Lynn Ransom
Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination. Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the research potential of Name Authorites in Linked Open Data contexts.
Lynn oversaw the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (2014-2017) into an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world's pre-modern manuscripts and served as the Principal Investigator for the US team on the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project, a Round 4 Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge Award recipient (2017-2020). She is currently serving as the Director of Digital Medievalist (until 2022) and the President and Executive Director of Digital Scriptorium (2021-2023). She is also Co-Editor of the Schoenberg Institute's journal Manuscript Studies. A list of her other publications can be found here.
From some curious habits by scribes of late Middle English manuscripts, I shall argue that scribes were sometimes not interested in, or were even vexed by, the material form of texts. I’ll focus on the scribes’ handling of page breaks. While in some ways the division of the text into pages allowed scribes to show off their own craft process, when they decorated the division of the codex into pages, following conventions without textual function, in other ways the page breaks contributed little to the text itself, and at times scribes used other methods to override the page breaks. From such examples, I shall argue that the scribes were more interested in the continuity of the text and of the reading process which continued beyond the literal limits of the page. I’ll suggest that the scribes’ handling of page breaks adds to the story of material texts but also challenges the focus on materiality in the study of literature, suggesting other concerns that might be part of the history of reading.
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Professor Daniel Wakelin is the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography. He came to Oxford from Cambridge. His research focuses on the material remains of English literature between the fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries: manuscripts, and some printed books, and what they reveal about writing habits and reading habits. HIs many publications include the forthcoming Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England: Making English Literary Manuscripts, 1400-1500 (2022) and Scribal Correction and Literary Craft: English Manuscripts 1375-1510, joint winner of the DeLong Prize for Book History in 2015.
