Research
‘The lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c. 700-1450: origins, identification, contexts and change’
is a five-year research effort funded through AHRC. Due for completion by May 2012 it wil include a searchable database of up to 7000 words and a companion Picture Gallery illustrating dress and textiles of the period. In addition a separately funded hard-back Encvclopaedia of Dress and Textiles, comprising 600 articles, is in preparation and will hopefully be published justbefore the Lexis database goes online.
Pam Walker, part-time, fully funded, PhD student, is researching Anglo-Saxon and medieval clothing depicted in effigies, stained glass windows, brass plaques and other sources. A number of the illustrations she has produced will be used in the Picture Gallery section of the Lexis website. Her PhD is titled 'Fashioning Death: The choice and representation of female clothing on English medieval funeral monuments 1250-1450'.
Leverhulme Project
Dr. Louise Sylvester and Professor Gale Owen-Crocker (as co-applicants) were awarded a substantial grant from the Leverhulme Trust in late 2009 to look at Medieval dress and textile vocabulary in hitherto unpublished or unedited sources, mainly held in the National Archives at Kew. Dr. Mark Chambers, whose three-year employment for the Lexis Project ended on November 5, immediately took up a further three-year post as principal researcher on this venture, which stands on its own, but also has ramifications for the Lexis Project, in that Mark’s study lies within the parameters of the Project’s thousand-year span of interest. Gale, Louise and Mark will be engaged, among other things, on producing an illustrated sourcebook of the vocabulary of medieval dress and textiles, whilst also assembling a corpus of documents relating to dress and textiles in the period and examining the language choices made in those documents. Importantly for the Lexis Project, the team will also extract any unknown vocabulary items ‘for inclusion in historical dictionary projects’ of which the Lexis database is the one that will initially benefit.
Eleventh century manuscripts and texts
A major MANCASS research project was a database of eleventh century manuscripts and texts providing specialist tools for analysing spelling and palaeography. See C11 database page on this website.
For many years Professor Don Scragg has been the Director for Old English of the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici project; an electronic database of Old English texts and their sources which can be searched via the Internet. Much of the early work on the database was undertaken by research associates at Manchester. Work is still continuing on adding new entries to the database and refining the search mechanisms.
MANCASS has undertaken a series of collaborative publications. Independent publications by members of the centre are listed in their staff home pages.
Interns
MANCASS has hosted six interns from Smith College USA since 2006. With their invaluable assistance a MANCASS Library has been established in Room S.1.1, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester.The holdings include books acquired by the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and Eleventh-century Script Projects (detailed above), together with some bequests and donations, and theses by Manchester students on Anglo-Saxon topics. Entry through Dr Brian Schneider or Dr Mark Zumbuhl in the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project RoomSamuel Alexander Building S 1.3a or Professor Owen-Crocker in S.1.11.
The catalogue will shortly be available on this website. The books have been dusted, reshelved and catalogued by two of our tAmerican interns over the summer of 2010 and are available to all MANCASS members but MUST NOT normally be taken out of the designated room. If you wish to photocopy something you must ask permission, give your name and details of the book to Dr Schneider or Dr Zumbuhl, or Professor Owen-Crocker, and check it in with them on your return.
From January to June 2011 MANCASS and the Lexis Project welcomes Johannes Graebeduenkel of the University of Hamburg as an intern. Johannes will be working on several projects whilst he is with us, but chiefly he will be conentrating on matters connected to the Lexis Project, as it enters its final year