Facsimiles of English Episcopal Acta, 1085-1305 (English Episcopal Acta Supplementary Volume 1)

摘要

For an archivist, it is a reassuring fact that an edition, no matter how carefully prepared and no matter how expertly supported by scholarly apparatus, ultimately pales in comparison with the original it seeks to represent. Nearly all texts, and especially those written by hand, contain features that are inevitably shorn away in the process of committing them to the modern printed page. For more than 30 years a project of The British Academy has been publishing the acta, i.e. charters and other formal documents, produced by the bishops of England in the period from the Norman Conquest until the advent of episcopal registers: a variable date depending on the record-keeping traditions of the 17 medieval dioceses of the country and chance survival, but more often than not a certain point in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century.