ABSTRACT
This chapter brings into conversation two manuscripts in the Parker collection. The first is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC), 162, an early eleventh-century south English collection of Old English homilies. The second manuscript is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, 153, a late ninth-century Welsh copy of Martianus Capella’s fifth-century encyclopaedic allegorical work, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (The Wedding of Philology and Mercury). The homily closes by returning to wonders and miracles, their necessary transmutation into written, heard, and spoken words—words created, words consumed, words recreated. In the twenty-first century, in Parker on the Web 2.0, CCCC 162 appears before new communities of readers through its digital avatar. Parker on the Web presents itself as a ‘digital exhibit’ of the Parker Library’s ‘treasure trove of rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, as well as early printed books’, a formulation that foregrounds both the wonder of the collection and the site’s engagement with material books.
