A digital edition of the Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.a.1)

The Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet.a.1) is the biggest and most important surviving late medieval English manuscript. An extensive collection of Middle English religious literature (and some French and Latin), and lavishly illuminated, it is potentially an incomparable resource for art historians, codicologists, palaeographers, literary and cultural historians, linguists, and editors. However, access is currently extremely limited for conservation reasons and because of the sheer scale of the volume (the text is two and a half as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace). The Vernon Manuscript Project will create a Digital Edition of the manuscript published on DVD in the Bodleian Digital Texts series (The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile Edition of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet.a.1, ed. by Wendy Scase, Bodleian Digital Texts 3 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, forthcoming, 2010). Providing high quality full-colour images linked to searchable descriptions and transcriptions of every page, the Digital Edition will transform the manuscript as a research resource. The edition will include essays on codicology, palaeography, production, provenance, and related manuscripts by A. I. Doyle; on language by Simon Horobin and Jeremy J. Smith; on decoration and illumination by Rebecca Farnham; and an overview of the manuscript and its contents by Wendy Scase.

Project Aims

To enhance knowledge and understanding of the Vernon Manuscript: contents; textual and codicological relations; production and reception
To enhance knowledge and understanding of problems in medieval English literature and culture, palaeography, codicology, dialectology and historical linguistics, editing, art and book history
To enhance access to the Vernon Manuscript by the research community and others whilst addressing conservation concerns
To provide a model for the production of electronic facsimiles of large manuscripts