I am an ARTS STUDENT. I should not have to draw tables.

[highlyeccentric]

So I set out to create a manuscript description, happy in the knowledge that no easy-to-use description of Cotton Nero A.i has already been made.
What I want in a MS description:
* items clearly laid out, with modern English descriptions where appropriate
* first lines of homilies in Old English
* texts identified by their common title as well as their MS title
* clear quire divisions within the list
* references to editions
* the ability to scan the description either quire-by-quire OR by content type

Which means a table. Vertical axis numbering items and listing foliation. Horizontal axis listing content type (Insitiutes, laws, homilies, other). So one can scan down the 'homily' column if one so desires, or one can isolate the fifth quire, or whatever. FABULOUS.

BLOODY DIFFICULT TO CREATE IN MS WORD.
An exel table would be fine. Lovely. But difficult to print out and bind into a thesis.
So we have lots of individual one-page tables, which have to be prevented from binding themselves together and aligning cell widths (the Homilies column, for example, having been squashed up when there are no homilies on the page, so as to make space for Institutes).

And then I discover that you can't footnote a table.

This, people, explains why no one has made a user-friendly Manuscript Description of Cotton Nero A.i.
But I will not be defeated! When I am done, the Reader will be able to flick through my table with ease!
Sigh. The Reader will be me, and whatever unfortunate souls mark the thing. Oh, the futility.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

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 I worked from the facsimile by Loyn and spent a great deal of time with Ker's Catalogue, but both are getting a bit outdated, and not everyone has the ability or time to spend poring over a facsimile in a special collection.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.)

Good luck with it!
B. Hawk

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

1) i hope so!
you guys are making me feel so much better :)

2) Endnotes are the plan at the moment. It remains to be seen what happens when I insert the tables into the rest of chapter one, though.

3a) By 'easily available' I was reffering to Ker's Catalogue, and Wormald (The Making Of English Law, p. 200-201). Loyn, being a facsimile, is slightly more difficult to get hold of.
Wormald's description is FABULOUS in several respects: a) he breaks the MS down into five sections, and gives you a table. It's A4 size, though, so it's no use for descriptions of individual texts.
b) Those five sections correspond to the sections he talks about in The Holiness of Society, but in English Law he doesn't fluff around with the Exerptiones, and in the text preceding the table he fleshes out his ideas about the development of the MS in Wulfstanian times.
Also,The Making of English Law is a very, very sexy book in all respects. I'm finding that, as well as the MS description, his discussions of individual kings and their lawmaking projects is providing the "notes" column for large sections of my table. Also, he has a snarky sense of humour and is just fabulous.

3b) Yes, yes it is well and truly time. As I was saying to Jenn, I get the feeling a lot more could be done with online databases.
What's so odd about Ker? All I find is that his Catalogue condenses too much into too short a space, so that unless you actually KNOW what's in the MS, you get a bit boggled and lost.
I'm preparing my description (a bigger section than just the table) according to the Sacred Principles of Ker, handed down from Ker to a student of his whose name I forget (jenny someone?), who passed them on to Awesome, who described a MS in the back of her thesis, and instructed me to copy the layout therefrom. In a much lengthier description than the Catalogue entry, the Ker Approved Layout is perfectly logical and makes perfect sense.
Furthermore, I would like more manuscript descriptions to be laid out in such a way that you can quickly pick out like texts. To figure out what's homilies and what's laws and so on, I've either had to go to Loyn's overblown description, or to get hold of the editions and pick them out from there (although I'm told this is fraught with danger in the matter of Napier, and even Jost seems to contain some texts which are more like semi-Institutes). I'm thinking either colour-coded entries in books, or tables, or (best option), online databases. The table works well for one MS, aside from being a bastard to make, but if i wanted a calatlogue of all Wulstan MSS, a single table would be out of the question, and that would leave you picking through each text and figuring out how the table was laid and fishing your information from them one by one.
hmmm... a catalogue of all Wulfstan MSS... *puts that on the putative Life To Do List*

4. Your prize for being the first person brave enough to comment on The Naked Philologist is a copy of my carefully constructed table. And you can tell me whether or not I"m right about it being a highly user-friendly format.

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

well, more user-friendly than the standard list, at least.