Fragmentarium
Fragmentarium is an online database to collect and collate fragments of medieval manuscripts making them available to researchers and historians worldwide. It is an international collaboration of major libraries and collections including the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Martin Schøyen Collection, Bavarian State Library, Harvard and the Vatican, it is based in Switzerland and the project's current director is Professor Christoph Flüeler from the University of Fribourg and the Virtual Manuscript Library, Switzerland. The Fragmentarium project was first proposed in October 2013 and the first planning meeting took place in Cologny in 2014, it was supported by representatives of 12 institutions, its goal being to study the field of manuscript fragment research and look at worldwide cataloguing standards. Fragmentarium was launched on 1 September 2017, by the Medieval Institute of the University of Fribourg at Abbey Library of St. Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Historians and librarians are now able to upload images to the Fragmentarium where they will be made available for research and encouraged to publish images under a Creative Commons public domain license.
The library operates as a closed system and will open up public resources from 2018. Fragmentarium follows an established Swiss codex digitisation system known as e-codices and aims to promote cooperative research and discussion between researchers and scholars from multiple institutions; as more fragments are uploaded it will be possible to reunite fragments which have become separated and compare analyses of similar manuscript pieces. Some fragments have been analysed using the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source to identify pigments, creating a unique "fingerprint" to enable it to be matched to corresponding fragments elsewhere in the world and track their journey with “the potential to learn more about trade routes, historic mining sites, the regional use of pigments and ingredients”. Other fragments have been identified as "recycled" into covers or bindings for documents, a practice, prevalent in the 15th to 17th century; the system is useful in documenting and digitally preserving partial manuscripts which have been damaged by neglect or fire as in the Cotton library fire of 1731, or by deliberate destruction as occurred in the reformation in Scandinavia.
In more recent times, in the 1950s and 1960s medieval manuscripts were deliberately divided in order to attract a higher return on resale values and have subsequently become lost to researchers: Fragmentarium hopes to reunite them. Flüeler has estimated that around 90% of extant fragments are "lost" in archives. In 2018 Fragmentarium published Fragmentology, described as a journal for the study of medieval manuscript fragments. Access to the library is free of charge; as of 2017 the following institutions are partner participants in Fragmentarium: Abbey library of Saint Gall Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Bibliothèque nationale de France Bodleian Library in association with St Edmund Hall, Oxford University The British Library Center for History and Palaeography of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation Harvard University Herzog August Library Martin Schøyen Collection, Oslo Medieval Academy of America Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Stanford University Libraries Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig Università degli Studi di Cassino Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig University of Pennsylvania LibrariesFragmentarium is financially supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Zeno-Karl-Schindler Foundation.
Conservation and restoration of illuminated manuscripts Digital Scriptorium Palimpsest Fragmentarium website
Nowell Codex
The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton Vitellius A.xv, one of the four major Anglo-Saxon poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf. In addition to this, it contains first a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher the more complete texts Wonders of the East and Letters of Alexander to Aristotle, after Beowulf, a poetic translation of Judith. Due to the fame of Beowulf, the Nowell codex is sometimes known as the Beowulf manuscript; the manuscript is located within the British Library with the rest of the Cotton collection. The current codex is a composite of at least two manuscripts; the main division is into two distinct books which were not bound together until the 17th century. The first of these owned by Southwick Priory in Hampshire, dates from the 12th century and contains four works of prose, it is the second, older manuscript, more famous. This second manuscript is known as the Nowell codex, after the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose name is inscribed on its first page.
At some point it was combined with the first codex. It was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton. In his library, it was placed on the first shelf as the 15th manuscript of the bookcase that had a bust of the Emperor Vitellius, giving the collection its name; the Nowell codex is dated around the turn of the first millennium. Recent editions have specified a probable date in the decade after 1000; the Nowell Codex was written in two hands. The first extends from the beginning of the manuscript as far as the word scyran in line 1939 of Beowulf. Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie notes that although the scribes behind the two hands are contemporary, they differ markedly in appearance, the second hand appearing "to belong to an older school of insular writing than its companion hand."The volume was damaged in 1731 when a fire destroyed the Cotton library. While the volume itself survived, the edges of the pages were badly scorched. Three pages, fol. 182a, fol. 182b and fol. 201b are in notably bad shape, showing more damage than can be explained by the Cottonian fire, with many words faded or illegible, some of which are far from the edges of the leaf.
