Announcements

EBS at Kalamazoo 2008
EBS is pleased to announce its sponsorship of six sessions at theÊ43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 8 - 11 May 2008

I. Teaching the Middle Ages with MSS in the 21st-century Classroom

II. Letter Perfect: Uses of Scripts (or Fonts) in the Representation of Content

III. Mirrors and Manuals: Courtesy Books and Conduct Literature

IV. Charms, Chants and Cookery: Recipes in Medieval MSS and Early Printed Books

V. Pilgrimage of Pleasure: Literary MSS/Books and their Peregrinations

VI. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Animals in Early Illustration

Abstracts (1-2 pp), letters of commitment, and a-v requests (please access the form through www.wmich.edu/medieval) should be sent to Martha Driver no later (preferably earlier) than September 15, 2007. EBS members wishing to serve as session chairs or respondents should send a note by the September date to the university or e-mail address. Abstracts are to be sent to Dept of English, Pace University, 41 Park Row, Rm 1525, New York, NY 10038 or FAXed to 212-346-1754 (attn: Martha Driver, English Department). Inquiries are welcome. E-mail: MDriver@pace.edu or marthadriver@hotmail.com.

British Library Petition
Dr. Michael Hammond sends the following message about possible changes at the British Library: "You may have seen the reports concerning the projected 7% cut in the British Library's annual budget which, if put into effect, are likely to lead to charging readers for admission, reductions in opening hours and the closure of the Colindale Newspaper Library.

Anyone who has been there recently will know that the BL is already struggling to meet the demands on its resources. It needs extra funding, not further cuts."

Dr. Michael Hammond
Senior Lecturer
English
School of Humanities
University of Southampton
tel: +44 (0)2380 596708
email:mkh@soton.ac.uk

For our UK members who wish to register their opposition to these cuts, there is now a petition on the No.10 website: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ library/. US members and members elsewhere are welcome to write the library directly.

"Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase"
This website (http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu /mednar/), produced through the Studio for Digital Projects and Research at New York University, offers resources for scholars, teachers, students, and performers to explore the performance of medieval narrative. Our purpose is to see how medieval stories can be brought to life in performance for modern audiences, and how performance can be used to teach medieval literature in the classroom. We hope as well to promote a better understanding of ways in which medieval narratives may have been performed for their original audiences.

Video clips constitute the primary resource on the website. The clips feature a variety of actors, storytellers, singers, musicians, mimes, puppeteers, and dancers, among them professionals, teachers, and students. They perform scenes drawn from a range of medieval narrative genres, including epics, romances, lais, tales, fabliaux, and others. Some performances of narratives from analogous traditions (such as the Egyptian Hilali epic) are also represented.

In the future, we plan to expand the site's holdings and add other resources to the site, including further information bearing on pedagogical uses of performance, and videoed interviews with performers and with faculty and students who work with performance.

We hope you will visit, and use, the website. We welcome your feedback, which may be sent to perf-med-narr@forums.nyu.edu

Timmie (E.B.) Vitz, New York University ­ ebv1@nyu.edu
Marilyn Lawrence, New York University ­ lawrence@alumni.princeton. edu
Project Directors

"Hand Bookbindings From Special Collections in the Princeton University Library:
Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious"
A new online exhibition will allow viewers to closely examine historic bookbindings from the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Firestone Library. "Hand Bookbindings From Special Collections in the Princeton University Library: Plain and Simple to Grand and Glorious" includes more than 200 books. Two major themes are illustrated. First, many of the books offer examples of the elements that make up a book's binding, such as sewing, endleaves, cover attachment, clasps and tooling. Readers learn not only what these elements are but also see specimens dating from different eras and locales. Second, numerous examples highlight historic national technical styles and "bespoke" bindings for famous collectors, as well as specialty styles such as those with fully silk-embroidered covers.  Examples date from as early as the 12th century and come down to the end of the 20th. The entire show is arranged in virtual cases, represented by 26 thumbnail images on the Web site's opening page.

To view the online exhibition, visit http://www. princeton.edu/rbsc/exhibitions/online.html and click on the entry for "Hand Bookbindings from Special Collections."

For further information, contact the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at (609) 258 3184 or e-mail rbsc@princeton.edu.

Imprimerie Nationale Collections Under Threat
The resources of the Imprimerie nationale, France's state-owned centre of printing and typographical expertise, are under threat of dispersal. The collections reach back to 1539 and include punches, presses, engravings and over 30,000 books.

