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An electronic corpus of 15th century Castilian cancionero manuscripts; towards completion of the Dutton project |
When Brian Dutton died prematurely in his 60th year (1994), he had completed his magnum opus, the seven-volume El cancionero castellano del siglo XV, in book format (Salamanca: Universidad, 1990-91), but although he had used electronic preparation of texts, he was unable to fulfil the dream of conversion to electronic usage. We can now present the online website version of the Dutton project of courtly verse, alongside our own project of the longer moralistic, didactic and religious Castilian verse of the fifteenth century. You will also find some digitized images of manuscripts; although this was not part of the original project submission, electronic capabilities march onwards, and we are in the process of negotiating permissions to insert these alongside the transcription in text/image view wherever possible. |
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Wyndham Lewis's Art Criticism in the "Listener", 1946-1951: Postwar British Art in its Context of Ideas, Institutions, and Practice. |
This project is focused on the entire work of Wyndham Lewis, and pays particular attention to the ideological aspects of his thinking. At the same time it is concerned with those aspects of his work which either have not been explored by Spanish or foreign critics, or have been dealt with in equivocal or politically mediated ways. Since a great deal of Lewis's literary production remains dispersed in hard-to-find periodical publications, above all in the USA and Canada, we shall bring these materials together for study and publication. An analysis of Lewis's short stories will be carried out to assess their relevance to modernist writing and to the short-story genre in general. The Wyndham Lewis website fully describes his work, shows the advances in the study of Lewis achieved by our research, and provides scholars with a research resource that is linked to other relevant sites. |
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Turning owners into actors: Possessive morphology as subject-indexing in languages of the Bougainville region |
A fundamental communicative task for all languages is to show which participant in a sentence is the subject. Languages have various ways of identifying the subject, including word-order, agreement, and case-marking. However, there is another unique and strange method, almost entirely unknown until now, found only in Northwest-Solomonic (NWS), a group of Oceanic languages of the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. In some constructions, these languages indicate subject using word-forms normally indicating possessors of nouns. This use of possessive morphology to mark subjects is theoretically highly significant. To define language fully we must understand the limits on subject-marking. This almost unresearched phenomenon is crucial to our understanding of the fundamental issue of how subjects can be marked. This project investigates this almost unresearched phenomenon: how it works, how it varies, what it does, and where it comes from. Unfortunately, the key languages are highly endangered, so the project is timely, and as a by-product, the project will result in the partial primary documentation of at least one of these languages. |
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The concert programmes database for the UK and Ireland (phase 1) |
The Concert Programmes Project has created an online database of holdings of concert programmes to be found in selected libraries, archives and museums in the UK and Ireland. Currently, it holds 5,500 collections of music related ephemera held by 53 institutions including the British Library, the Royal College of Music, the Royal Academy of music, the national libraries of Scotland and Ireland and the Bodleian Library and Trinity College Dublin. It includes material from the end of the 17th century to the present day. Its detailed search facility allows users improved access to previously inadequately catalogued and therefore underused material. |
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ROYAL: Illuminated Manuscripts of the Kings and Queens of England |
The research project focuses on the Library's collection of medieval and Renaissance Royal illuminated manuscripts. The project, a collaboration with The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, will culminate in a major exhibition at the British Library in 2011-2012; the research will become part of the British Library's free illustrated online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (CIM); and will also support and deliver a virtual exhibition and online introductory 'tours' of the Royal collection for visitors to the British Library website. The collection comprises approximately 1,950 manuscripts from the royal library presented by King George II to the newly founded British Museum in 1757, from where they were transferred to the British Library. The manuscripts featured will include the French presentation copy of Philippe de Mézières's letter to Richard II; the Shrewsbury Book of romances presented to Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, as a gift for their marriage in 1445; and chronicles and histories produced in southern Netherlands for Edward IV. Approximately 400 illuminated manuscripts from the Royal collection have been selected for further study. Each will be examined to uncover details including patronage, information about the artist, scribe, and how it may have been received and used. This represents the first systematic analysis of narrative and decorative imagery in royal medieval manuscripts. |
