Malcolm Parkes
Malcolm Beckwith Parkes (26 June 1930 – 10 May 2013), credited as an author as M. B. Parkes, was an English paleographer, notable for his contributions to the scholarship of medieval manuscripts. His studies of the manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland were especially important, and his 1978 article "The Production of Copies of the 'Canterbury Tales'" was described as "seminal". Parkes was a student of Neil Ripley Ker and wrote his B.Litt. thesis on the Secretary hand. From 1965 to 1997 he was a fellow at Keble College, Oxford Keble College () is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its main buildings are on Parks Road, opposite the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, University Museum a ..., and held a personal chair in paleography in the University of Oxford. At Keble he taught Old and Middle English language and literature. Among his important individual achievements are the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Palaeography
Palaeography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, UK) or paleography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, US) (ultimately from , , 'old', and , , 'to write') is the study and academic discipline of historical writing systems. It encompasses the historicity of manuscripts and texts, subsuming deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, as well as the analysis of historic penmanship, handwriting script, signification, and printed media. It is primarily concerned with the forms, processes and relationships of writing and printing systems as evident in a text, document or manuscript; and analysis of the substantive textual content of documents is a secondary function. Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which texts such as manuscripts, books, codices, Tract (literature), tracts, and monographs were produced, a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer ( ; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for ''The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific ''A Treatise on the Astrolabe'' for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in public service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament, having been elected as Knight of the shire, shire knight for Kent. Among Chaucer's many other works are ''The Book of the Duchess'', ''The House of Fame'', ''The Legend of Good Women'', ''Troilus and Criseyde'', and ''Parlement of Foules''. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman Fren ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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William Langland
William Langland (; ; ) is the presumed author of a work of Middle English alliterative verse generally known as ''Piers Plowman'', an allegory with a complex variety of religious themes. The poem translated the language and concepts of the cloister into symbols and images that could be understood by a layman. Life Little is known of Langland himself. It seems that he was born in the West Midlands of England around 1330, according to internal evidence in ''Piers Plowman''. The narrator in ''Piers Plowman'' receives his first vision while sleeping in the Malvern Hills (between Herefordshire and Worcestershire), which suggests some connection to the area. The dialect of the poem is also consistent with this part of the country. ''Piers Plowman'' was written ''c.'' 1377, as the character's imagination says he has followed him for "five and forty winters." A fifteenth-century note in the Dublin manuscript of ''Piers Plowman'' says that Langland was the son of Stacy de Roka ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Neil Ripley Ker
Neil Ripley Ker (; 1908–1982) was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature. He was Reader in Palaeography at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford until he retired in 1968. He is known especially for his ''Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon'', which is praised as a milestone in Anglo-Saxon manuscript study. Biography Ker was born in Brompton, London, and was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, completing a BA in English Language and Literature in 1931 and a BLitt in 1933. During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector. In 1945 he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College and in 1946 University Reader in Palaeography. Ker was the first Lyell Lecturer in Bibliography at the University of Oxford in 1952-53 on the topic, English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest. In 1955 he held the Sandars Readership in Bibliography at Cambridge University and lectured on "Oxford libraries in the sixteenth c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Secretary Hand
Secretary hand or script is a style of European handwriting developed in the early sixteenth century that remained common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for writing English, German, Welsh and Gaelic. History Predominating before the dominance of Italic script, it arose out of the need for a hand more legible and universally recognizable than the book hand of the High Middle Ages, in order to cope with the increase in long-distance business and personal correspondence, in cities, chanceries and courts. The hand thus used by secretaries was developed from cursive business hands and was in common use throughout the British Isles through the seventeenth century. In spite of its loops and flourishes it was widely used by scriveners and others whose daily employment comprised hours of writing. By 1618 the writing-master Martin Billingsley in his ''The Pen's Excellency'', 1618, distinguished three forms of secretary hand, as well as "mixed" hands that employed some Ro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Keble College, Oxford
