MSU project expands Medieval Latin scholarship via the Internet

Contact: Maridith Geuder

The efforts of a Mississippi State University English professor are making more accessible to worldwide scholars many significant handwritten parchment documents, including some rare selections from the fifth century.

Dan Embree has organized an Internet resource that marks the first attempt to forge a single reference work containing the location of every known manuscript of every known Latin chronicle of the Middle Ages.

Titled "Repertorium Chronicarum," Embree's web site at www.chronica.msstate.edu also is available through the MSU Libraries at http://library.msstate.edu.

The project's scope is huge: a survey of more than 7,500 manuscripts and more than 1,000 works now found in hundreds of public and private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan.

Spanning time in Europe between the fifth and 16th centuries, the chronicles describe the national, political, military, and ecclesiastical life of the Middle Ages. Previously, no bibliographic tool was available to locate all members of this class of Latin manuscripts, many in libraries throughout the Continent.

Embree said his interest in the project began while editing a series of chronicles, first in Middle English, then in Latin and Anglo-Norman. With no single locator resource, he and other scholars were forced to laboriously search through catalogs written in English, Latin, French, German, and Italian.

"The project is an attempt to track down every surviving manuscript that self-consciously recounts history," Embree said.

To complete his task, Embree spent countless hours locating and reading the original documents, including those held by the Vatican. He then had to decipher 600-1,000-year-old writing, dating the hand and linking the manuscripts with one another on the basis of what he describes as "shared errors."

"Because the project is so big, our plans are to continuously publish information as it is collected and to invite scholars to contribute their findings," Embree explained. Additional planned features include accompanying information about the chronicle author and scholars' notes about the manuscripts.

"We hope 'Repertorium Chronicarum' will be valuable to scholars in deciding whether a particular manuscript will be useful to their research," Embree said.

Dean of Libraries Frances Coleman said Embree's substantial and unique achievement will greatly enhance the online reference materials available through the MSU Libraries.

"Without a doubt, Dr. Embree's work will be a major asset to English and other scholars around the world," she said. Maintenance of the web resource will be supported through a graduate assistantship funded by the libraries and MSU's Office of Research, she added.

A teacher and researcher in Old and Middle English literature, Embree has published scholarly editions of "The Simonie" and "The Chronicles of Rome." He is co-editor of Boydell and Brewer's Medieval Chronicle Series.

In addition to academic responsibilities, he currently is in a second annual term as chair of the university's Robert Holland Faculty Senate.