Manchester Middle English Manuscripts Conference

In 2008 the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester,
received funding from the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee to
digitise its important collection of over forty Middle English manuscripts,
including literary texts by Chaucer and Lydgate, and major collections of
manuscripts of the Brut Chronicles and Wycliffe's Bible translations.

To celebrate the completion of this project and the launch of the Manchester
Medieval Digital Library, the JRUL is hosting a major academic conference on
17-18 September 2009. The Manchester Middle English Manuscripts Conference
will consider the Rylands collection within the wider context of other
corpora of ME manuscripts, and explore the potential of digitisation to
enable novel methods and new avenues of scholarly enquiry.

Keynote speaker Professor Julia Boffey of Queen Mary University, London,
will open the conference with a public lecture on the evening of Thursday
17th September. Other speakers include Professor Wendy Scase (Birmingham),
Prof. Tony Edwards (De Montfort University) and Professor John Thompson
(Queen's, Belfast).

The conference will be of interest to medieval historians, students of
Middle English literature, linguists, codicologists, historians of the book,
archivists and manuscript curators.

For further information and to download a booking form, please visit
http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/specialcollections/collections/specialprojects/incipit/conference/.
The deadline for registration is Friday 28th August.

The project blog http://mmems.wordpress.com/ contains the latest news on the
progress of the digitisation work.