One very important facet of my Honors Thesis is the individual study of one of the three Bibles involved in the overall project: a manuscript with the shelfmark MS.MR.Frag.63. This is a sixty-eight leaf fragment of an English Bible produced ca. 1240 in Oxford, England in a professional manuscript workshop known for its master, William de Brailes. This project is a testament to the interdisciplinary nature of Medieval Studies; I have sections of this paper which fall under the categories of Art History, Medieval History, Modern American History, Codicology, Paleography, Fragmentology, and so much more. Although the link included below shows some of the most fascinating and fun illuminations included in MS.MR.Frag.63, these are not the only important aspects of the manuscript on which I work. In fact, illumination is one of the portions of manuscript research that I am the least interested in. People often think that manuscript research is all about the text, i.e. what does it say?, but I actually work on the text itself very little. I am interested in using small physical aspects on the manuscript itself and external records to find the individuals who have handled this manuscripts throughout the last 750-plus years, and in doing this, I begin to reconstruct a small piece of history.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/9SmtoxWwQXohrKMg6