Category: update

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September 2014 Updates

Rose site users, we are delighted to announce that we have added another manuscript to our repository, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble 608, aka Grenoble 608. This 16th-century handwritten codex is chock full of illustrations – 88 pen and ink drawings, with light coloring in places, adorn the manuscript’s 143 paper folios. These fascinating depictions, which are somewhat amateurish in their execution, are accompanied by at times less-than-perfect scribal work. It seems the product of a smaller purse than some of the illuminated Rosemanuscripts, which makes it perhaps all the more alluring as an object of study. Was it copied hurriedly for a middle-class, middle-income household? Did the first owner pen the drawings themselves?

Image: Grenoble 608 ff. 13v-14r (orig. 11v-12r)
We have made some other small updates to our site to respond to requests and fix bugs in the system: the provenance of the Ferrell manuscript has now been corrected thanks to feedback from Peter Kidd (you can view his blog on Medieval Manuscripts Provenance, which includes a post about the Ferrell Rose here). Some users had noticed some problems with viewing the transcriptions that are available for some of the manuscripts – the Javascript problem, which was the culprit, has now been fixed.
Our project to tweet a modern English version of the Rose continues, you can follow us @RoseDigLib #RoseRom.
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Rose on Twitter

For those of you who are regular visitors to the Roman de la Rose Digital Library blog, you will probably be noticing some changes. In addition to a slight makeover of our blog style, the most obvious new feature is our fabulous Twitter feed in the right hand column.

Since the beginning of May our Twitter handle, @RoseDigLib, has been hosting some experiments with medieval ‘twitterature’. The project was conceived by Tamsyn Rose-Steel (@TamsynMedieval), CLIR/Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, and utilizes the talents of poet Mike Rose-Steel (@MikeRStyping), who is a PhD candidate at Exeter University and is funded by Exeter’s ‘Bridging the Gaps’ Wiring Wittgenstein project. Guillaume de Lorris’s original poem of around 4,000 lines has been rendered into approximately 200 tweets in modern English rhyming couplets and quatrains, often accompanied by some of the stunning manuscript images that we host here on the Rose Digital Library. Follow us to enjoy this new rendering of the Rose.

To explain the philosophy behind the endeavor and how we handled the constraints on the Twitter medium, some pages will be added to this blog exploring our ideas in greater depth. The first mini-essay ‘Medieval Twitterature’ has already been posted – click on the tab under the header to start reading. We hope you enjoy experiencing this most seminal of medieval French works in a new way.

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New Rose manuscripts and other improvements

We have just updated the Roman de la Rose Digital Library with some exciting new developments. We are proud to announce the addition of three new manuscripts from various German libraries. The new manuscripts include:

  • Ms. lat. qu. 65 from the Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt. This 14th century manuscript includes 14 miniatures.
  • Cod. gall. 17 from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. This mid-14th century Parisian manuscript is beautifully illustrated with 82 miniatures.
  • Cod. poet et Phil. 6 from the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart. This is a 15th century manuscript with 37 miniatures.

In addition to the three new manuscripts, we are making the following additions and changes to the site:

  • Updated manuscript description for Bodmer 79
  • Corrected the image tagging on the following: Walters 143 (105v), Arsenal 5209 (107r), and Chicago 1380 (102v). Each of these descriptions were changed from “Husband Foolishly Confides in Wife” to “Procreating Couple”.
  • Image tagging on Morgan 148, 162r moved to 162v.
  • Corrected numbering of flyleaves on Fr. 25526.
  • Missing links added to French-language home page.
As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions about the library. We hope that these additions and changes will enhance your research.
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Site update

  • Changed image tagging format to normalize character names and illustration titles. This greatly improved the illustration title and character name tables.
  • Reworked the data collection table to better utilize space.
  • Updated to latest gwt and gwt-visualization.
  • More image tagging.
  • Support for bibliographies in RefWorks XML format. See Douce 195, Douce 332, and Selden Supra 57.
  • Automatic linking of bibliography references to Google books when available.
  • Fixed search bug caused by huge query expansions (searching for responsiveness, or Sisyphus in Safari) by limiting expansions.
  • Fixed search bug caused by ” not being escaped
  • The contact email address working again after resolving email relay issue
  • Fixed naming of images in endmatter of Hunter 409.