ITSEE is featured in a paper this week at the First Annual Conference of the European Academy of Religion.
This week in Bologna sees the first annual conference of the European Academy of Religion. The work of ITSEE at Birmingham will be featured in a paper given by Dr Antonio Gerace of KU Leuven. Dr Gerace is a postdoctoral scholar working on a transcription of the Codex Eyckensis and other related Latin Gospel books. Codex Eyckensis is an eighth-century copy of the four Gospels in Latin in insular script normally on display in St Catherine's Church, Maaseik.
Dr Gerace will be speaking in the session on New Frontiers of Technology and the Study of Religion: the Emerging and Transformative Role of Libraries, Universities, and Cultural Heritage Institutions on Thursday 8 March. His abstract is as follows:
Codex Eyckensis: A Significant Evangelarium from the Eighth Century. Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
The Codex Eyckensis is the most ancient Gospel Book of the Low Countries. Its origin is still debated: evidence links this manuscript with other codices, like the Barberini Gospels and the Codex Aureus, made in Britain in the 8th century (De Bruyne 1908; Lowe 1994), or to the Augsburg Gospels, made in Echternach in the 8th century (Fisher 1988-91; Ferrari 1999; Netzer 1994). The Codex Eyckensis Research Project wants to give an answer to this debated question, by comparing the textual tradition of these and other codices, thanks to their transcription. The aim of the paper is to show the importance of the electronic tools developed by the Birmingham Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), able to create a digital edition of the codices and therefore to easily comprehend the degree of their textual agreements. In this way, it will be possible to show to which textual tradition the eighth century Codex Eyckensis belongs.
The inaugural meeting of the Codex Eyckensis research project took place in Leuven in October 2017. ITSEE's Director, Dr Hugh Houghton, is a member of the project board, members of which are shown below along with the two codices which make up Codex Eyckensis.
Members of the Codex Eyckensis project with the manuscript in October 2017