Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age explores one major manuscript repository’s digital presence and poses timely questions about studying books from a temporal and spatial distance via the online environment. Through contributions from a large group of distinguished international scholars, the volume assesses the impact of being able to access and interpret these early manuscripts in new ways. The focus on Parker on the Web, a world-class digital repository of diverse medieval manuscripts, comes as that site made its contents Open Access. Exploring the uses of digital representations of medieval texts and their contexts, contributors consider manuscripts from multiple perspectives including production, materiality, and reception. In addition, the volume explicates new interdisciplinary frameworks of analysis for the study of the relationship between texts and their physical contexts, while centring on an appreciation of the opportunities and challenges effected by the digital representation of a tangible object. Approaches extend from the codicological, palaeographical, linguistic, and cultural to considerations of reader reception, image production, and the implications of new technologies for future discoveries. Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age advances the debate in manuscript studies about the role of digital and computational sources and tools. As such, the book will appeal to scholars and students working in the disciplines of Digital Humanities, Medieval Studies, Literary Studies, Library and Information Science, and Book History.

Working with manuscripts has become a digital affair. But, are there downsides to digital photos? And how can you take advantage of the incredible computing power you have literally at your fingertips? Cornelis van Lit explains in detail what happens when manuscript studies meets digital humanities. In Among Digitized Manuscripts you will learn why it is important to include a note on the photo quality in your codicological description, how to draw, collect, and publish glyphs of paleographic interest, what standards (such as TEI and IIIF) to abide by when transcribing a text, how to write custom software for image recognition, and much more. The leading principle is that learning a little about computers will already be of great benefit.

Essays exploring the importance of archives as artifacts of culture

Manuscripts provide rich documentary evidence for understanding the history of cultural life across the breadth of Europe and Asia down through the Middle Ages. Many illustrate engagement between and across languages, in both similar and contrasting ways from east to west. The demarcation of manuscript studies into single-language academic disciplines has often obscured this reality, privileging one constituent part or contributing language from each manuscript rather than exploring the combination as a nuanced and complex whole. This volume seeks to examine manuscripts as integrally united artefacts, respecting the diversity of their constituent elements. Case studies are presented of twelve manuscripts with evidence for various levels of inter-language exchange and collision, from horizons as diverse as the Atlantic West, Carolingian Europe, the Byzantine world, the Silk Road cultures, and east Asia. The essays function individually as discrete contributions, but together they highlight a range of overlapping themes, illustrating language interaction in global religions, pedagogical exchange, and secular society-building.The analogies as well as the concrete points of connection between them underline the value of a cross-disciplinary approach.

This volume presents epigraphic research using digital and computational tools, comparing the outcomes of both well-established and newer projects to consider the most innovative investigative trends. Papers consider open-access databases, SfM Photogrammetry and Digital Image Modelling applied to textual restoration, Linked Open Data, and more.

This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

A New York Times Editors' Choice Book and a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 So Far Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s just where you go to look things up. But as Dennis Duncan reveals in this delightful and witty history, hiding in plain sight is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. In the pages of the index, we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. Here, for the first time, is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Duncan uncovers how it has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and—of course—indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart—and we have been for eight hundred years.