When linguistic and literary scholars have described the Early Middle English period (roughly ca. 1100-1350), their collective evaluations have labeled it “one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights.”[1] Bracketed by the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century and the decline of the English populace as a result of the Plague (1348-1450), it is a period of intense linguistic change, literary experimentation, and textual production that juggled regional specificities, genres in process, and multilingual imbrications. Characterized by its multilingualism and its interaction with cultural developments from Ireland to the Middle East, this is a literary world very different from standard views of medieval England: multilingual, culturally diverse, intellectually and aesthetically experimental.
With a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Early Middle English Society (EMES) is developing the Archive of Early Middle English (AEME), which will be made freely available to scholars, students, and the public. Initially, we will produce an electronic edition of two Early Middle English manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 1. The editions will contain not only electronic transcriptions but also encoded information on names and places, paleographical and material features, and the like, all of which will be searchable and easily adaptable to use in a variety of digital analytical forms. Digital editing allows for a more dynamic edition than print; it can be interactive, serve multiple audiences, be extended, and facilitate different types of analysis, visualization, and comparison (that is, with the larger archive) enabled by emerging computer technologies.
AEME will thus make Early Middle English texts and manuscripts more accessible to a wide range of people who, through geography, financial resources, or institutional affiliation, have not had sufficient access. Our editions will enable new readers, who have previously lacked the linguistic and paleographical training to read the texts in manuscript or in prior editions, to study these texts. AEME will bring a variety of materials together in a form that can be searched and manipulated for analysis and visualization. Thus the project will create new windows for exploring the multidimensional world that produced these Early Middle English texts, and provide new opportunities for bringing the texts into dialogue with larger conversations in the humanities, including the dynamics of cultural diversity.