Project Team

Principal Investigator:

Dr Estelle Stubbs, School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, The University of Sheffield

Technical Development:

HRI Digital, University of Sheffield, in association with Stanford University Libraries

Advisory Group

Cluster Coordinator:

Alexandra Gillespie (Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto)

Linne Mooney (Professor of Medieval English Palaeography, University of York)
Wendy Scase (Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham)
Andrew Prescott (Professor of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London)
Kari Anne Rand (Professor of English, University of Oslo)
Jonathan Hsy (Assistant Professor of English, The George Washington University)

Project Background

University of Toronto

The aim of the projects in the University of Toronto’s ‘Making Medieval Manuscripts’ cluster is to use and refine new as well as existing digital technologies to advance our knowledge about the individuals, institutions and communities in both the medieval and the early modern periods, which made and used medieval books.
In the Digital Humanities, proof-of-concept demonstrations involving tools and methodologies in interoperating environments are sometimes presented as scholarship, whereas the Toronto projects seek to raise the scholarly profile of digital manuscript collections and tap into the enormous research energy in the field of book history at this present time, specifically in the study of the medieval book. This should provide the opportunity to encourage the addition of affiliated research from influential scholars working in the fields of English literary studies, history, art history, medieval Anglo-French and Latin studies, palaeography, codicology and historical linguistics.

The Sheffield Networks Project

Work at Sheffield will focus on the identification of scribal hands and the provenance of a number of manuscripts in the Parker on the Web collection which were either produced or used in London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and which made their way into Parker’s collection. The hypothesis to be tested is that at this period, London became a ‘hub’ for the production and circulation of medieval books. The activities of manuscript producers and consumers helped to fashion and influence the political, social, religious and literary culture of medieval England and the complex social networks thus created will be formally documented. This ‘cultural mapping’ will be plotted using network software developed by HRI Digital and made available for enhancement by other scholars in the future.