Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Recent Directions in Medieval Manuscript Study
- Another Fine Manuscript Mess: Authors, Editors and Readers of Piers Plowman
- A New Approach to the Witnesses and Text of the Canterbury Tales
- Prospecting in the Archives: Middle English Verse in Record Repositories
- Medieval Manuscripts and Electronic Media: Observations on Future Possibilities
- Representing the Middle English Manuscript
- Skins, Sheets and Quires
- Reconsidering the Auchinleck Manuscript
- Professional Readers of Langland at Home and Abroad: New Directions in the Political and Bureaucratic Codicology of Piers Plowman
- Professional Scribes? Identifying English Scribes Who Had a Hand in More Than One Manuscript
- Manuscript Production in Medieval Theatre: The German Carnival Plays
- The ‘Lancelot-Graal’ Project
- After Chaucer: Resituating Middle English Poetry in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The application of electronic media to the study of medieval manuscripts is a concept only recently considered by scholars and teachers of the Middle Ages. The implications for the shape of future scholarship are both enticing and hair-raising: the visionary proclaiming that the Internet will universalize access for anyone wishing to study or view the illuminated page, the Luddite gloomily mentioning the transitory nature of the Internet and commenting on the potential loss of access to actual material by serious scholars in the rush to reproduce manuscripts for all and sundry. This essay, meant to comfort the fearful and to engage technologic neophytes in the stunning possibilities afforded by electronic resources, includes a brief, and perhaps temporal, survey of manuscript sites available on the World Wide Web. In order to point to some benefits (and pitfalls) of Internet research, I then will examine more closely recent publicity about the Canterbury Tales Project, and finally, share some observations drawn from a multimedia class on medieval and Renaissance literature that I have been teaching for six consecutive semesters with Jeanine Meyer, a colleague in Information Systems, at Pace University in New York City. While I do not think electronic media can replace the process of going to libraries and looking at primary sources, of having the direct experience of observing illumination or transcribing a text, or of holding a medieval manuscript in one's hands, the promotional, publicizing and creative possibilities of the Internet or its related form, the CD-ROM, are not to be underestimated. Here I shall explore briefly the public and popular nature of the Internet, and its most powerful application, the Net as teaching tool.
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- Chapter
- Information
- New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript StudiesEssays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, pp. 53 - 64Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2000