The Electronic Grosseteste

Dr James Ginther, of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds, sees similarities in the process of creating medieval manuscripts and electronic texts. Unlike the relatively mechanical process of creating a modern printed text, the appearance of the medieval manuscript and the electronic book is very much dependent on not just the author, but the scribe or designer who produces the parchment or website. To Dr Ginther therefore, the creation of an electronic resource featuring printed editions transcribed copies of the manuscripts of the thirteenth-century theologian Robert Grosseteste, is an entirely appropriate scholarly mission. During his lifetime, Grosseteste (ca. 1170-1253) was an avid participant in European intellectual life. His early education had given him a taste for natural philosophy. He began producing texts on the liberal arts, and mainly on astronomy and cosmology. The digital resource was created by manual transcription by a team of five graduate students, resulting in a corpus of 825 pages and over 225,000 words. The corrected texts were then prepared in the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) format suitable for distribution on the web. The public domain texts have been prepared for electronic dissemination by using HTML, but the copyrighted texts will exist only in the more sophisticated eXtensible Markup Language (XML).