Medieval

The project seeks to answer the question: why and how did 15th-century Londoners make use of the royal court of common pleas at Westminster? It will track and analyse the litigation brought both by and against Londoners in the common pleas over the course of the period 1399-1509, and use the data gathered to answer a series of questions that will significantly enlarge our understanding go how the law was regarded and employed both in London, and more widely in late medieval England.

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 project's purpose is to edit and publish copies of all English episcopal acta - that is, bishops’ charters and documents - from 1066 to 1300 or until the beginning of bishops’ registers in each diocese; and to make them available both in print and electronically.

Apart from a few widely known examples, such as Edinburgh St Giles or Perth St John, the medieval parish churches of Scotland are very rarely dealt with in discussions of architecture in Britain in the Middle Ages. This is largely because they have never been systematically studied as a body, and there is surprisingly little knowledge of how much of medieval date survives. Indeed, it became clear some years ago that even the Church of Scotland itself was largely unaware of the medieval origins of the core of its stock of parish churches.