A couple thoughts: 1) This does sound like a great project!
2) For footnotes: try endnotes instead. They wouldn't mess up the page formatting, because they would come at the end of all the tables, probably on the last page.
3) I worked on Cotton Nero A.i last semester (and recently went back to the project to pull it together for a conference paper), and such a description sounds great. I worked from the facsimile by Loyn and spent a great deal of time with Ker's Catalogue, but both are getting a bit outdated, and not everyone has the ability or time to spend poring over a facsimile in a special collection. I would assume these are the descriptions you say already exist--if you know of other extensive descriptions that I may have missed, I'd love to get the citations from you, though.
3) I think it's high time to update manuscript descriptions in general. You yourself have noted the frustration with Ker, and clearly the other descriptions you've alluded to were not good enough for your purposes--so you've created your own. I was talking to a colleague who went to a conference Elaine Treharne was keynote speaker, and she discussed problematic issues of older scholarship like this. She apparently discussed Ker's odd way of describing (although praising his massive contribution to the field, of course--he'll never really be obsolete), and pointed toward the need for new, fresh looks at manuscripts and creating new, fresh descriptions. Perhaps your tables do justice to this idea, and could be presented as a case-study/example in describing manuscripts in such a light. Perhaps, in this way, it could be very valuable as a published work to the greater medieval scholar community.
4) Could I possibly get a copy of this tremendous document when it's compiled? I know you say that you're afraid you might be the only one to use it, but it actually sounds greatly useful--and I'm sure I'm not the only person who would think so. (Hence see number 3.)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-04-05 02:55 pm (UTC)1) This does sound like a great project!
2) For footnotes: try endnotes instead. They wouldn't mess up the page formatting, because they would come at the end of all the tables, probably on the last page.
3) I worked on Cotton Nero A.i last semester (and recently went back to the project to pull it together for a conference paper), and such a description sounds great. I worked from the facsimile by Loyn and spent a great deal of time with Ker's Catalogue, but both are getting a bit outdated, and not everyone has the ability or time to spend poring over a facsimile in a special collection. I would assume these are the descriptions you say already exist--if you know of other extensive descriptions that I may have missed, I'd love to get the citations from you, though.
3) I think it's high time to update manuscript descriptions in general. You yourself have noted the frustration with Ker, and clearly the other descriptions you've alluded to were not good enough for your purposes--so you've created your own. I was talking to a colleague who went to a conference Elaine Treharne was keynote speaker, and she discussed problematic issues of older scholarship like this. She apparently discussed Ker's odd way of describing (although praising his massive contribution to the field, of course--he'll never really be obsolete), and pointed toward the need for new, fresh looks at manuscripts and creating new, fresh descriptions. Perhaps your tables do justice to this idea, and could be presented as a case-study/example in describing manuscripts in such a light. Perhaps, in this way, it could be very valuable as a published work to the greater medieval scholar community.
4) Could I possibly get a copy of this tremendous document when it's compiled? I know you say that you're afraid you might be the only one to use it, but it actually sounds greatly useful--and I'm sure I'm not the only person who would think so. (Hence see number 3.)
Good luck with it!
B. Hawk