Inner Circles: Reading and Writing in Late Medieval London (British Academy Neil Ker Memorial Fund Grant / Visiting Fellowship, Magdalen College, Oxford)

The British Academy's Neil Ker Memorial Fund will support the digitisation costs for this project, and some of the research will be conducted during a three-month Visiting Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford.

The main aim of this project is to produce a substantial monograph on scribal culture and book production in London from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century. The book is provisionally entitled 'Reading and Writing in Late Medieval London' and will offer the first comprehensive discussion of all institutional and private contexts in which writing and reading took place in the London area (London, Westminster, Southwark, and their environs). This will include the courts, writing offices, and institutions of the national government in Westminster; civic offices, commercial, and guild contexts in London; and religious courts and houses in and around London.

To limit additional research visits and avoid trips to archives further afield, an amount will be set aside to acquire digitised copies of manuscripts. This will include important fifteenth-century collections of original letters and documents, such as British Library Cotton MSS Galba B I, Caligula IV and V, and Cleopatra F. iii and iv, Edinburgh, University Library MS 183 (Privy Seal and Signet formulary, only partially digitised), and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 789