This digital scholarly project is designed as a learning resource for students of all levels of Old English, medieval Latin, paleography, and medieval translation, and also as a detailed resource for scholars. It provides full transcriptions & editions of a short medieval Latin text and its subsequent Old English translation, digital facsimiles of both manuscript versions, Latin and Old English glossaries, editorial commentary, and detailed discussion of the manuscripts and their contexts. It also showcases the full power of the Digital Mappa 2.0 platform for digital publication and scholarship.
At its center are two texts: a piece of Old English prose from the eleventh century, partly erased, of some forty-five lines, that itself is a direct translation of a late tenth-century Anglo-Latin version of the same content. These texts detail the allegorical significance of the ringing of church bells, and derive from redactions of the Liber Officialis, a massive ninth-century treatise by Amalarius of Metz which figurally treats a vast range of objects and rituals related to the celebration of Mass. The Belltokens project offers students and scholars entry into the evolution of material in early medieval England from a number of scholarly and pedagogical perspectives, and will be of use to those interested in learning about Old English, medieval Latin, manuscript and paleographical studies. In this edition, every single word of the Old English and Latin texts has been edited, and interlinked between its occurrence on the manuscript page, an edited transcription, a full glossary, and its linguistic analogue in the Latin or Old English witness, respectively. The edition provides a rare window into the process of vernacular translation, where an Old English scribe had to translate a Latin text that they themselves understood to be corrupted. It also serves as a companion to the Four Anglo-Carolingian Minitexts project, as they overlap in their studies of the Cotton Vespasian D. xv manuscript, its content, and background.
Using the Digital Mappa platform, this project suggests new ways to conceive of a digital edition of medieval materials – e.g. granularly linking moments of digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, translations and commentary, and also taking advantage of the capacity to link internally among the editions’ annotations and primary materials and then externally to other relevant online digital resources.
This peer-reviewed project publishes a set of editions for four recently identified short Carolingian Latin texts in a late tenth-century English manuscript; three of these texts were not previously known to be in England before the Norman Conquest. The editions themselves link together digital manuscript facsimiles, transcriptions, editorial commentary and modern English translations.
Mapping Metaphor is a project hosted by the University of Glasgow and represents the portion of the Mapping Metaphor project devoted particularly to the study of Old English. Deriving its data from the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, the project aims to provide useful data and data visualizations that map words and their usage as metaphors in Old English. The project presents over 70,000 metaphorical words in several visual formats. Users can also see which metaphorical words pair most frequently with a variety of statistical analyses.
The project has several tutorials and glossaries that teach a user how to use the database. Though the data itself is not available for download, the project includes several modes of searching its findings.
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.
Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland is a project that aims to uncover Old English place names in southern Scotland. Old English is the predecessor to both Middle English and Scots, and the project relies upon place names to provide evidence of the early Northumbrian dialect of the language. As of 2020, the database includes a list of over 500 place names in southern Scotland derived from Old English. Users can view the list of places alphabetically, by map, or through advanced searching for keywords and other salient qualities. Places can be displays on a map and frequently include a description of the place-name in addition to bibliography where available.
Users can download all project data through its API, and all data is made available under a Creative Commons license. One can also find a glossary of early place terms in addition to links to other projects with similar goals.
Published by the University of Glasgow, the Thesaurus of Old English Project is an online resource that thematically arranges definitions of terms. Drawing from standard dictionaries of Old English, the project has created thematic entries that are cross referenced with one another. The project is fully searchable; while searching, a user may go directly to the thesaurus’ data or be directed off-site to one of the major dictionaries of Old English. The project has well over 40,000 entries.
Though free to use for individual users, the project makes explicit that large-scale use of data from the project is not allowed. Should users wish to analyze the Thesaurus’ corpus data, they should contact the creators.
