French Literary Manuscripts in England, 1100-1500

The data is centred around 810 manuscripts that contain French literature and that were produced in England in the wake of the Norman Conquest. All Anglo-Norman manuscripts in Ruth Dean and Maureen Boulton’s Anglo-Norma Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (1999) are contained in the dataset except those currently housed in Oxford.

For each manuscript, the dataset contains any traditional description information available in manuscript catalogues, including the manuscript’s estimated date of composition, place of composition, original and subsequent medieval owners, and any notes relevant to its medieval provenance. For each manuscript in the dataset, the contents file contains a list of the manuscript’s constituent texts, their languages of composition, and the folio range for each text; the owners file contains information about owners, listing first the person who commissioned or produced the manuscript, if known.