Output details

The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220

This e-book, designed to be read online, is the major research output of an AHRC-funded project (2005-10). The English material that survives from 1060 to 1220 had been studied only piecemeal before 2005, as a postscript to Old English or a precursor to Middle English textual and linguistic culture, or for its idiosyncratic dialectal evidence. This e-book contains the first full, accurate and analytical corpus of manuscripts with English written immediately before and after the Norman Conquest, bridging traditional periodization of 'Old' and 'Middle' English by investigating the status of English relative to French and Latin during this period and the issues surrounding the production and use of English at this time in terms of place, date, scribes and resources.

Kato was the project research associate (2008-10), and continued to work for the completion of the e-book until September 2013. She designed and created the whole of the web-structure. She is the main editor and one of the four authors of this e-book.

The e-book contains 205 manuscript descriptions by ten authors in various lengths: some detailed case studies contain new discoveries from original investigations of the manuscripts, while some others are described with reference to published scholarship. Kato commissioned, edited, proofread and published all 205 descriptions (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/catalogue/mss.htm).

Kato is the main or one of the authors of forty-five descriptions, which include CUL MSS,

• Hh.1.10 (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/mss/EM.CUL.Hh.1.10.htm)

• Ii.2.4 (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/mss/EM.CUL.Ii.2.4.htm)

• Ii.2.11 (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/mss/EM.CUL.Ii.2.11.htm)

• Kk.3.18 (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/mss/EM.CUL.Kk.3.18.htm)

The total length of descriptions by Kato amounts to over 100,000 words.

The e-book offers accompanying material jointly written and edited by the four authors, which discusses the wider implications of the findings that have emerged from the manuscript descriptions. Kato and Da Rold’s article, ‘What We Know We Know’, for example, contextualises and maps CUL MSS Ii.1.33 and Kk.3.18 within the long post-Conquest literary culture (http://www.le.ac.uk/english/em1060to1220/culturalcontexts/4_WWKWK.htm).