Finished!!!

All 41 Medieval English MS chosen for the JISC-funded Manchester Middle English Manuscripts project are now fully catalogued & available online in the Rylands Medieval Collection.

Transcription plans…

An exciting development in the Manchester Middle English Manuscripts project…  Two volunteers, Mary Begley & Jasmine Sparrow, will be working on a transcription of English MS 7 (Forme of Cury). Mary & Jasmine have both recently completed BAs in English Language at the University of Manchester. Upon completion, the transcriptions will be available in the Luna record for English MS 7.

Thank you!

The MMEMS project would like to say a big thank you to Mary Begley, a postgraduate student in the School of Languages, Linguistics & Cultures, who has been volunteering with us for a few years.  Her contribution to the project has been invaluable.  As part of her recently completed BA in English Language, Mary’s dissertation was a partial transcription of, and a morpho-syntactic/lexico-semantic description of MS English 404 (Medical Recipes). She is currently working on English MS 82, a Wycliffe Old Testament, which is the last remaining  manuscript, out of the original 41, to be catalogued.

Latest Update

Just a quick blog to keep everyone up-to-date with the progress of the project: English MS 82 (Wycliffe Old Testament) and English MS 91 (Wycliffe Bible) are currently being catalogued by project staff, leaving only English MS 83 (Wycliffe Parablis of Solomon) to do…..

Latest Update

English MS 80, a Later Version Wycliffe New Testament, has now gone ‘live’ and is available to be viewed online via LUNA within the Rylands Medieval Collection.

Prologue to the Gospel of Luke

Latest Update

As promised in a recent post, English MS 79, a Later Version Wycliffe New Testament, has now gone ‘live’ and is available to be viewed online via LUNA within the Rylands Medieval Collection.

Gospel of John: Prologue and chapter one

Latest Update

The cataloguing of the beautiful Petworth Chaucer manuscript is now complete and the images of the entire item are now available to view in the Rylands Medieval Collection in LUNA.  This work has been done through the Centre for Heritage Imaging & Collection Care.

From Petworth House & Park, National Trust property, West Sussex

• Petworth 486026, Canterbury Tales, (early 15^th century, ca 1420-40)

Latest Update

There are currently 33 Middle English manuscripts digitised and available as part of The Rylands Medieval Collection. Three more manuscripts (English MS 79, English MS 80 and English MS 103) will go ‘live’ shortly.  This means that, out of the 41 manuscripts selected for digitisation as part of In the bigynnyng: the Manchester Middle English Digital Library (JISC digitisation programme), it only remains to catalogue 5 more manuscripts before the project is complete!

Latest Update

A number of new medieval English manuscripts digitised through the Centre of Heritage Imaging & Collection Care (CHICC) are now catalogued and available to view in the Rylands Medieval Collection in LUNA (for more information about CHICC, please see the project blog).

The manuscripts include nine items from Chetham’s Library here in Manchester and three from the Brotherton Library, Leeds.

From Chetham’s

• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.2.160,  Bible N.T. English (Middle English) Wycliffe (early 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS.Mun.A.6.90,  Polycronicon (late 14^th - early 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS.Mun.A.4.104,  Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady etc.  (late 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS.Mun.A.4.107,  Mandeville’s travels (early 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.6.31,  Ipomadon, etc.  (mid-late 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.4.99, Astrologica (mid 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.3.127, Medical Recipes (in English)  (late 15^th – early 16^th century)
• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.2.166,  Life of Christ (early 15^th century)
• Chetham’s MS Mun.A.7.1,  Mirror of the Life of Christ (mid 15^th century)

From the Brotherton Library, Leeds

• Brotherton Collection MS 500,  Prick of Conscience (14^th – 15^th century)
• Brotherton Collection MS 501,  Miscellany of Middle English religious verse and prose (mid 15^th century)
• Brotherton Collection MS 502,  Festial of English Sermons (late 15^th century)

Digitisation; Complete.

The Digitisation of all 41 English Medieval Manuscripts has now been completed. The grand total comes to roughly 12,100 images, cover to cover of all 41. The last manuscript to be fully digitised is MS 80, a later version of the Wycliffe New Testament, from around 1444. This was quite a problematic task, du to the manuscript’s tight binding and text close to the gutter in the spine. It was also one of the longer manuscripts, totaling 652 images.

All the images have now been loaded into LUNA, with an accompanying catalogue record, albeit a basic one. The cataloguing will continue for a little longer, but will be completed very soon. All images and records will be made available in the online collection over the next few weeks.

Page from MS 80