Index of Middle English Prose: Digital Cotton Catalogue Project is hosted by the University of Oslo and involves me, Alpo Honkapohja working on a catalogue of the Cotton manuscripts. Other people involved include Associate Professor Jacob Thaisen and Professor Emeritus Kari Anne Rand, who is the General Editor of the IMEP.
The project centres around one of the most famous English manuscript collections, the one that belonged to Sir Robert Cotton (1570/1-1631). The collection contains such well-known manuscripts as the only surviving copy of Beowulf (Cotton Vitellius A XV), the only surviving copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cotton Nero A X), the Vespasian Psalter (Cotton Vespasian A I) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (Cotton Nero S IV).
The Cotton collection is also famous for a tragic library fire in 1731 – exactly a hundred years after Cotton’s death – which destroyed some of the manuscripts (such as the Old English poem Battle of Maldon and Asser’s biography of Alfred the Great), damaged others like Beowulf, but also, fortunately, left many undamaged such as the unique manuscript containing the work of the Gawain poet... and many interesting volumes of Middle English prose, which are the ones I am working with.
What is the project about?
There are two main aims. First and foremost, I am compiling a catalogue on the Cotton manuscripts for the Index of Middle English Prose (IMEP).
The IMEP is an ongoing project that aims to identify and index all prose works written in English between 1200 and 1500. This is no small undertaking, especially for larger collections such as the Cotton manuscripts.
The man who started work on the IMEP Cotton Handlist, Brian Donaghey, sadly passed away in 2015. I am working from his unfinished notes. You can see him talking about letterpress printing for the Open College of the Arts here:
Second, we are developing a better search tool for the Digital IMEP website. The tool is being developed at the University of Oslo in collaboration with Cambridge Digital Humanities. I am collaborating with my supervisor Jacob Thaisen, who is an expert on language modelling, which is used in the search tool.
In this blog I will discuss topics related to the project, including:
- Robert Cotton himself, and
- what did Cotton use his manuscript collection for?
- What are the effects of the library fire? How does it feel to be working with the burned manuscripts?
- Interesting texts I’ve come across while working with the Cotton manuscripts,
- Challenges with developing a search tool for Middle English – one that is able to cope with all the different kinds of variation that you encounter in it.
If you are interested in manuscripts, Middle English or both manuscripts and Middle English, this blog might be something you would like to follow.
As I am pretty busy with the academic aspects of this project – the project only lasts for two years – I cannot promise to update this blog more frequently than every two months. Nevertheless, my intention is to make the posts a bit longer and more thought-out than quick microblogging bursts – quality over quantity. The blog format should hopefully give me an opportunity to elaborate in a bit more detail on things I find interesting related to the project. I hope others find them interesting too.