Linne Mooney, Dan Mosser, Elizabeth Solopova, and David Radcliffe are pleased to take this opportunity at the Thirteenth Biennial Early Book Society Conference in St Andrews to announce the launch of The Digital Index of Middle English Verse. The project, begun in 1995 under the auspices of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has been available as a prototype since 2008, and in its current structure since 2011. Additional support from the University of Maine, the Leverhulme Trust, University of York Department of English and Related Literature, the Association for Manuscripts and Archives in Research Collections (AMARC), the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (Virginia Tech), and the NEH, have allowed us to realize almost all of what was envisioned in 1995: transcriptions of the first two and last two lines of every witness to every scrap of Middle English verse; a searchable database, with “SEARCH RECORDS” options enabling searches by specific DIMEV, IMEV, and NIMEV numbers, browsing by alphabetic or number ranges, searches by AUTHOR, TITLE, SCRIBE, SUBJECT, VERSE FORM, and VERSE PATTERN (or combinations of these); the “SEARCH WITNESSES” option allows one to search MANUSCRIPTS by LOCATION and/or REPOSITORY; lists of early PRINTED BOOKS and INSCRIPTIONS are also available. Where witnesses (MS shelfmarks, etc.) are highlighted, clicking on the witness name will compile a list of that manuscript’s Middle English verse contents in their order of appearance in that witness.
Where difficult or obsolete words are retained in the standardized headings, these are highlighted and linked to glosses, which may also be accessed by selecting GLOSSARY from the menu on the SEARCH RECORDS page. There, too, are menu selections DELETED RECORDS, or NEW RECORDS. Linguistic information is prepended to many manuscripts when their records are viewed by clicking on their shelfmarks. An extensive BIBLIOGRAPHY of editions and facsimiles of Middle English Verse is also available through a menu selection.
Should users detect any errors or be able to supply any missing transcriptions or other data, or wish to make suggestions for improvement, please feel free to contact us:
Dan Mosser (dmosser@vt.edu)
Linne Mooney (linne.mooney@york.ac.uk)
