Parker Library's Medieval Manuscripts on Web
by Andrew Herkovic and John Haeger
In June, the University of Cambridge received a $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support work at Cambridge and Stanford that will make hundreds of medieval manuscripts accessible on the Internet. The collaborative project, involving the Stanford University Libraries, the Cambridge University Library and Corpus Christi College, will digitize more than 500 manuscripts housed in Corpus Christi's Parker Library.
Matthew Parker (1504-1575) was a powerful figure of the English Reformation, and was largely responsible for the establishment of the Church of England as a national institution. Parker served both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and at various times was Master of Corpus Christi College, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, confessor to Anne Boleyn, and Archbishop of Canterbury. Parker's greatest legacy is his library, consisting of some 600 manuscripts and books bequeathed to Corpus Christi in 1574. Parker was an avid book collector, salvaging medieval manuscripts dispersed at the dissolution of the monasteries; he was particularly keen in preserving those materials that related to Anglo-Saxon England, motivated by his search for evidence of an ancient English-speaking church independent of Rome.
Although the library has drawn visiting scholars from around the world for more than a century, access to its materials has been limited due to space and preservation concerns. The Parker on the Web project will digitize more than 200,000 pages, including editions, translations and secondary works. The effort will also create a rich electronic research environment, with supporting tools such as flexible links between high-quality images of the manuscript pages and supporting texts. This will allow scholars to conduct both text-based and contextual research. The Mellon Foundation grant will fund the project's first production phase. The full project is expected to be completed in about four years.
A prototype of the Parker on the Web site, produced in the course of earlier pre-production work, contains high-resolution page images for two complete manuscripts (Parts I and II of Matthew Paris' Chronica Maiora), as well as an encoded version of M.R. James's 1912 catalog describing the entire collection, plus a selection of secondary texts. It is currently available on the web at:
http://parkerweb.stanford.edu/
Prototype development and related tasks were supported by earlier grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Scholars and students in all relevant disciplines - especially medieval, Renaissance and early modern studies, art history, paleography, church history, the history of the English language and Anglo-Saxon studies - are invited to visit the prototype site. Feedback on the prototype will help the project team as a full site is designed and implemented in the months ahead.
