University of Oxford

In June 2002, the Bodleian Library acquired the unique complete manuscript of a hitherto unknown Arabic cosmographical treatise known as the Book of Curiosities. The manuscript is a copy, probably made in Egypt in the late 12th or early 13th century, of an anonymous work compiled in the first half of the 11th century in Egypt. The treatise is extraordinarily important for the history of science, especially for astronomy and cartography, and contains an unparalleled series of diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth.

The Romance verb reveals some seemingly nonsensical, but diachronically and geographically recurrent, patterns in its paradigmatic structure, which show remarkable diachronic robustness, self-reinforcement and self-replication. The recurrent but autonomously morphological structures presupposed by such changes furnish crucial diachronic corroboration for the notion of ‘morphomes’ as elaborated by M. Aronoff (Morphology By Itself 1994), and in general for the importance of ‘inferential-realizational’ strategies in acquisition and language change (see G. Stump Inflectional Morphology 2000).

The Thomas Gray Archive is a long-term research effort dedicated to studying the life and work of eighteenth-century poet and letter-writer Thomas Gray (1716-1771). The Archive strives to preserve and to make accessible a comprehensive corpus of high-quality, electronic primary sources and secondary materials.

Prosopography of the Byzantine World (PBW) aims to record all surviving information about every individual mentioned in Byzantine textual sources, together with as many as possible of the individuals recorded in seal sources, in the period 1025-1261. The current online database is the first major result of PBW, a project covering the period AD 1025-1180, and represents a continuation of prosopographical work originally inspired by A.H.M. Jones in 1950, and sponsored since then by the British Academy.