Van Kirk Dobbie suggests the damage to the third of these pages was due to Beowulf being separated from Judith prior to the 17th century, fol. 201b was on the outside of the manuscript with no binding to protect it. But he offers no explanation for the condition of the first two pages; the damage to the Nowell Codex can be overcome to different degrees. The three pages in bad shape mentioned above have been studied under ultraviolet light, the resulting information has been published. Three modern transcriptions of parts of this portion of this manuscript are known. Two of these transcriptions, known as A and B, were made under the direction of the first editor of Beowulf, Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin in the years 1786-1787 after the Cottonian fire yet before the manuscript had deteriorated as far as it presently has. Transcript A was made by an unidentified professional copyist, while B was made by Thorkelin himself; the third transcript is of the Judith poem and was made by Franciscus Junius between 1621 and 1651.
A careful copy of the poem with only occasional errors, Junius' transcription preserves the text of the poem before it suffered fire damage. The first codex contains four works of Old English prose: a copy of Alfred's translation of Augustine's Soliloquies, a translation of the Gospel of Nicodemus, the prose Solomon and Saturn, a fragment of a life of Saint Quentin; the second codex begins with three prose works: a life of Saint Christopher, Wonders of the East, a translation of a Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. These are followed by Beowulf, which takes up the bulk of the volume, Judith, a poetic retelling of part of the book of Judith. Great wear on the final page of Beowulf and other manuscript factors such as wormhole patterns indicate Judith was not the last part of the manuscript, though it is in the same hand as the parts of Beowulf; the somewhat eclectic contents of this codex have led to much critical debate over why these particular works were chosen for inclusion. One theory which has gained considerable currency is that the compiler saw a thematic link: all five works deal to some extent with monsters or monstrous behaviour.
Anglo-Saxon literature Beowulf Caedmon manuscript Exeter Book Liber Monstrorum Vercelli Book R. D. Fulk, ed. and trans. The Beowulf Manuscript: Complete Texts and The Fight at Finnsburg. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 2010. Kiernan, Kevin. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. Revised edition. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press. 1996. Published by Rutgers, State University of New Jersey Press, 1981. Full digital coverage of the manuscript on the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website
Cotton Genesis
The Cotton Genesis is a 4th- or 5th-century Greek Illuminated manuscript copy of the Book of Genesis. It was a luxury manuscript with many miniatures, it is one of the oldest illustrated biblical codices to survive to the modern period. Most of the manuscript was destroyed in the Cotton library fire in 1731, leaving only eighteen charred, shrunken scraps of vellum. From the remnants, the manuscript appears to have been more than 440 pages with 340-360 illustrations that were framed and inserted into the text column. Many miniatures were copied in the 17th century and are now in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; the manuscript contains the text of the Book of Genesis on 35 parchment leaves, with numerous lacunae. The original codex contained 165 leaves, in the quarto size, it is written in one column per page, in 27-30 letters per line. The nomina sacra are written in an abbreviated forms: ΚΣ, ΚΝ, ΘΣ, ΘΝ, for κυριος, κυριον, θεος, θεον, it contains some illustrations. The miniatures were executed in a late antique style.
Herbert Kessler and Kurt Weitzmann argue that the manuscript was produced in Alexandria, as it exhibits stylistic similarities to other Alexandrian works such as the Charioteer Papyrus. According to Tischendorf it was written in the 5th century; the Cotton Genesis appears to have been used in the 1220s as the basis for the design of 110 mosaic panels in the atrium of St Mark's Basilica in Venice after it was brought to Venice following the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The manuscript arrived in England, was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton in the 17th century, his collection passed to the British Museum. It was brought from Philippi by two Greek bishops, who presented it to King Henry VIII, whom they informed that tradition reported it to have been the identical copy which had belonged to Origen. In 1731, while the codex was at Ashburnham House with the rest of the collection, it was reduced by fire to a heap of charred and shrivelled leaves. Afterwards the rest of the codex was divided in two parts.
