Welcome to my manuscript research project blog on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 449.  I’ve been working with this manuscript since September 2011, and I’ll be using this blog as a way to organize my thoughts as I move from a research prospectus towards a more developed article.

My name is Scott Bevill, and I’m a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I work primarily in medieval literature where I focus on Anglo-Saxon language and poetry, Antiquarians and the recovery of Old English, and medievalisms throughout other eras.  The manuscript I’m working on for this project is a version of Ælfric’s Grammar and Glossary from the early 11th century, with a bit of a twist.  The first 41 folios of the original are missing and were reconstructed in an imitative hand by a 16th century scribe working under Archbishop Matthew Parker.  This document is a fascinating example of not only how some of the first scholars of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts approached the thorny issues of manuscript preservation and restoration, but also how they made direct use of ancient sources for their own contemporary purposes.

This page is going on-line just in time for my poster session at the MARCO Manuscript Workshop, so I’d like to take the time to thank the workshop organizer (and my advisor) Dr. Roy Liuzza for the chance to present my work and my professors for the seminar in paleography that made all this possible: Dr. Maura Lafferty and Dr. Thomas Burman. I’d also like to thank the Parker Library at Cambridge, Corpus Christi College and the web archive hosted by Stanford for the beautiful manuscript images that have proved indispensable.  Additionally, I’d like to thank the British Library for providing the images from Royal 15 B.xxii and the Cambridge University Library for the images of CUL Hh.1.10.

My poster from the workshop is linked below and it should provide a basic overview of one of the key issues regarding this manuscript.  Thanks for visiting the site and please feel free to contact me with any questions, comments, or suggestions.  I would love to hear from you!