Category Medieval Manuscript Studies
Getting your hands on some vellum…
I’ve recently celebrated my 200th anniversary. That is, in the course of the last eight months, I have got my paws on two hundred medieval and early modern manuscripts in the British Library. And, oh, what a privilege it has been. Even after seeing so many ‘in the vellum’, every one is still special. But […]
“I saw a dog making sauce, and an ape thatching a house” A Sixteenth-Century Nonsense Poem
“NOW, how does one thatch a house again??” Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr.1444b, f.249r Whilst searching for an edition of a text that I am working on, I found a beautiful little nonsense poem, which exists in Oxford, Balliol College MS 354. The manuscript is a commonplace book, a kind-of early scrapbook, containing a variety […]
Acerbic Annotations: the Brusque Reviewer of a Sixteenth-Century Welsh Manuscript
As I open this BL Additional MS. 14866 , I am greeted by a stamp on its paper flyleaf that reads ‘presented by the governors of the Welsh School, 1844’, which gives a clue to the ownership, and past readers, of the manuscript. The ‘Most Honourable and Loyal Society of Antient Britons’, I found out […]
“Mi Pilkoc Pisseþ on Mi Schone”! Dripping Noses, Impotence, and Other Symptoms of Medieval Old Age.
Well, the title says it all, doesn’t it? Getting old can be a drag! Whatever people say about ‘eighty being the new thirty’ or similar, there is little satisfaction to be found in the physical effects of the ageing process, from finding your first grey hair, to being unable to run for the bus as […]
Derivation, Deviation, and Distortion. The dynamism of medieval texts.
My role at with the Digital Index of Middle English Verse is amplifying my awareness of the implications of copying by hand upon the form and contents of medieval texts. The fact that texts were written by hand meant that every time that a new version was created, there was potential for changes to be […]
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