Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Authors in Anglo-Saxon England: Twenty-First Progress Report, December 2006
http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk
The year 2006 was marked by a very successful Open Meeting, hosted for the first time at University College London by Professor Susan Irvine, and attracting an audience of nearly fifty, including an encouraging number of students. In the first session, 'Sources', papers were delivered on 'The Sources and Audience of Vercelli Homily VII' by Samantha Zacher (Cornell University), and on 'Aldhelm, Patristics and the Anglo-Saxon Audience', by Tereli Askwith (Swansea). The second session, 'Resources', was devoted to progress reports on several major research projects: the Anglo-Saxon Formulary (Andy Orchard, University of Toronto); the new edition of the Durham Liber Vitae (Andrew Wareham, King's College London); Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (Andrew Bell, Cambridge); English Manuscripts 1060-1220 (Mary Swan, Leeds, and Elaine Treharne and Orietta Da Rold, Leicester). Dr Zacher has since agreed to contribute entries on Vercelli VII to the database, and a version of her paper will appear shortly in a volume of essays on the Vercelli Homilies edited by herself and Professor Orchard. It is hoped to arrange a further Open Meeting in due course.
There was a meeting of the Management Committee in Cambridge in October 2005; a further meeting is planned to coincide with the ISAS conference in London in July-August 2007.
The website (http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk) continues to attract over three hundred hits a month, and references to the database continue to appear regularly in print and in conference papers, for example in ASE 34 (several times), at the annual symposium of the Boethius Project in Oxford in August 2006, and in the introduction to the recent festschrift for Professor Frank Barlow, Writing Medieval Biography (Boydell and Brewer, 2006). Contributions have been received on Napier XXXI and on the Old English version of the Bull of Pope Sergius I for Malmesbury Abbey; work in progress on Vercelli VII has already been mentioned.
As ever, offers of help with sourcing texts, especially in Latin, would be warmly welcomed. Potential contributors should contact the Director for Latin, Dr Rosalind Love (rcl10@cam.ac.uk), or the Director for Old English, Professor Susan Irvine (uclesei@ucl.ac.uk), as appropriate.
