This conference aims to bring together researchers applying network analysis to pre-modern manuscripts and manuscript texts. Key topics include:

• Theoretical reflections on the challenges and advantages of applying network analysis, including social network analysis, to pre-modern written cultures;
• Application of network analysis to cor…[Read more]

The twelve volumes of the Codices latini antiquiores provide a rich trove of data about the earliest methods of citation-marking in the Latin West. This data indicates that citations from the Bible began to be marked in Christian books by the fifth century. Originally, the preferred method of such marking was by indentation of cited material, but…[Read more]

Manuscript fragment Chicago, Newberry Library, Masi Fragm. 14 was previously misidentified as containing an unknown sermon or biblical excerpts. It is, in fact, a remnant of large-format deluxe Bible containing a set of Spanish prefaces to the Pauline epistles. These prefaces identify the deluxe codex as a descendant of a Theodulf Bible, a…[Read more]

Despite its fame as the pre-eminent medieval Icelandic saga, Njáls saga lacks a stemma comprehending all the saga’s manuscripts: only the vellum manuscripts have been surveyed in detail. As part of the Variance of Njáls saga (Breytileki Njáls sögu) project, we produced a stemma of nearly all witnesses to chapters 44, 86, and 142. This affor…[Read more]

‘ “You Tempt me Grievously to a Mythological Essay”: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Correspondence with Arthur Ransome’, edits a letter from Tolkien to Ransome held in the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds. On December 13th 1937, the celebrated children’s author Arthur Ransome wrote to J. R. R. Tolkien with a few comments on Tolkien’s newly publi…[Read more]

‘The Instability of Place-names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy’ makes its contributions in three main areas, pragmatic, theoretical and historical:

* Pragmatic: this is an ‘open source’ paper. Its findings arise from several datasets which are published online, primarily at htt…[Read more]

‘A gente Anglorum appellatur: The Evidence of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum for the Replacement of Roman Names by English Ones During the Early Anglo-Saxon Period’ argues that Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica contains unnoticed evidence for the processes of transition from Roman to Anglo-Saxon toponymy in early Anglo-Saxon England. B…[Read more]

This article seeks better to understand the processes whereby English and, to a lesser extent, Gaelic, expanded in early medieval Britain at the expense of the p-Celtic dialects. Most research has tried to examine this process in its earliest, prehistoric phases, but the present study focuses on the (near-)contemporary evidence for its seventh-…[Read more]

‘On the Etymology of Adel’ is a light-hearted tour of the historiography of the etymology of Adel, a parish in North Leeds, resisting the twentieth-century concensus of Old English adela (‘filth, dirt, dirty place; foul filth; bilge-water’ and possibly even ‘sewer, privy’) in favour of *Eada-lēah (‘Eada’s lea’), suggested in 1910 by F. W. Moorman.