Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past

This contribution explores the mechanisms by which the Benedictine foundation of Bury St Edmunds sought to legitimise and preserve their spurious pre-Conquest privileges and holdings throughout the Middle Ages. The archive is extraordinary in terms of the large number of surviving registers and cartularies which contain copies of Anglo-Saxon charters, many of which are wholly or partly in Old English. The essay charts the changing use to which these ancient documents were put in response to threats to the foundation's continued enjoyment of its liberties. The focus throughout the essay is to demonstrate how pragmatic considerations at every stage affects the development of the archive and the ways in which these linguistically challenging texts were presented, re-presented, and represented during the Abbey’s history

The Description of Britain

The LEME Corpus Manual has an editorial introduction, indexes of subjects, proper names, and chronology, a primary bibliography of LEME corpus texts, as well as English language texts not included in the Corpus, a description of the XML encoding and of lemmatization and source analysis tools. The appendix includes lists of language abbreviations and of abbreviations for parts of speech.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaCanada Foundation for InnovationUniversity of Toronto LibrariesUniversity of Toronto PressInformation & Instructional Technology, Faculty of Arts and Science, University of Toront

Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, monachi Cestrensis

Ranulf Higden (d.1364) was a monk at the abbey of St Werburgh in Chester. His most important literary work is this universal chronicle, which survives in over a hundred Latin manuscripts, testifying to its popularity. The earliest version of it dates from 1327, but Higden continued writing until his death, expanding and updating the text. It was also continued in other monastic houses, most importantly by John Malvern of Worcester. The English translation made by John Trevisa in the 1380s was also widely circulated and is included in this work, published in nine volumes for the Rolls Series between 1865 and 1886. The chronicle shows how fourteenth-century scholars understood world history and geography. Volume 2 contains the remainder of Book 1, on the description of Britain, and twenty-eight chapters of Book 2, on the early history of the world to the reign of Saul in Israel.</jats:p

BMC 64--Almond-shaped Mappa Mundi by Ranulf Higden circa 1350

An example of Higden’s mandorla (almond-shaped) mappa mundi, or medieval map of the world and is oriented with East at the top. It uses place names to show relative positions and locations and virtually no attempt to draw the actual landmasses or bodies of water. Original map in the collections of the British Library, Royal MS. 14 C.xii, fol. 9v.https://digitalmaine.com/arc_baxter/1084/thumbnail.jp

BMC 64--Almond-shaped Mappa Mundi by Ranulf Higden circa 1350

An example of Higden’s mandorla (almond-shaped) mappa mundi, or medieval map of the world and is oriented with East at the top. It uses place names to show relative positions and locations and virtually no attempt to draw the actual landmasses or bodies of water. Original map in the collections of the British Library, Royal MS. 14 C.xii, fol. 9v.https://digitalmaine.com/arc_baxter/1084/thumbnail.jp

Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, monachi Cestrensis

Ranulf Higden (d.1364) was a monk at the abbey of St Werburgh in Chester. His most important literary work is this universal chronicle, which survives in over a hundred Latin manuscripts, testifying to its popularity. The earliest version of it dates from 1327, but Higden continued writing until his death, expanding and updating the text. It was also continued in other monastic houses, most importantly by John Malvern of Worcester. The English translation made by John Trevisa in the 1380s was also widely circulated and is included in this work, published in nine volumes between 1865 and 1886. The chronicle shows how fourteenth-century scholars understood world history and geography. Volume 9 contains the continuation partly written by John Malvern, with the section from 1381 to 1394 now believed to have been written at Westminster. Glossaries and indexes to the entire work are also included.</jats:p