http://www.sla.purdue.edu/medieval-studies/Corpus/corphome.htm

Corpus of Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art

Contents

Introduction

In the field of Medieval Studies where scholars, teachers, and students often study evidence drawn from collateral disciplines and media, there is a pressing need for improved access to the visual dimensions of culture. The need for pictorial or iconographic documentation is particularly evident in Anglo-Saxon studies, a field in which, given the relative paucity of surviving written documents, artistic and archaeological finds are important reflections of the values, attitudes, and tastes of early English society. The ravages of time, neglect, censorious zeal, and later restoration have often reduced the monumental art forms---wall painting, sculpture, and stained glass---to shadows of their former selves, if they survive at all. Manuscripts, by contrast, often preserve in pristine condition miniatures or illustrations, offering to researchers a vast visual encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Accessing the decorative and iconographic contents of manuscripts produced or owned in the British Isles, c. 675 to c. 1100, has been complicated by the lack of a single finding aid. Now, however, thanks to technological developments in hypertext and the World Wide Web, researchers can quickly search and retrieve information about hundreds of manuscripts. The current inventory of manuscripts, it should be noted, is under construction, and new entries will be added once they are converted into HTML. Although no images are yet available, it is our goal to provide scanned photographs in the future.

The Corpus Project

CORPUS is an international, collaborative project that aims to document verbally and pictorially the illumination and major decoration of manuscripts produced or owned in the British Isles, from circa 675 to circa 1100 A.D.

CORPUS has five objectives:

To maintain a database of information containing a catalogue entry for each of the 257 manuscripts surveyed so far. Each entry contains codicological, iconographic, and bibliographic information, together with an inventory of the illumination or illustration and the major decoration within the manuscript. Many entries have been checked against the manuscripts themselves, and continue to be revised as new research refines knowledge of the sources and their contexts. The electronic form of the database makes it possible easily to revise and to expand its information. It forms an indispensable reference tool for many disciplines.
To document the corpus photographically. Although the electronic database contains no images, its photo-bibliography guides researchers to published sources for most of the items. It is highly desirable that the corpus be published in full on CD-ROM. Until this becomes feasible, we are encouraging the traditional publication of photographs of manuscripts. The publication of 454 photographs in Thomas H. Ohlgren s Anglo-Saxon Textual Illustration (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992) is the first of two important steps in this direction. A second major publication is Mildred Budny's two-volume Insular, Anglo-Saxon, and Early Anglo-Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which will be issued soon by Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University. This work presents 766 photographs: 747 in black-and-white and 19 in color.
To fill the gaps in CORPUS we are encouraging scholars, particularly graduate students, to undertake studies of neglected manuscripts or forms of decoration and illustration. To this end two sessions on the CORPUS Project were held at the 1993 meeting of the International Congress on Medieval Studies. The sessions were designed as a systematic survey of research on manuscript codicology and art. Each of the presenters --- Mildred Budny, M.J. Toswell, Kathleen Openshaw, Jane Rosenthal, Herbert Broderick, Gernot Wieland, Marilyn Deegan, and Richard Gameson --- was assigned a particular group of manuscripts: mss. at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; psalters; liturgical mss.; gospel books; Old Testament mss.; scientific mss.; and early Anglo-Norman mss. The presentations shared three common goals: 1) to define the category of manuscripts (location, genre, or period); 2) to survey published scholarship; and 3) to assess what specific work needed to be done to complete the documentation of each grouping or category. These papers were published in the Old English Newsletter, vols. 28.1 and 28.3.
To establish cooperation and exchanges of information with projects working on the same or similar materials: the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture; Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile, the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, the Seminar in the History of the Book to 1500, the UCLA Index of Medieval Medical Images, and the Japan Society for Medieval English Studies. Close contacts with some of these groups have already been established.
To adopt an administrative structure consisting of an Administrative Committee, an Advisory Committee, and a group of Special Consultants.

CORPUS Committee Members

Administrative Committee

Thomas H. Ohlgren (Chair, Medieval Studies, Purdue University)

Mildred Budny (Independent Scholar, Princeton, NJ)

Advisory Committee

J.J.G. Alexander (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)

Helmut Gneuss (Institut f?r Englische Philologie der Universit?t M?nchen)

Jane Rosenthal (Columbia University)

Special Consultants

Richard N. Bailey (University of Newcastle)

Carl T. Berkhout (University of Arizona)

Robert Boenig (Texas A&M University)

Linda Brownrigg (Oxford & Los Altos Hills, California)

Leonard E. Boyle (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

Herbert Broderick III (City University of New York)

Michelle P. Brown (British Library, London)

Brendan Cassidy (Index of Christian Art, Princeton)

John Contreni (Purdue University)

Marilyn Deegan (Oxford Computing Centre)

A. N. Doane (University of Winconsin at Madison)

Michael Evans (Warburg Institute, University of London)

Carol A. Farr (University of Alabama at Huntsville)

Richard Gameson (University of Kent, Canterbury)

Malcolm Godden (Pembroke College, Oxford)

Timothy Graham (Rawlinson Center, Western Michigan University)

George D.S. Henderson (Cambridge University)

John Higgitt (University of Edinburgh)

Constance Hill (Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art)

Mark Infusino (University of California at Los Angeles)

Louis Jordan (University of Notre Dame)

Catherine Karkov (Miami University, Ohio)

Thomas E. Kelly (Paris, France)

Simon D. Keynes (Trinity College, Cambridge)

Henry Mayr-Harting (St. Peter's College, Oxford)

Lawrence Nees (University of Delaware)

Carol Neuman de Vegvar (Ohio Wesleyan University)

Jennifer L O'Reilly (University of Cork, Ireland)

Malcolm Parkes (Keble College, Oxford)

Andrew Prescott (British Library, London)

Michael Ryan (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin)

Thomas H. Seiler (Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University)

Patricia Stirnemann (Institut de Recherche d'Histoire des Textes, Paris)

William Stonemann (Shiede Library, Princeton University)

Paul Szarmach (Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University)

Elizabeth C. Teviotdale (Getty Museum)

M. Jane Toswell (University of Western Ontario)

William Voelkle (Pierpont Morgan Library)

Leslie E. Webster (British Museum, London)

Martin Werner (Temple University)

Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley (Georgetown University)

Gernot Wieland (University of British Columbia)

David M. Wilson (Isle of Man)

Patrick Wormald (Christ Church, Oxford)

Charles Wright (University of Illinois)

Sample Entries

For information about the history, scope, and format of the following descriptions, see Thomas H. Ohlgren, Insular and Anglo-Saxon Illuminated Manuscripts: An Iconographic Catalogue (New York and London, 1986). It is important to note that the indexes to the manuscripts, authors and titles, places of origin and provenance, dates, and iconographic contents are not available in the WWW version. To obtain information about the fully-featured version of CORPUS, contact Thomas H. Ohlgren at tohlgren@gte.net.

Last Updated on August 11, 1996 by Thomas H Ohlgren and William I. Bormann