing to study or view the illuminated page, the Luddite gloomily mentioning the transitory nature of the Internet and commenting on the potential loss of access to actual material by serious scholars in the rush to reproduce manuscripts for all and sundry. This essay, meant to comfort the fearful and to engage technologic neophytes in the stunning possibilities afforded by electronic resources, includes a brief, and perhaps temporal, survey of manuscript sites available on the World Wide Web. In order to point to some bene®ts (and pitfalls) of Internet research, I then will examine more closely recent publicity about the Canterbury Tales Project, and ®nally, share some observations drawn from a multimedia class on medieval and Renaissance literature that I have been teaching for six consecutive semesters with Jeanine Meyer, a colleague in Information Systems, at Pace University in New York City. While I do not think electronic media can replace the process of going to libraries and looking at primary sources, of having the direct experience of observing illumination or transcribing a text, or of holding a medieval manuscript in one's hands, the promotional, publicizing and creative possibilities of the Internet or its related form, the CD-ROM, are 53 1 For an excellent overview, see C. J. Brown and B. Valentine,`Networking in Medieval and Postmodern Cultures: Texts, Authorship, and Intellectual Property', Journal of the Early Book Society 2 (1999), 157±78, edited by Martha W. Driver. A special issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing 14.2 (1999), entitled`Teaching the Middle Ages with Technology', edited by M. W. Driver and D. McGrady, includes nine essays that report on the successful teaching of medieval texts, mainly to undergraduate students, using a variety of electronic media. The work of Larry Benson and a number of Harvard graduate students attests to the ®ne quality of medieval materials that can be found on the Internet. They are consistently cited by students in college classrooms as the best sites to support the study of Chaucer and the Middle Ages. The Harvard Chaucer site, last consulted September 1999, may be accessed at <www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer>. All sites discussed in this essay were accessed again in September 1999 unless otherwise noted.

Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, 2018

The University of Manitoba is home to a number of early printed books, so it is also home to a number of medieval manuscript fragments that have been transformed from the books they themselves used to be into binding material for the printed books. While the printed books are catalogued, the fragments are not. This paper argues that the process of archival description is the best way to catalogue these fragments and make them available to the public. Treating manuscript fragments as archival objects means that we can treat them both as unique items, which they are, and as part of a larger whole, regardless of how much of that whole remains. My paper will attempt to draw archival and editorial theories and practices together and to demonstrate the archival-ness of manuscript fragments, as well as the abilities of the archival concepts of provenance and description to mediate fragments, looking particularly at those held at the University of Manitoba. Tom Nesmith’s work on the theory of societal provenance suggests that an archival object is not merely the product of a creator, but is rather the product of a society. This approach is similar to that of book historians and textual critics, who often consider the contexts of books along with their physical forms. By focussing on the common strengths of archivists and book scholars, and by learning about each other’s methods, we can develop ways to care for and make accessible these unique and neglected texts.

Modern Philology, 2016

There is a saying among scholar-librarians that goes something like this: all manuscripts are copies, and all printed books are unique. 1 In the past, such bibliographical witticism served to keep newcomers to the field of rare books and manuscripts on their toes. Today, such truths may not be selfevident. Manuscripts seem to promise greater research value because of their apparent uniqueness, and they continue to command high sale prices in the marketplace, even while the cost of many antiquarian books continues to fall. Curators of special collections, meanwhile, are increasingly asked to justify purchases of printed materials that may seem unnecessary, redundant, or even burdensome when electronic surrogates are readily available via digital libraries such as Google Books. Some commentators treat the discarding of physical books as a fait accompli: "What are we going to do with all that space that was once devoted to storage in the form of stacks?" 2 It is here that David McKitterick has much to teach us. Written as a companion to his Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (2003), Old Books, New Technologies explores what McKitterick calls the "myth of the uniformity of print" (42). We learn about the vexed historical role that printed books play as unique, physical artifacts that, more frequently than not, are presented as identical copies. Yet it is only by analyzing multiple wit-For permission to reuse, please contact

The challenge of the object: 33rd congress of the International Committee of the History of Art, Nuremberg, 15th - 20th July 2012 = Die Herausforderung des Objekts: 33. Internationaler Kunsthistoriker-Kongress/ CIHA 2012, Nürnberg. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, pp. 599-602, 2013

2019

Studi Francesi, 2016

In the Spring semester of 2011 I signed up for a PhD level seminar at Northern Illinois University entitled "Paleography" taught by Dr. Nicole Clifton. The majority of the coursework consisted of learning various styles of handwriting scripts dating from 100 BCE to 1700 CE as well as transcribing, dating, and identifying the origin of a manuscript housed in the Rare Books section of the university library. It was in this class that I was first introduced to the extensive work conducted by the British Library"s Manuscript Studies division housed on their website. The BL was able to digitize a large assortment of collected texts from across their holdings, especially medieval manuscripts dating as early as the 10 th century. While I have previously involved myself in such technological discussions as Kairos and Computers and Composition, I had never spent time working with the intersection between ancient text and modern technology. The availability of ancient manuscripts and the ability to work with programs like Adobe allowed me to transition my thinking about writing from one that focused exclusively on hypertextual writing to seeing the need for writing to become more accessible, especially works that are normally housed in archives hidden away from public view. Is there a digital medieval humanities? Multimodality within the medieval community is nothing new as projects such as CANTUS database, Project Gutenberg, various linguistic tutorials for medieval Latin, Old High German, Old English, and Old French, and annotated hypertext websites covering the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Malory, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.