One part of it was moved to another to the Bodleian Library. Until the middle of the 19th century it was thought to be the oldest manuscript of the Septuagint. According to Thomas Hartwell Horne it was not only the most ancient but the most correct manuscript, extant. According to Swete the manuscript before the fire had been imperfect. Most of the London fragments of the codex were deciphered and published by Constantin von Tischendorf in 1857. Vienna Genesis – another illuminated Greek manuscript of the Book of Genesis Early Christian art and architecture Calkins, Robert G. Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983. Alfred Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments, für das Septuaginta-Unternehmen, Göttingen 1914, p. 107-108. Constantin von Tischendorf, Monumenta sacra inedita, XIII, XXII-XXXVI. Weitzmann, Kurt, ed. Age of spirituality: late antique and early Christian art, third to seventh century, no. 408-409, 1979, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ISBN 9780870991790 Weitzmann, Kurt.
Late Antique and Early Christian Book Illumination. New York: George Braziller, 1977. Weitzmann and Herbert L. Kessler; the Cotton Genesis: British Library, Codex Cotton Otho B VI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. British Library catalogue entry
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of 209,331 km2, it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island, the ninth-largest island in the world. In 2011, Great Britain had a population of about 61 million people, making it the world's third-most populous island after Java in Indonesia and Honshu in Japan; the island of Ireland is situated to the west of Great Britain, together these islands, along with over 1,000 smaller surrounding islands, form the British Isles archipelago. The island is dominated by a maritime climate with quite narrow temperature differences between seasons. Politically, Great Britain is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, constitutes most of its territory. Most of England and Wales are on the island; the term "Great Britain" is used to include the whole of England and Wales including their component adjoining islands. A single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the union of the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland by the 1707 Acts of Union.
In 1801, Great Britain united with the neighbouring Kingdom of Ireland, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, renamed the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" after the Irish Free State seceded in 1922. The archipelago has been referred to by a single name for over 2000 years: the term'British Isles' derives from terms used by classical geographers to describe this island group. By 50 BC Greek geographers were using equivalents of Prettanikē as a collective name for the British Isles. However, with the Roman conquest of Britain the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, Roman-occupied Britain south of Caledonia; the earliest known name for Great Britain is Albion or insula Albionum, from either the Latin albus meaning "white" or the "island of the Albiones". The oldest mention of terms related to Great Britain was by Aristotle, or by Pseudo-Aristotle, in his text On the Universe, Vol. III. To quote his works, "There are two large islands in it, called the British Isles and Ierne".
Pliny the Elder in his Natural History records of Great Britain: "Its former name was Albion. Old French Bretaigne and Middle English Bretayne, Breteyne; the French form replaced the Old English Breoton, Bryten, Breten. Britannia was used by the Romans from the 1st century BC for the British Isles taken together, it is derived from the travel writings of the Pytheas around 320 BC, which described various islands in the North Atlantic as far north as Thule. Marcian of Heraclea, in his Periplus maris exteri, described the island group as αἱ Πρεττανικαὶ νῆσοι; the peoples of these islands of Prettanike were called the Priteni or Pretani. Priteni is the source of the Welsh language term Prydain, which has the same source as the Goidelic term Cruithne used to refer to the early Brythonic-speaking inhabitants of Ireland; the latter were called Picts or Caledonians by the Romans. Greek historians Diodorus of Sicily and Strabo preserved variants of Prettanike from the work of Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia, who travelled from his home in Hellenistic southern Gaul to Britain in the 4th century BC.
The term used by Pytheas may derive from a Celtic word meaning "the painted ones" or "the tattooed folk" in reference to body decorations. The Greco-Egyptian scientist Ptolemy referred to the larger island as great Britain and to Ireland as little Britain in his work Almagest. In his work, Geography, he gave the islands the names Alwion and Mona, suggesting these may have been the names of the individual islands not known to him at the time of writing Almagest; the name Albion appears to have fallen out of use sometime after the Roman conquest of Britain, after which Britain became the more commonplace name for the island. After the Anglo-Saxon period, Britain was used as a historical term only. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudohistorical Historia Regum Britanniae refers to the island as Britannia major, to distinguish it from Britannia minor, the continental region which approximates to modern Brittany, settled in the fifth and sixth centuries by migrants from Britain; the term Great Britain was first used in 1474, in the instrument drawing up the proposal for a marriage between Cecily the daughter of Edward IV of England, James the son of James III of Scotland, which described it as "this Nobill Isle, callit Gret Britanee".
