About Manuscripts of the West Midlands
| Professor Wendy Scase |
| Dr Rebecca Farnham - Research Fellow |
| Dr Orietta Da Rold - Research Fellow |
| Dr Peter Robinson - Technical Director |
| Andrew West |
| Michelle Devereux |
| Patrick Gibbs |
Institutional Sponsors and Funding
The project is based in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham, under the auspices of the School of Humanities. Technical support is provided by the University of Birmingham Institute for Textual Studies and Electronic Editing. For the first twenty-seven months The Centre for Technology and the Arts, De Montfort University, was a partner in the project providing technical support until the relocation of the project partners to Birmingham. The project was funded for three years from 1 February 2003 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Resource Enhancement Scheme.
The manuscripts of the West Midlands have long been valuable resources for medieval English literary and book history. Research has focused on individual manuscripts or small groups. Surviving in large numbers, together these manuscripts potentially offer a resource for investigation of regionalism and other issues in manuscript culture. Systematic manuscript geography has hitherto been inhibited by lack of research tools for large-scale comparative work. This project aims to enhance the value of these resources for manuscript geography in particular and medieval literary and cultural history more generally by creating a new electronic research resource:
An Electronic Catalogue of Vernacular Manuscript Books of the Medieval West Midlands.
- To enhance the value of these medieval manuscripts, and of existing knowledge about them, for the history of the book and for medieval literary studies.
- To produce a new kind of research resource for medieval manuscript studies that is congruent with other new kinds of resource under development.
- To provide a model for the production of similar resources.
- To provide infrastructure for the development of manuscript geography.
