Link: https://oepoetryfacsimile.org/
Project Status: Ongoing
Publication Date: 2019
The premise of the Old English Poetry in Facsimile project is simple: produce a comprehensive collection of open-access, scholarly and rigorous digital facsimile editions that present digital manuscript images, transcriptions and translations of Old English poetry all in one place, to better allow people to study and explore these works. To do so, the project takes advantage of the new Digital Mappa 2.0 platform, which allows editors to make links and annotations across individual moments on related images and texts, and users to open and view multiple items side by side.
This project combines older editorial traditions with “bigger data” resources and research for more comprehensive lexical, dialectal and orthographic editorial readings.
Editions on this site practice “restorative retention” – privileging the text as written over emendation wherever possible, with an emphasis on description rather than prescription – in an effort to better preserve and understand linguistic and poetic heterogeneity in early medieval England.
Over 300 editions of Old English verse have been published, including examples of every genre: psalms, riddles, inscribed objects, charms, heroic verse, prayers, Boethian meters, wisdom poetry, marginal micro-texts, chronicle poems, homiletic verse, dialogues, and others.
Resource details:
Resource Type: Catalog, Downloadable data, Images, Manuscripts/Facsimiles, Searchable Database, Text: Medieval
License: Creative Commons, No Fee
Medieval content details:
Dates: 500 - 1066
Subject: Codicology, Diplomatics, Early English Peoples, Early Medieval England, Literature, Manuscript Decoration/Illumination, Manuscript Studies, Material Culture, Old English, Paleography
Type/Genre of Medieval Primary Source Material: Art and Artifacts, Manuscripts, Material Evidence, Textual Evidence
Geopolitical Region: British Isles and Ireland, England, Europe
Original Language: English, Old English