It was used again in 1604, when King James VI and I styled himself "King of Great Brittaine and Ireland". Great Britain refers geographically to the island of Great Britain, it is often used to refer politically to the whole of England and Wales, including their smaller off shore islands. While it is sometimes used to refer to the whole of the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, this is not correct. Britain can refer to either all island
Edward Coke
Sir Edward Coke was an English barrister and politician, considered to be the greatest jurist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Born into an upper-class family, Coke was educated at Trinity College, before leaving to study at the Inner Temple, where he was called to the Bar on 20 April 1578; as a barrister he took part in several notable cases, including Slade's Case, before earning enough political favour to be elected to Parliament, where he served first as Solicitor General and as Speaker of the House of Commons. Following a promotion to Attorney General he led the prosecution in several notable cases, including those against Robert Devereux, Sir Walter Raleigh, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators; as a reward for his services he was first knighted and made Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. As Chief Justice, Coke restricted the use of the ex officio oath and, in the Case of Proclamations and Dr. Bonham's Case, declared the King to be subject to the law, the laws of Parliament to be void if in violation of "common right and reason".
These actions led to his transfer to the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench, where it was felt he could do less damage. Coke successively restricted the definition of treason and declared a royal letter illegal, leading to his dismissal from the bench on 14 November 1616. With no chance of regaining his judicial posts, he instead returned to Parliament, where he swiftly became a leading member of the opposition. During his time as a Member of Parliament he wrote and campaigned for the Statute of Monopolies, which restricted the ability of the monarch to grant patents, authored and was instrumental in the passage of the Petition of Right, a document considered one of the three crucial constitutional documents of England, along with Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. Coke is best known in modern times for his Institutes, described by John Rutledge as "almost the foundations of our law", his Reports, which have been called "perhaps the single most influential series of named reports".
He was a influential judge. In America, Coke's decision in Dr. Bonham's Case was used to justify the voiding of both the Stamp Act 1765 and writs of assistance, which led to the American War of Independence; the surname "Coke", or "Cocke", can be traced back to a William Coke in the hundred of South Greenhoe, now the Norfolk town of Swaffham, in around 1150. The family was prosperous and influential – members from the 14th century onwards included an Under-Sheriff, a Knight Banneret, a barrister and a merchant; the name "Coke" was pronounced during the Elizabethan age. The origins of the name are uncertain. Another hypothesis is that it was an attempt to disguise the word "cook". Coke's father, Robert Coke, was a barrister and Bencher of Lincoln's Inn who built up a strong practice representing clients from his home area of Norfolk. Over time, he bought several manors at Congham, West Acre and Happisburgh, all in Norfolk, was granted a coat of arms, becoming a minor member of the gentry. Coke's mother, Winifred Knightley, came from a family more intimately linked with the law than her husband.
Her father and grandfather had practised law in the Norfolk area, her sister Audrey was married to Thomas Gawdy, a lawyer and Justice of the Court of King's Bench with links to the Earl of Arundel. This connection served Edward well. Winifred's father married Agnes, the sister of Nicholas Hare. Edward Coke was born on 1 February 1552 in one of eight children; the other seven were daughters – Winifred, Elizabeth, Anna and Ethelreda – although it is not known in which order the children were born. Two years after Robert Coke died on 15 November 1561, his widow married Robert Bozoun, a property trader noted for his piety and strong business acumen, he had a tremendous influence on the Coke children: from Bozoun Coke learnt to "loathe concealers, prefer godly men and briskly do business with any willing client", something that shaped his future conduct as a lawyer and judge. At the age of eight in 1560, Coke began studying at the Norwich Free Grammar School; the education there was based on erudition, the eventual goal being that by the age of 18 the students would have learned "to vary one sentence diversely, to make a verse to endight an epistle eloquently and learnedly, to declaim of a theme simple, last of all to attain some competent knowledge of the Greek tongue".
