BL blogpost: How many alphabets?

As part of my work on the Polonsky Foundation England and France digitisation programme at the British Library last year, I wrote a blogpost on the different writing systems used in early medieval Latin manuscripts.  This has just been published on the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts blog, in conjunction with the new exhibition Writing: Making Your…

Devotion and Digitisation: Medieval Prayer Manuscripts and their Online Images

On the 8th of March, I gave a keynote paper at a two-day workshop at Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, titled ‘Devotion and Digitisation: Medieval Prayer Manuscripts and their Online Images’.  I’ve written elsewhere that, whenever I publish a formal academic work, I back it up with a ‘non-identical twin’, an accompanying blogpost which handles the same subject…

Caroline and hiragana: learning to write

As I wrote in a recent post, I currently have less time for blogging due to an impending book deadline.  Which is why it is complete foolishness that I have taken up learning a completely new language. Well, sort of.  What happened was that, having heard good things about it, I signed up to Duolingo…

The Vespasian Psalter

As mentioned in my last post, I have a new publication out – an entry in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, on the Vespasian Psalter, the manuscript now shelved as London, British Library Cotton MS Vespasian A. i.  So how better to celebrate this than by dedicating a blogpost to the manuscript…

Have mercy, guide me, guard me: an eighth- (and eleventh-) century prayer

It’s Lent, and time for something a bit more penitential than some of the glorious manuscripts and linguistic fun that I have been writing about in recent posts.  It happens that a lot of my current work (adapting my doctoral thesis for publication) has been on confessional prayers of various kinds, which is pretty convenient. …