You can read up about the action being taken to save these resources and sign the petition here: http://www. garamonpatrimoine.org/petition.html. (Click on the Union flag to read the English language translation.)

Announcing the Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Cultures research hub: http://www.medievalmanuscripts .net
The Medieval Manuscripts and Textual Cultures research hub was conceived at a meeting of Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) research grant fund holders at the University of Glasgow in spring 2003. The Glasgow meeting was one of several hosted by fund holders designed to share experiences with regard to conducting collaborative research in medieval studies.

The hub was primarily developed to be a one-stop forum for the discussion of research issues pertaining to scholars of medieval manuscripts. Ideally, it will be used to share information about manuscripts and books in a way which facilitates ongoing research on medieval textual cultures.

How might you use the forum?

If you are working on a medieval manuscript and would like to share or seek palaeographical descriptions or other information relevant to your research, you might use the 'Help with a specific manuscript or manuscripts' forum. If you have a manuscript description you would like to make available to other scholars, you might want to post in the 'Manuscript descriptions' forum. If you are interested in ongoing research projects, or are thinking of developing an application for research funding, there are discussion forums where you may find, or post, relevant information.

If you are interested in participating in the hub, please visit the site: http://www.medievalmanuscripts .net.

Pierpont Morgan Library Offers Manuscript Descriptions Online
One of the most frequently consulted resources in the Reading Room of The Pierpont Morgan Library is a set of binders containing detailed descriptions of the collection of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts.The descriptions, compiled by several generations of curators, often contain information not available elsewhere, such as complete lists of texts and illustrations within individual manuscripts, long discursive notes on provenance, binding, etc., and lengthy bibliographies. Books and articles that have come to the curators' attention since 1989 are cited in separate bibliographies, which are updated regularly.

For many years, this documentation was accessible only in paper form. Now, as part of a six-year, three-million-dollar project to make scholarly information on all the Library's holdings freely available on the Web, users of CORSAIR, the Library's comprehensive online collections catalog, can view and print electronic versions of the descriptions and bibliographies. The material, which is linked to CORSAIR records for individual manuscripts, has been scanned and converted into PDF files to preserve the historical layers of scholarship evident in the annotations and additions.

To view a sample description, visit the URL below and follow the links:
http:// corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/BBM0069.htm

For more information on this resource, visit: http://corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/msdescriptions.htmhttp: //corsair.morganlibrary.org/msdescr/msdescriptions.htm

Additional online research resources, including guides to the collections for researchers, finding aids for archival collections, and descriptions and images of individual folios (a joint project of the Index of Christian Art and the Library) will soon become available through CORSAIR.

The Black Book on the Web
Over 750 years after being written probably in the Priory in Carmarthen the Black Book of Carmarthen is now on the world wide web. Using the very latest technology, staff at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth have digitally captured some 54 leaves of one of Wales' most important manuscripts so that people world-wide can view some of the earliest Welsh poetry from the comfort of their own home.

The Black Book includes some of the earliest Welsh literature, including poems about battles in the Hen Ogledd (the 'Old North', roughly present day northern England and the Scottish Borders but which were 1,500 years ago, Brythonic/Welsh-speaking). The work also includes references to the drowned area of Cantre'r Gwaelod as well as to King Arthur and Myrddin (Merlin). Although the Black Book was written in about the year 1250 the poems and traditions it encompasses stretch back centuries earlier.

The collection which includes the Black Book of Carmarthen was bought in 1904 for the embryonic National Library of Wales for £400 by its founding father, Sir John Williams. The manuscript (MS Peniarth 1) comprises some 54 original parchment (animal skin) folios, now arranged in eight quires.

"Transposing the Black Book of Carmarthen onto the web was a big undertaking on the National Library of Wales' behalf," said Lyn Lewis Dafis, Metadata Manager. "The work of digitally photographing every page and transposing them onto the web involved the work of 6 members of specialist staff - cataloguers, photographers, metadata specialists and web designers. The Black Book attracts academics and tourists from all over the world to Aberystwyth, but now the words which were written on parchment are on the web," said Lyn.

You can view the Black Book by visiting the National Library's web site, clicking on Digital Mirror and then on the sub-heading Treasures. http://www.llgc.org. uk/drych/drych_s005.htm

FURTHER INFORMATION:
Siôn Jobbins, Marketing Officer NLW: 01970 632902 sij@llgc.org.uk
NLW website: www.llgc.org.uk
Black Book: http://www.llgc.org. uk/drych/drych_s004.htm