Keble College () is one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. Its main buildings are on Parks Road, opposite the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, University Museum and the Oxford University Parks, University Parks. The college is bordered to the north by Keble Road, to the south by Museum Road, and to the west by Blackhall Road. Keble was established in 1870, having been built as a monument to John Keble, who had been a leading member of the Oxford Movement which sought to stress the Catholicity, Catholic nature of the Church of England. Consequently, the college's original teaching focus was primarily theological, although the college now offers a broad range of subjects, reflecting the diversity of degrees offered across the wider university. In the period after the Second World War, the trends were towards scientific courses (proximity to the university Science Area, Oxford, science area east of th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Song Of Roland
The ''Song of Roland'' () is an 11th-century based on the deeds of the Frankish military leader Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in AD 778, during the reign of the Emperor Charlemagne. It is the oldest surviving major work of French literature. It exists in various manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity in Medieval and Renaissance literature from the 12th to 16th centuries. The epic poem written in Old French is the first and one of the most outstanding examples of the ''chanson de geste'', a literary form that flourished between the 11th and 16th centuries in Medieval Europe and celebrated legendary deeds. An early version was composed around 1040 AD, with additions and alterations made up to about 1115 AD. The final poem contains about 4,000 lines. Manuscripts and dating Although set in the Carolingian era, the ''Song of Roland'' was written centuries later. There is a single extant manuscript of the ''Song of Roland''. It is he ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Lyell Lectures
The Lyell Readership in Bibliography is an endowed annual lecture series given at the University of Oxford. Instituted in 1952 by a bequest from the solicitor, book collector and bibliographer, James Patrick Ronaldson Lyell. After Lyell's death, Keeper of the Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Richard William Hunt, writing of the Lyell bequest noted, "he was a self-taught bibliophile and scholar of extraordinary enthusiasm and discrimination, and one who deserves to be remembered not only by Oxford but by the whole bibliographical world." The series has continued down to the present day. Together with the Panizzi Lectures at the British Library and the Sandars Lectures at Cambridge University, it is considered one of the major British bibliographical lecture series. Lectures * 1952–1953 Neil Ripley Ker: English Manuscripts in the Century after the Norman Conquest * 1954–1955 Walter Wilson Greg: Some Aspects and Problems of London Publishing between 1550 and 1 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Prosopography
Prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable. Research subjects are analysed by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis.Stone 1971. The discipline is considered to be one of the auxiliary sciences of history. History British historian Lawrence Stone (1919–1999) brought the term to general attention in an explanatory article in 1971, although it had been used as early as 1897 with the publication of the '' Prosopographia Imperii Romani'' by German scholars. The word is drawn from the figure of prosopopeia in classical rhetoric, introduced by Quintilian, in which an absent or imagined person is —in words, as if present. Stone noted two uses of prosopography as an historian's tool, in uncovering deeper interests and connections beneath the superficial rhetoric of politics, to examine the structure of the political machine and in analysing the c ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Medieval Academy Of America
The Medieval Academy of America (MAA; spelled Mediaeval until ) is the largest organization in the United States promoting the field of medieval studies. It was founded in 1925 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The academy publishes the quarterly journal '' Speculum'', and awards prizes, grants, and fellowships such as the Haskins Medal, which is named for Charles Homer Haskins, one of the academy's founders and its second president. Overview The academy supports research, publication and teaching in medieval art, archaeology, history, law, literature, music, philosophy, religion, science, social and economic institutions, and all other aspects of the Middle Ages. The academy was admitted to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1927. It has been affiliated with the American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1930 Births
Events January * January 15 – The Moon moves into its nearest point to Earth, called perigee, at the same time as its fullest phase of the Lunar Cycle. This is the closest moon distance at in recent history, and the next one will be on January 1, 2257, at . * January 26 – The Indian National Congress declares this date as Independence Day, or as the day for Purna Swaraj (Complete Independence). * January 28 – The first patent for a field-effect transistor is granted in the United States, to Julius Edgar Lilienfeld. * January 30 – Pavel Molchanov launches a radiosonde from Pavlovsk, Saint Petersburg, Slutsk in the Soviet Union. February * February 10 – The Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng launch the Yên Bái mutiny in the hope of ending French Indochina, French colonial rule in Vietnam. * February 18 – While studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh confirms the existence of Pluto, a celestial body considered a planet until redefined as a dwarf planet ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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2013 Deaths
This is a list of lists of deaths of notable people, organized by year. New deaths articles are added to their respective month (e.g., Deaths in ) and then linked below. 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995 1994 1993 1992 1991 1990 1989 1988 1987 1986 Earlier years ''Deaths in years earlier than this can usually be found in the main articles of the years.'' See also * Lists of deaths by day * Deaths by year (category) {{DEFAULTSORT:deaths by year ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |