The collection of 41 treatises in 26 Oriental manuscripts now at St John's College, Oxford, reflect the varying ways in which Europeans have sought to make themselves familiar with the cultures of the East. Acquired between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, most are Arabic or Persian, but there are also Syriac, Hebrew, Turkish, Ethiopic, and Gujarati items. No mere catalogue, it includes an essay by Geert Jan van Gelder, the present Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford on the Arabic poetry that owners over the years jotted down on the margins, and is lavishly illustrated with 37 examples of calligraphy, diagrams, and illuminations.The catalogue provides a detailed description of every item within each manuscript. Most of the manuscript volumes were acquired through the donation of Archbishop William Laud (d. 1645), founder of the Chair of Arabic which bears his name. Several of his volumes were acquired from the traveller and adventurer Sir Kenelm Digby (d.1665), who bought them in Amsterdam, possibly on Laud's behalf. They are an interestingly varied collection, including Qur'ans and Arabic and Persian treatises on astronomical, mathematical, and military subjects. A bi-lingual Hebrew-Latin manuscript, as well as Arabic astronomical tables, came through the donation of Edward Bernard, Savilian Professor of Astronomy from 1673 to 1691. Six more manuscripts were given to the College in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including an Ottoman Turkish letter, a Gujarati merchant's map, and two Hebrew thirteenth-century deeds of conveyance collected by the antiquary John Pointer (d. 1754), one-time chaplain of Merton College, Oxford.

Full biographical accounts of the members of St John's College Oxford give much new evidence for academic life of the period. This volume comprises a register of all who were academically of St John's College, Oxford, from its foundation in 1555 until 1660, as well as of a number of men otherwise associated with it. It includes many figures of nationalimportance, among them William Laud, William Juxon, Edmund Campion, and Bulstrode Whitelocke, scholarly translators of the Bible, five future earls, and many Members of Parliament. The biographies, based on a very wide rangeof sources, amplify and correct existing work and identify many previously unknown St John's men. The introduction draws on this new research to provide a richer and more nuanced portrayal of an early-modern Oxford college than any so far attempted - and, since the College was both a Catholic Marian foundation and the institution in which Laud spend much of his life, makes a significant contribution to an understanding of the ramifications of early modernEnglish religious loyalties. The College's involvement in early academic drama in Oxford also receives special attention, as do its many Shakespearean connections (both family and Warwickshire affinity). An extensive Glossary provides essential supplementary guidance to the workings of the early-modern academic world. Andrew Hegarty gained his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford; his research is on the history of European universities in theearly modern period.

While quill and ink were the writing implements of choice in the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, other colouring and non-colouring writing implements were in active use, too. The stylus, among them, was used on an everyday basis both for taking notes in wax tablets and for several vital steps in the creation of manuscripts. Occasionally, the stylus or perhaps even small knives were used for writing short notes that were scratched in the parchment surface without ink. One particular type of such notes encountered in manuscripts are dry-point glosses, i.e. short explanatory remarks that provide a translation or a clue for a lexical or syntactic difficulty of the Latin text. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of the known corpus of dry-point glosses in Old English by cataloguing the 34 manuscripts that are currently known to contain such glosses. A first general descriptive analysis of the corpus of Old English dry-point glosses is provided and their difficult visual appearance is discussed with respect to the theoretical and practical implications for their future study.

The catalogue is a detailed study of Oxford manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete translation of the Bible in English.

Essays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.

Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts is the first publication to list every surviving manuscript or manuscript fragment written in Anglo-Saxon England between the seventh and the eleventh centuries or imported into the country during that time. Each of the 1,291 entries in Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge's Bibliographical Handlist not only details the origins, contents, current location, script, and decoration of the manuscript, but also provides bibliographic entries that list facsimiles, editions, linguistic analyses, and general studies relevant to that manuscript. A general bibliography, designed to provide full details of author-date references cited in the individual entries, includes more than 4,000 items. Compiled by two of the field's greatest living scholars, the Gneuss-Lapidge Bibliographical Handlist stands to become the most important single-volume research tool to appear in the field since Greenfield and Robinson's Bibliography of Publications on Old English Literature. Their achievement in the present book will endure for many decades and serve as a catalyst for new research across several disciplines.

Discusses the techniques, uses, and aesthetics of medieval drawings; and reproduces work from more than fifty manuscripts produced between the ninth and early fourteenth century.