The Word is Sacred, Sacred is the Word


Book Description

Demonstrates the wealth and diversity of India's manuscript traditions and communicates a lasting impression of India as a multifarious and multicultural society that holds knowledge and knowledge systems in high regard. This title introduces manuscripts, books, and related documents that span a timescale of almost two millennia of Indian history. The Word is Sacred; Sacred is The Word: The Indian Manuscript Tradition' sets out to demonstrate the wealth and diversity of India's manuscript traditions and to communicate a lasting impression of India as a'










Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in Houghton Library, Harvard University


Book Description

The first full account of North America’s largest collection of traditional Irish-language manuscripts. Harvard University has the largest collection of Irish-language codices in North America, held in Houghton Library, its rare book repository. The manuscripts are a part of the age-old heritage of Irish book production, dating to the early Middle Ages. Handwritten works in Houghton contain versions of medieval poetry and sagas, recopied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to which period most of the library’s documents belong. Contemporary writings from that time, as well as ones by the post-Famine Irish immigrant community in the United States, are included. This catalogue describes the collection in full for the first time and will be an invaluable aid to research on Irish and Irish American cultural and literary output. The author’s introduction examines how the collection was formed. This untold story is an important chapter in America’s intellectual history, reflecting a phase of unprecedented expansion in Harvard University’s scholarship and teaching during the early twentieth century when the institution’s program of studies began to accommodate an increasing range of European languages and literatures and their sources. This indispensable guide to a major repository’s records of the Irish past, and of America’s Irish diaspora, will interest specialists in early and post-medieval codices. It should prove of relevance as well to scholars and students of comparative literature, cultural studies, and Irish and Irish American history.







A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts of Merton College, Oxford


Book Description

Descriptive catalogue provides a crucial guide to one of the most important repositories of medieval manuscrips. Merton College, Oxford, one of the oldest colleges in the University, was founded in 1264. Its library contains some 328 complete medieval manuscript books (plus several hundred fragments in, or extracted from, the bindings of early printed books), dating from the ninth to the late fifteenth century. Most of them came to the College before the Reformation, and are the remains of its medieval collection, part of which was chained in the library, part in circulation amongst the Fellowship. Together with the College's surviving medieval archive, which includes no fewer than twenty-three book-lists, this material provides an important window on intellectual life at the University of Oxford between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the manufacture, acquisition and use of the books that supported it. This first catalogue of the medieval manuscripts since 1852 offers full and detailed descriptions of each item, supported by a colour frontispiece, 50 colour plates, and 107 black and white plates. Its introduction provides the first detailed history of Merton's medieval library, including an account of the building anddesign of the College's 'Old Library', built in the 1370s, western Europe's oldest library room still in use today; and the volume is completed with four appendices (including a comprehensive set of extracts from the College's medieval account rolls referring to its books and library) and two indexes. RODNEY M. THOMSON is Professor of History and Honorary Research Associate in the School of History and Classics, University of Tasmania.







Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library


Book Description

This catalogue describes MSS 1-247 and 298 in the Chapter Library of Lincoln Cathedral, plus ten former Lincoln MSS now elsewhere. About half of the MSS were part of the cathedral's medieval Library; nearly all the rest came therebefore the late seventeenth century. Among the MSS, which date from the eighth to the early sixteenth century, are biblical commentaries and sermons, works of pastoral theology and an important corpus of Middle English texts, including the famous Thornton Romances. A group of MSS written at the Cathedral c.1100 is notable for its distinctive decoration. The Catalogue is preceded by a history of the Cathedral Library, based on the rich documentaryevidence, which includes two medieval catalogues. The plates illustrate bindings, ownership marks, important decoration and noteworthy script, including samples from all signed and dated books.