Bodleian Library Homepage

Wendy Scase is the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham.

"The Vernon Manuscript" is one of the greatest treasures of early English literature and the arts of the book. It contains over 350 Middle English texts, among them "Piers Plowman", "the Ancrene Riwle", the "South English Legendary", the "Prick of Conscience", and the "Miracles of the Virgin". A volume of massive dimensions, carefully copied and extensively decorated for pious readers c.1390-1400, it offers an incomparable resource for students of literature, art, culture, and language. For the first time, the entire manuscript is available here in an innovative, highly accessible format. The DVD-ROM contains a full facsimile with images of each page of the manuscript, visible at high magnification, and a complete 'live' transcription of the text with hyperlinks allows for powerful global searches across the entire text. It contains: full-colour high resolution images of the entire manuscript; simultaneous view of entire page and selected detail of the page, with a full page description; life-like magnifier, movable across the page, activated by clicking on the facsimile, allowing detailed viewing; specialist essays on contents, production, decoration, and language; complete, hyperlinked transcription of the entire text of the manuscript; global text-search facility, covering transcription, translation, illustrations, introduction, bibliography and notes; search results linked to manuscript pages and transcription simultaneously; and, glossary of descriptive terms. Providing a new quality of access to this remarkable resource, this new edition is aimed at specialists and students in medieval literature, manuscript studies, palaeography, art history, and the history of the book.