Toronto’s academic community is involved in a wide variety projects that feature manuscripts and manuscripts scholarship. Below you can find descriptions and links to some of the exciting projects.
DECIMA – A New Way to Study Florence
DECIMA is a powerful GIS mapping tool that allows historians to explore the city’s evolving urban dynamics like never before.
No other city has as rich a store of human data available before the eighteenth century. By combining a variety of historical census and tax data within a precise, geo-referenced spatial framework, DECIMA creates opportunities for new and dynamic ways to uncover social networks, economic currents, and the sensory life of Florence.
Dictionary of Old English
The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) defines the vocabulary of the first six centuries (C.E. 600-1150) of the English language, using twenty-first century technology. The DOE complements the Middle English Dictionary (which covers the period C.E. 1100-1500) and the Oxford English Dictionary, the three together providing a full description of the vocabulary of English.
Digital Tools for Manuscript Study
An increasing number of scholars and students use digitized medieval manuscripts to carry out their work. Their needs are the same as those working with physical manuscripts: they want to compare pages, take notes, describe quires, leaves and booklets using collation diagrams, and discuss their findings with other scholars. Digital Tools for Manuscript Study is a two-year project generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under the direction of Alexandra Gillespie (Centre for Medieval Studies) and Sian Meikle (Information Technology Services) to address these needs.
The Épinal-Erfurt Glossary
The aim of the project is to produce the first critical edition of the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary in its entirety. The project will be carried out in two phases: (1) an online edition and translation published letter by letter; (2) a printed commentary that will include discussion of the sources and the forms of both the Latin lemmata (including the Greek derivatives) and the Old English glosses.
Hidden Stories – New Approaches to the Local and Global History of the Book
Hidden Stories connects over 130 collaborators working across more than 60 institutions around the world, searching for the history of books in 9 different locations: Dunhuang, Ethiopia and Coastal East Africa, Global Judaica, Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands of North America, The Himalayas, Kairouan, Kashmir and Gandhara, Mesoamerica and Mexico, and Northumbria.
The project brings together interdisciplinary and scientific research, cultural heritage preservation, community relationship-building, and the development of knowledge-sharing tools, protocols, and best practices. It seeks to listen to, care for, and share the stories that books hold that ground our understanding of world history as at once locally situated and globally interconnected.
Livres d’heures – Textes et langue
Led by Dorothea Kullmann and funded by SSHRC (2020-2024), a team of 6 researchers aim to establish an online catalogue of Books of Hours held in Canadian institutions outside of Québec and to create a text database of French texts out of Books of Hours.
Lost Plays Database
The Lost Plays Database is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England, 1570-1642. Its purpose is to add lost plays to scholarly discussions of early modern theatrical activity.
The editors believe that lost plays are a potential source of significant information on playwrights, playing companies, venues in London and the provinces, repertory studies, and audiences. The database provides a web-accessible, web-editable site for data on these plays concerning theatrical provenance, sources, genre, and authorship.
Mapping Ararat – An Imaginary Jewish Homelands Project
Using augmented reality, this project animates Major Mordecai Noah’s 1825 unrealized plan to transform Grand Island, New York into Ararat, a “city of refuge for the Jews.” Explore. Take a Tour. Learn. Imagine.
Mayors and Sheriffs of London
The MASL database includes the mayors, sheriffs, and wardens of the City of London from 1190 to the present: their names, years of office, and companies (in the early years, craft/trade guilds) or (in the earliest years) occupations.
Old Books New Science – A Medieval Studies Lab at the University of Toronto
The OBNS Lab brings together undergraduate research assistants, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and scholars with interests in new scientific and global approaches to medieval book history; digital text editing and computational approaches to humanities research; and medieval literary studies––especially work on form, affect, and historical phenomenology.
Practices of Commentary
Our primary goal is to set new research agendas for the longue durée of an interpretive mode that has been used in a diversity of cultures, has never ceased to shape opinions and worldviews, and continues to serve as a prime site for the perpetuation and innovation––and, sometimes, willful distortion––of knowledge, as seen in social media-infused digital spaces.
Records of Early English Drama
REED is an international research collaboration that is establishing for the first time the context from which the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries grew.
SERAI – Early Modern Encounters
Serai is a free and open online collaboratory for scholarship on premodern encounters across ethnolinguistic and religious divides, combining regional expertise with a keen interest in the transformative potential of digital scholarship.
As an explicitly trans-disciplinary space, Serai offers researchers, teachers, and students at all stages of their career a digital meeting place where they can share resources, exchange ideas, and collaborate on projects. We hope to inspire others to join us in thinking through our diverse research materials about the multiple intersections between the past and the future of cultural encounters, knowledge production, and boundary crossing, and the urgency of exploring connectivities and confluences across seemingly disparate spaces.
Story Nations – Kiinawin Kawindomowin
The stories of Canada’s founding and future have often drowned out those of Indigenous nations; through our presentation of a missionary’s diary, we hope to make visible and audible the stories of people that he met on Ojibwe land in 1898, with the help of people we met when visiting there in the twenty-first century.
Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations is a digital storytelling collaboration based in Toronto, on the territory of the Huron-Wendat and Petun First Nations, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
Textiles in Ethiopian Manuscripts
Textile pastedowns preserved on the inside book boards of 15th to 19th-century Christian Ethiopian manuscripts provide information leading to unrecognized aspects of the late medieval and early modern societies, industries, and the global trading networks, in which Ethiopia clearly participated. To best investigate these surviving objects, a multi-disciplinary team of historians, art historians, textile scholars, and specialists in manuscripts and their bindings, with the required knowledge of the language and geographic expertise, has been assembled to study many aspects of Ethiopian culture and the countries/regions from which the textiles originated, ranging from Western Europe to East Asia.
Transmission History of al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals
Led by Jeannie Miller and funded by SSHRC (2018-2021), a team of undergraduate and graduate researchers are analyzing all the twenty-odd surviving manuscripts of the 7-volume Arabic Book of Animals by al-Jahiz (d. 868 CE). This contributes to larger research questions about the reception history of Abbasid texts that came to be canonical: How were these texts read before the modernizing movements of the 19th and 20th centuries and the advent of reading practices associated with the modern notion of literature? How did scholars during the wrongly characterised ‘age of decline’ cultivate the Abbasid textual tradition prior to its rediscovery by the Nahda?