The students were taught rhetoric based on the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Greek centred on the works of Homer and Virgil. Coke was taught at Norwich to value the "forcefulness of freedom of speech", something he applied as a judge; some accounts relate. After leaving Norwich in 1567 he matriculated to Trinity College, where he studied for three years until the end of 1570, when he left without gaining a degree. Little is known of his time at Trinity, though he studied rhetoric and dialectics under a
Strand, London
Strand is a major thoroughfare in the City of Westminster, Central London. It runs just over 3⁄4 mile from Trafalgar Square eastwards to Temple Bar, where the road becomes Fleet Street inside the City of London, is part of the A4, a main road running west from inner London; the road's name comes from the Old English strond, meaning the edge of a river, as it ran alongside the north bank of the River Thames. The street was popular with the British upper classes between the 12th and 17th centuries, with many important mansions being built between the Strand and the river; these included Essex House, Arundel House, Somerset House, Savoy Palace, Durham House and Cecil House. The aristocracy moved to the West End over the 17th century, following which the Strand became well known for coffee shops and taverns; the street was a centre point for theatre and music hall during the 19th century, several venues remain on the Strand. At the east end of the street are two historic churches: St Mary le Strand and St Clement Danes.
This easternmost stretch of the Strand is home to King's College, one of the two founding colleges of the University of London. Several authors and philosophers have lived on or near the Strand, including Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Virginia Woolf; the street has been commemorated in the song "Let's All Go Down the Strand", now recognised as a typical piece of Cockney music hall. The street is the main link between the two cities of London, it runs eastward from Trafalgar Square, parallel to the River Thames, to Temple Bar, the boundary between the two cities at this point. Traffic travelling eastbound follows a short crescent around Aldwych, connected at both ends to the Strand; the road marks the southern boundary of the Covent Garden district and forms part of the Northbank business improvement district. The name was first recorded in 1002 as strondway in 1185 as Stronde and in 1220 as la Stranda, it is formed from the Old English word ` strond'. It referred to the shallow bank of the once much wider Thames, before the construction of the Victoria Embankment.
The name was applied to the road itself. In the 13th century it was known as'Densemanestret' or'street of the Danes', referring to the community of Danes in the area. Two London Underground stations were once named Strand: a Piccadilly line station that operated between 1907 and 1994 and a former Northern line station which today forms part of Charing Cross station.'Strand Bridge' was the name given to Waterloo Bridge during its construction. London Bus routes 6, 23, 139 and 176 all run along the Strand. During Roman Britain, what is now the Strand was part of the route to Silchester, known as "Iter VIII" on the Antonine Itinerary, which became known by the name Akeman Street, it was part of a trading town called Lundenwic that developed around 600 AD, stretched from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. Alfred the Great moved the settlement into the old Roman town of Londinium from around 886 AD onwards, leaving no mark of the old town, the area returned to fields. In the Middle Ages, the Strand became the principal route between the separate settlements of the City of London and the royal Palace of Westminster.
In the archaeological record, there is considerable evidence of occupation to the north of Aldwych, but much along the former foreshore has been covered by rubble from the demolition of the Tudor Somerset Place, a former royal residence, to create a large platform for the building of the first Somerset House, in the 17th century. The landmark Eleanor's Cross was built in the 13th century at the western end of the Strand at Charing Cross by Edward I commemorating his wife Eleanor of Castile, it was demolished in 1647 by the request of Parliament during the First English Civil War, but reconstructed in 1865. The west part of the Strand was in the parish of St Martin in the Fields and in the east it extended into the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Mary le Strand. Most of its length was in the Liberty of Westminster, although part of the eastern section in St Clement Danes was in the Ossulstone hundred of Middlesex; the Strand was the northern boundary of the precinct of the Savoy, where the approach to Waterloo Bridge is now.
All of these parishes and places became part of the Strand District in 1855, except St Martin in the Fields, governed separately. The Strand District Board of Works was based at No. 22, Tavistock Street. Strand District was abolished in October 1900 and became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster. From the 12th century onwards, large mansions lined the Strand including several palaces and townhouses inhabited by bishops and royal courtiers on the south side, with their own river gates and landings directly on the Thames; the road was poorly maintained, with many pits and sloughs, a paving order was issued in 1532 to improve traffic. What became Essex House on the Strand was an Outer Temple of the Knights Templar in the 11th century. In 1313, ownership passed to the Knights of St John. Henry VIII gave the house to William, Baron Paget in the early 16th century. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, rebuilt the house in 1563 calling it Leicester House, it was renamed Essex House after being inherited by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, in 1588.
It was demolished around 1674 and Essex Street, leading up to the Strand, was built o
