Forty Four Manuscripts Of The 9th To The 16th Century

Encompassing the study of manuscripts produced in the British Isles between the Conquest and the end of the seventeenth century, this series provides a forum for the interdisciplinary investigation of both medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.

The Catalogue of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project (EMIP), volume 7, provides a full catalog for the collection of fifty-four manuscripts in the Meseret Sebhat Le-Ab collection at Mekane Yesus Seminary in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. These include one late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century manuscript of Jubilees and the Minor Prophets. Each catalog entry provides a full physical description, a listing of contents (with incipits), illuminations, varia (known works added later), notes on codicology and scribal practice, as well as a full quire map. Opening articles provide an introduction to the collection, a biography of Alaqa Meseret's life and work, an introduction to the Ethiopian musical tradition of Saint Yared, and a study on the textual character of the manuscript of Jubilees. Four indices (works, names, miniatures, and scribal practice) provide quick access for the researcher.

Influential scholars from Britain and North America discuss future directions in rapidly expanding field of manuscript study. The study of manuscripts is one of the most active areas of current research in medieval studies: manuscripts are the basic primary material evidence for literary scholars, historians and art-historians alike, and there has been an explosion of interest over the past twenty years. Manuscript study has developed enormously: codices are no longer treated as inert witnesses to a culture whose character has already been determined by the modern scholar, but are active participants in a process of exploration and discovery. The articles collected here discuss the future of this process and vital questions about manuscript study for tomorrow's explorers. They deal with codicology and book production, with textual criticism, with the material structure of the medieval book, with the relation of manuscripts to literary culture, to social history and to the medieval theatre, and with the importance to manuscript study of the emerging technology of computerised digitisation and hypertext display. The essays provide an end-of-millennium perspective on the most vigorous developments in a rapidly expanding field of study. Contributors: A.I. Doyle, C. David Benson, Martha W. Driver, J.P. Gumbert, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linne R. Mooney, Eckehard Simon, Alison Stones, John Thompson. DEREK PEARSALL is former Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, York, and Professor of English at Harvard University.