Rant of the Day: Manuscript Catalogues

[highlyeccentric]

My somewhat obsessive friend MrsBacon, who has spent much of the last couple of months chasing down crusader letters by haphazard chains of catalogue searches, word of mouth, the history of french libraries after the Revolution, and midnight telephone calls to confused non-english speaking librarians who just might have something in a 'little box' downstairs, assures me that I am blessed in my choice of field, because the English generally and Anglo-Saxonists in particular are obsessed with cataloguing and record-keeping, and that I should be overjoyed to have access to big fat manuscript catalogues and so forth.

Nevertheless, having finally laid hands on Helmut Gneuss' Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, i found it immensely frustrating. It didn't take much to discover that 'Cotton Nero' wouldn't be in the list, and that it would be found headed by its location. After peering at the index for some time, wondering why 'British Library' doesn't appear before 'Cambridge University Library', i noticed the neat little comma: 'Cambridge, University Library'. Deft use of the index took me through the various manuscripts containing "Wulfstan, Archbishop of York: homilies" and brought me at last to 'London, British Library, Cotton Nero A.i". So far so good- all inconveniences at the feet of my own incompetence.

Gneuss turns out to contain a very short paragraph and no more information than I could have rattled off from the top of my head, save for the size of the MS itself. Perhaps useful for cross-referencing across manuscripts, it was quite disapointing for my current purposes. (What are they? I'm not sure... )

Next i turned to Neil Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, which DID contain useful- if barely comprehensible- information, several pages of it. This, however, took me another half an hour to find, as I stared at the gap between Lincoln, Cathedral 298 no. 2 and London, British Museum, Additional 9381, wondering where the British Library had got to. I checked at the other end of British Museum, and L had not been mysteriously moved to after M. To the indexes i returned, and sifted through manuscripts containing the handwriting of Wulfstan- which was at least a vaugely relevant tour- only to end up at London, British Museum, Cotton Nero A.i.

Why has no one told me that the British Museum and the British Library are the same thing? Furthermore, how does one figure out which to refer to?

Comments

[daiskmeliadorn.livejournal.com]

as in, what other aspects of him are interesting, or something.