First Line Index of Post-Medieval Latin Verse in Early Modern English Manuscripts

I am making this first-line index of around 5,500 Latin poems in early modern English manuscripts freely available. Please note that it represents an initial and rather basic stage of development. I have records of around another 25,000 Latin poems for which the first lines have not yet been encoded, and this total of around 30,000 Latin poems itself represents only a fraction of the post-medieval Latin verse extant in English manuscripts alone. In other words, the fact that a first line does not appear in this list should not be taken to imply that it is not extant in one or even several English manuscripts.

A few key points for users:

• The index is fully searchable. The search disregards diacritics, so e.g. ‘ae’ will find both æ and ae. It does not regularize spelling, so it is worth searching under both forms for words containing u/v and i/j (e.g. umbra and vmbra).

• The first lines retain transcription mark-up. Deleted material appears as ~deletion~ and uncertain transcriptions as {uncertain}. Where deleted material stands at the beginning of a line, it has not been taken into account in the alphabetisation, but remains fully searchable.

• For the moment, some blank entries and entries beginning with punctuation appear at the start of the index; these will be ironed out in due course.

• A few English first lines are also included; these generally represent English versions of a Latin poem where both appear together in a manuscript.

• This data has not been double-checked and certainly contains some errors of transcription.

• The index does not currently indicate the author of the poem, even where this is known. Similarly, it does not indicate whether the poem is attributed (correctly or incorrectly) in the original manuscript.

• If you make use of this data in published work, please cite the web address (https://www.victoriamoul.com/first-line-index-of-latin-verse-in-english-manuscripts) and my name (Dr Victoria Moul).

Information about the data on which this index is based:

• Manuscripts included dated or appeared to date from between 1550 and 1720, with a few exceptions.

• The manuscripts included initially were all in English collections, excluding Scotland, Wales, Ireland, the US, France and the Netherlands, although all these countries also have significant relevant holdings. Over time, some manuscripts from outside England will be added.

• Latin poems in such manuscripts were included in the survey if the Latin poem itself appeared to be definitely or probably post-medieval — which for this project was defined as dating from in or after 1500. Nevertheless, some medieval material no doubt remains, especially in cases where medieval Latin poems were clearly being reused for contemporary effect (e.g. for satirical purposes).

• The data is derived from a large number of .xml files created mostly as part of a Leverhulme Trust funded project, ‘Neo-Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, c. 1550-1700’, which ran between 2017 and 2021. In practice, the parameters of the survey extended well beyond verse miscellanies as such, and data is also drawn from, for example, letters, notebooks, scribal publications, school work, scrolls and many loose papers in various archives. I (Victoria Moul) have continued to add to, edit and improve the data over the last five years.

• the intial .xml transcriptions were made by a team of students and researchers including myself, Bianca Facchini, Edward Taylor, Sharon van Dijk, Raffaella Colombo and Astrid Khoo.

• I have used Claude to help write the Python code to create the index from the underlying files, and to create .html code with which to host it freely on this website. No AI has been used at any stage in the creation of the .xml files themselves.

This database represents many hundreds of hours of work and the website has some running costs. I have been a freelance writer and scholar since 2023 and no longer hold a paid university position after moving to France. (Most recently I was Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at UCL, and I retain an honorary (unpaid) research affiliation.) If you would like to donate towards the costs of the project, please either use the button below for a one-off donation or consider a paid subscription to my substack, Horace & friends. I write fairly regularly on the substack about the research findings based on this data, including, over the last few years, possible new Latin poems by Robert Southwell, George Herbert and John Donne.