A New Appreciation for the Giants Whose Shoulders We Stand Upon
For close to 6 months now, I’ve been working on a bibliographic analysis of a medieval medical manuscript, Peterhouse MS 222. This followed on from the paper I gave to the Bibliographic Society of Australia and New Zealand in December. Within a week of that conference I saw a call for papers for a volume on the movement of documents in the Middle Ages, and I stupidly thought “what the heck. I’m not a medievalist. They’ll probably reject me.” Spoiler alert. They didn’t reject me. Thus began a project which has made me realise just how spoilt we ancient historians and classicists are. A major part of this research was reading the manuscript and identifying which texts were included in it. Some of this had been done by previous scholars, but a considerable amount had not. I was also identifying exactly what parts some of these works came from, by comparing the manuscript to printed editions, some published as early as the 1470s, or to other manuscripts because no printed editions exi...
