EMISCS99

This volume brings together essays by leading authorities on the production, reception, and editing of medieval English manuscripts in honour of Ralph Hanna, on the occasion of his retirement as Professor of Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Ralph Hanna has made an enormous contribution to the study of Middle English manuscripts; his numerous essays and books have discussed the development of London literature, alliterative poetry (especially Piers Plowman), regionalism, and the production and circulation of manuscripts. The essays included in this volume are arranged into four major sections corresponding to Ralph Hanna’s core areas of interest: Manuscript production; Dialect; Regionalism; Reading and Editing manuscripts.

These essays, written by leading scholars in their fields, offer new insights into the manuscripts of major Middle English writers and on scribal practice, as well as studies of individual codices. Essays cover a wide regional and chronological range, stretching from the beginnings of London literature traced in the works of Peter of Cornwall to the circulation of John Lydgate’s Troy Book, and encompassing manuscripts and texts composed and circulated outside the capital. Dialectal studies offer reconsiderations of the evidence for a Wycliffite orthography, the dialect of William Langland, and the vocabulary of the alliterative Morte Arthure. A final section on reading and editing investigates the structure and divisions in the manuscripts of the A Version of Piers Plowman, and examines specific readings in the Prick of Conscience and the Canterbury Tales. The volume also includes a tribute to Ralph Hanna and a list of his extensive publications.

In the most recent years a group of young researchers has given a new impetus to the study of Book Illumination in Portugal, promoting national and international research that focuses on understanding illuminated manuscripts in both their aesthetics and material dimensions, as well as the relationship between text and image. The developement of interdisciplinary research thanks, in part, to strategic partnerships between the Humanities and the domain of Exact Science has been established to address new issues raised by the need of more comprehensive and wide studies around the illuminated manuscript.

This volume gives thus light to the most important contributions of these new approaches, including new technical studies of pigments in manuscripts of the fund of the Monastery of Alcobaça and three copies of Hugh of Fouilloy’s Book of Birds, inquiries concerning a mismounted mappamundiin the Lorvão Beatus, a study of two southern French legal manuscripts, the image of the artist in astrological iconography, problems raised by two books of hours in the National Library of Portugal, and penwork decoration in fifteenth-century Hebrew manuscripts.

The authors of the volume belong to three Portuguese academic institutions. Maria Adelaide Miranda, Alicia Miguélez Cavero, Catarina Fernandes Barreira, Maria Alessandra Bilotta, Ana Lemos and Luís Ribeiro are integrated members of the Institute of Medieval Studies of the Nova University of Lisbon; Maria João Melo, Rita Castro, Conceição Casanova, Vania Solange Muralhas e Rita Araújo are members of the Department of Conservation and Restoration of the Nova University of Lisbon; Luís Urbano Afonso e Tiago Moita are members of the Institute of History of Art of the University of Lisbon.