Ownership and Usership from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century of manuscripts written in Old and Middle English

十六世纪至十八世纪古英语和中古英语手稿的所有权和使用权

• 批准号: 08610493
• 负责人: WADA Yoko
• 金额: $ 1.34万
• 依托单位: Kansai University
• 依托单位国家: 日本
• 项目类别: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• 财政年份: 1996
• 资助国家: 日本
• 起止时间: 1996 至 1998
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://kaken.nii.ac.jp/grant/KAKENHI-PROJECT-08610493/
• 关键词: Old English; Middle English; manuscripts; collectors; Britain in the Middle Ages; libraries; monasteries; Britain in the early modern period; 西洋写本; 中世図書館

In order to establish the corpus of all extant manuscripts Containing Middle English I consulted all manuscript catalogues available to me and for each manuscript I filled in a form which I had specially designed for this project. Concise information about each manuscript has therefore been collected on each form : the institution which owns It, the shelf-mark, the date, the material on which it is written (in other words, paper or parchment), the format, the script, the number of hands, texts in the manuscript (and the language(s) in which they are written), its owners and users in the middle ages and during the early modern period, references and so on, I also conducted research on famous collectors and on the histories of great libraries in Britain, The internet was extremely useful in helping me to gather necessary information from all over the world.From the research the following conclusion was drawn Manuscripts containing Old English were scatfered and most were lost after the dissolution of the monasteries ; however, some of them were discovered and kept to be studied to justify the policies of the Church and the State, They were eventually donated to great libraries by collectors by the end of the eighteenth century because those were the safest places for valuable manuscripts to be preserved, On the other hand, beautiful Middle English manuscripts were a status-symbol and were treated as part of the family-property among the wealthy gentry and merchants ; therefore they were passed from generation to generation in private collections. Mediocre-looking manuscripts containing Middle English religious texts were originally read by not only women but also men who could not understand Latin in monasteries or were used for education at home. Some of them seem to have been secretly preserved and read by Catholics while they were oppressed.

为了建立包含中古英语的所有现存手稿的语料库，我查阅了所有可用的手稿目录，并为每份手稿填写了我为本项目专门设计的表格。因此，每一份手稿的简明信息都被收集在每份表格上：拥有它的机构、书架标记、日期、书写材料（换句话说，纸张或羊皮纸）、格式、脚本、手稿的数量、手稿中的文字（以及书写的语言）、中世纪和近代早期的所有者和使用者、参考资料等等，我还对著名收藏家进行了研究以及伟大图书馆的历史在英国，互联网在帮助我从世界各地收集必要的信息方面非常有用。通过研究得出以下结论：包含古英语的手稿散落一地，大部分在修道院解散后丢失了；然而，其中一些被发现并继续研究，以证明教会和国家政策的合理性，最终在十八世纪末被收藏家捐赠给大型图书馆，因为这些是保存有价值的手稿的最安全的地方另一方面，美丽的中古英语手稿是地位的象征，在富裕的绅士和商人中被视为家庭财产的一部分；因此，它们在私人收藏中代代相传。包含中古英语宗教文本的看起来平庸的手稿最初不仅由女性阅读，而且也由那些在修道院里不懂拉丁语的男性阅读，或者用于家庭教育。其中一些似乎是天主教徒在受到压迫时秘密保存和阅读的。