September 2002
The project was begun in 1984 and has been developed and managed by a group of scholars under the chairmanship of, successively, Peter Clemoes (Cambridge), Malcolm Godden (Oxford) and Joyce Hill (Leeds). The current officers are:
Other members of the Committee are:
The Committee is helped by an international Advisory Board whose current members are:
The Register aims to identify all written sources which were incorporated, quoted, translated or adapted anywhere in English or Latin texts which were written, or are likely to have been written, in Anglo-Saxon England, including those by foreign authors. It also identifies the written sources used by authors of texts written abroad if those authors are certainly or arguably Anglo-Saxons, and by foreigners who were drawing mainly on materials which they had obtained, or are likely to have obtained, in Anglo-Saxon England.
Anglo-Saxon England is defined as England up to 1066, but a text is sourced whether it is extant in a pre-1066 copy or only in a later one. A text written after 1066 is included in the project only if it is of a type characteristic of England before 1066. An identifiable source is recorded whether or not it is extant. Oral sources and booklists are excluded.
The initial impulse for a large-scale project to study and record the written sources of Anglo-Saxon authors came at a one-day conference on sources at the University of Leeds in March 1984, organized to publicize a proposal made at the Symposium on the Sources of Anglo-Saxon Culture held in conjunction with the 1983 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University to revise J. D. A. Ogilvy's Books known to the English, 597-1066 (Cambridge, MA, 1967). At the Leeds Conference, J. E. Cross and Malcolm Godden gave papers on the sources of some of the Vercelli homilies and of Ælfric respectively, and in the discussion which followed, the desirability of establishing a rather different project, along the lines of Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, was agreed by all present. A small steering committee was set up, which met subsequently on a number of occasions at King's College, London, during the summer of 1984. At some of its meetings representatives of the informal group of American scholars concerned with the 'revised Ogilvy' project (subsequently named Sources of Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture) were also present, and the separate aims and objectives of the two schemes were clarified. The steering committee established an Executive Committee for Fontes with Peter Clemoes as Director, Joyce Hill as General Secretary, Michael Lapidge as Executive Secretary for Anglo-Latin, and Donald Scragg as Executive Secretary for Old English.
Planning and setting up the project in every detail necessarily formed a lengthy initial stage, but since then a substantial body of material has been assembled. First of all, the Executive Committee, on the basis of work done by various subcommittees, approved guidelines for the submission of entries to a computer database, housed at the University of Manchester. Then followed the recruitment of a body of scholars worldwide. Next the database was created by Dr Marilyn Deegan, whose work during a one-year full-time appointment as a Research Assistant to the project was funded by the University of Manchester's Research Support Fund. Processing of the contributions received from scholars and their incorporation in the database were achieved to begin with by the half-time appointment for two years of Mrs (now Dr) Wendy Collier as a Research Assistant, funded by the University of Manchester Research Support Fund. Subsequently continuation of Dr Collier's work was supported by grants from the British Academy. From 1991 onwards advances on the Old English side of the project were greatly assisted by a succession of appointments of research associates funded by the British Academy and its Humanities Research Board, and subsequently by the Arts and Humanities Research Board.
These research associates compiled material for a substantial range of material:
1992-3 Dr Joan Hart (now Joan Hart-Hasler): King Alfred's version of the Regula Pastoralis, the Old English Bede, Canons of Edgar, Apollonius of Tyre
1995-7 Dr Mark Atherton: anonymous homilies and saints' lives; Ælfric's De Temporibus Anni; as well as processing work from outside contributors
1995-2002 Dr Rohini Jayatilaka: Ælfric's Supplementary Homilies and Saints' Lives; Wærferth's translation of Gregory's Dialogues; Old English Orosius; Old English Benedictine Rule
1997-8 Dr Christine Rauer: Lives of St Machutus and Chad; the Old English Martyrology
1998-9 Dr Daniel Anlezark: Old English Daniel and Azarias; Old English Exodus
1999 Dr Brad Bedingfield: Ælfric's homilies Assmann 5 and 6; Ælfric's Interrogationes Sigewulfi in Genesin
Work on the Anglo-Latin side was substantially advanced in 1996 by the appointment of Dr Rosalind Love as Humanities Research Board Institutional Fellow at Robinson College Cambridge, to work on the project; she has covered the Latin charters, the Latin saints' lives and the works of Bede (in progress). Following Dr Love's appointment to a lectureship in the Department of Anglo-Saxon Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, Dr Katherine Scarfe-Beckett succeeded to the HRB Institutional Fellowship in 2000 and completed work on the sources for Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica.
Other material has been contributed by members of the project, and by scholars elsewhere. [See list of 'Texts included in the Database']
In 1995 the database was moved from the mainframe computer at Manchester to a PC-base using the Paradox database system, and Dr Orchard became database manager. In 1998 the main database was relocated at Oxford, with Dr Jayatilaka as database editor and Professor Godden as database director, and work began on creating a web-mounted version, with the help of Paul Groves of the Humanities Computing Development Team at the Oxford University Computing Service. This was made available to the public for the first time on 1 August 1999. In 2002 the present CD-ROM version of the database was created with the help of David Miles of Oxford Database Design. The project aims to incorporate additional records from time to time and to issue at least one updated version on CD-ROM.
In the course of its development the project has produced a series of research tools:
The project gratefully acknowledges support from the following institutions:
Currently the database covers about 1150 Anglo-Saxon texts, over 500 in Old English and over 600 in Latin. For the full list see 'Texts included in the Database' (or to see the list of authors covered so far, go into the database and scroll down the list under Anglo-Saxon Texts). Nearly a thousand source-texts have been so far cited, from Abbo to Wulfstan.
The records for each text were compiled by the individual contributors named in the general information for that text, using either their own unpublished research or published work by themselves or others as noted in the bibliographical information provided with the records, or a combination of the two. Any user wishing to employ material drawn from the database in their own publications should acknowledge the Fontes database and, where appropriate, the individual contributor and the published work cited in the bibliographies.