The Auchinleck Manuscript

Following the Lisa Jardine trail … lots of interesting stuff Francis Bacon and Milton, to name a few … anyway … at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) …

The Auchinleck Manuscript was probably created in London in 1330/1340-ish and is currently housed in the National Library of Scotland. This is an on-line copy of an English language literary work that pre-dates Chaucer, so is important lingusitically and culturally as well as a work of literature.

I was moved to blog the link. because I happen to be reading Eco’s 1980 “The Name of the Rose”, set in and around the “scriptorium” of a monastery in 1327, under investigation by a member of the “inquisition”. The text is full of the jargon of scribes and manuscripts and the Auchinleck site has a useful glossary of such terms.

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