ABSTRACT

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.

part 1|40 pages

Theory and Practice

chapter 2|8 pages

What it is to be a digitization specialist

Chasing medieval materials in a sea of pixels

chapter 3|8 pages

From the divine to the digital

Digitization as resurrection and reconstruction

chapter 5|18 pages

Ways of seeing manuscripts

Exploring Parker 2.0

part 2|36 pages

Materialities

chapter 7|10 pages

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 367 Part II

A study in (digital) codicology

chapter 8|8 pages

Pocket change

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 383 and the value of the virtual object

chapter 9|9 pages

Rolling with it

Navigating absence in the digital realm

part 3|38 pages

Translation and Transmission

chapter 10|7 pages

‘Glocal’ matters

The Gospels of St Augustine as a codex in translation

chapter 12|8 pages

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 322

Tradition and transmission

chapter 13|9 pages

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 41 and 286

Digitization as translation

part 4|41 pages

Of Multimedia and the Multilingual

chapter 15|12 pages

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 144 and 402

Mercian intellectual culture in pre-Conquest England (and beyond)

chapter 16|9 pages

Philologia and philology

Allegory, multilingualism and the Corpus Martianus Capella

part 5|57 pages

Forms of reading

chapter 18|17 pages

Living with books in early medieval England

Solomon and Saturn, bibliophilia, and the globalist Red Book of Darley

chapter 20|11 pages

Books consumed, books multiplied

Martianus Capella, Ælfric’s Homilies, and the International Image Interoperability Framework