Alfred the Great's Boethius

FAIN: RZ-20887-02

University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY 40506-0001)
Kevin Kiernan (Project Director: September 2001 to May 2008)

To support preparation of an electronic edition of Alfred the Great's Boethius' CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY.

BL MS Cotton Otho A. vi preserves the only surviving copy of the Old English prosimetrical translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy by King Alfred the Great. Because the manuscript, severely damaged by fire in 1731, is often illegible in normal light, there is still no modern edition of this text. This project addresses: digital restoration of the manuscript with special lighting techniques; creation of a searchable electronic edition and glossary with the restored manuscript images; and development of a modular software framework, customized to the needs of scholars in the humanities, to allow efficient assembly of complex electronic editions from high-resolution digital facsimiles and XML-encoded textual materials.

Associated Products

“The Nathwylc Scribe and the Nathwylc Text of Beowulf.” (Book Section)
Title: “The Nathwylc Scribe and the Nathwylc Text of Beowulf.”
Author: Kevin Kiernan
Editor: Catherine E. Karkov
Abstract: Using tools first developed under Electronic Boethius (NEH), and subsequently developed as Edition Production and Presentation Technology (EPPT, Mellon, now Image-Based XML or IBX), this article posits a third scribe for Beowulf.
Year: 2009
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/poetry-place-and-gender-studies-in-medieval-culture-in-honor-of-helen-damico/oclc/430522973&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/Nathwylc/
Secondary URL Description: Author's website
Publisher: Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University
Book Title: Poetry, Place and Gender: Studies in Medieval Culture

“Remodeling Alfred’s Boethius with the tol ond andweorc of Edition Production Technology (EPT)" (Book Section)
Title: “Remodeling Alfred’s Boethius with the tol ond andweorc of Edition Production Technology (EPT)"
Author: Kevin Kiernan
Editor: Kevin Kiernan
Editor: Antonette DiPaolo Healey
Abstract: Edition Production Technology (EPT) is a digital workbench that can preserve and display manuscript features while still making the text accessible to scholars and students alike. An image-based electronic edition of the largely inaccessible Cotton manuscript helps clarify the seemingly upside-down manuscript tradition of Alfred’s Boethius.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/making-sense-constructing-meaning-in-early-english/oclc/174138597&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBoethius/edit.htm#remodeling
Secondary URL Description: Electronic Boethius website. For more advanced image-based electronic editing tools, see the EPPT website at http://www.eppt.org/eppt.
Publisher: Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 7, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Book Title: Making Sense: Constructing Meaning in Early English

Making Sense: Constructing Meaning in Early English (Book)
Title: Making Sense: Constructing Meaning in Early English
Editor: Kevin Kiernan
Editor: Antonette DiPaolo Healey
Abstract: The five essays in this volume discuss texts either from the Old English period or from the transitional twelfth century, and each explores, from differing perspectives, how today's readers make sense of, or construct meanings from, early English documents." "The first two essays specifically focus on the research tools of the Dictionary of Old English as strategic aids in the discovery of meaning. The other three, while also availing themselves of the Dictionary of Old English, focus on how scholarly editing tries to make sense of the complex ways medieval documents themselves attempted to make sense - through evolving translations, variant versions, selective adaptations, explanatory glosses, expansive commentaries - of the "same" texts over this long and linguistically diverse span of time." "From word to dictionary, from Beowulf to Boethius, from prose and verse to prose-and-verse, from Latin sources and resources to Old English transformations, from glosses and commentaries to canon formation, from consuetudinaries to penitentials, from manuscripts to electronic and print editions, these five essays reflect some of the direct and round-about paths scholars take in their search to understand and elucidate our culturally distant primary materials.
Year: 2007
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/making-sense-constructing-meaning-in-early-english/oclc/174138597&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Publisher: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9780888449078

“Digital Facsimiles in Editing: Some Guidelines for Editors of Image-based Electronic Editions" (Book Section)
Title: “Digital Facsimiles in Editing: Some Guidelines for Editors of Image-based Electronic Editions"
Author: Kevin Kiernan
Editor: Lou Burnard
Editor: Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe
Editor: John Unsworth
Abstract: In the past several years it has become imperative to bring the research agendas of the humanities and computer science together to advance our abilities for representing, editing, and accessing our cultural records. What is urgently needed to take full advantage of encoding schemes of scholarly editions is the seamless integration of text and image, which will ultimately serve the interests of not only image-based scholarly editions but also the broader cultural world. The Computer Science research community is very interested in image search and techniques for developing efficient and accurate searching, while the humanities computing research community is similarly absorbed in textual encoding. Neither area is likely to make real progress, however, until their complementary research agendas converge.
Year: 2006
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/electronic-textual-editing/oclc/62134738&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat
Secondary URL: http://www.uky.edu/~kiernan/MLA-TEI/ETE-ksk.html
Secondary URL Description: Author's website
Publisher: New York : Modern Language Association of America
Book Title: Electronic Textual Editing

The Source of the Napier fragment of Alfred's Boethius (Article)
Title: The Source of the Napier fragment of Alfred's Boethius
Author: Kevin Kiernan
Abstract: In 1887 A. S. Napier published a semi-diplomatic transcript of a fragment from an Old English Boethius manuscript, which he reported finding the year before as a flyleaf at the end of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Junius 86 (Napier 1887). Medieval and Renaissance binders sometimes used the leaves of older manuscripts, when they had lost their interest, at the front and back of bindings to reinforce them and protect their contents (Ker 1957, xli). Junius 86 is the second part of an eleventh-century collection of, for the most part, Old English homilies.1 Unfortunately, the fragment was removed and temporarily mislaid soon after its discovery in 1886, and no one other than Napier has ever been able to examine it (Sedgefield 1899, xvi.). For the inaugural issue of the Digital Medievalist it is de rigueur to use digital tools for analyzing virtual manuscripts. For this job I will be wielding several digital tools originally developed for the Electronic Boethius in order to create and analyze a virtual facsimile of the lost manuscript leaf Napier describes and transcribes.
Year: 2005
Primary URL: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal/1.1/kiernan/#d186939e194
Primary URL Description: Online journal
Secondary URL: http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/eBoethius/inlad.htm
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Digital Medievalist - Inaugural issue, Volume 1, number 1

Electronic Beowulf, Third Edition (Book)
Title: Electronic Beowulf, Third Edition
Editor: Kevin Kiernan
Abstract: The revision of the third edition of Electronic Beowulf (British Library Publications and University of Chicago Press 2010) was facilitated by digital tools first developed under the Electronic Boethius grant. These tools were subsequently developed under grants from NSF and Mellon as EPT (Edition Production Technology) and EPPT (Edition Production and Presentation Technology). They are now also called IBX (Image Based XML).
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/electronic-beowulf/oclc/730089862&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: World Cat
Secondary URL: http://ebeowulf.uky.edu
Secondary URL Description: Index & Guide to Electronic Beowulf, Third Edition
Access Model: Electronic edition
Publisher: British Library Publications and University of Chicago Press
Type: Scholarly Edition

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