Spotlight on Achievement
Daniel W. Mosser
Dan Mosser held a Leverhulme Professorship at the University of York in the United Kingdom in the fall semesters of 2007 and 2008. He worked at the Centre for Medieval Studies on several research projects
Unlocking secrets through manuscript studies
The manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and other medieval texts are still revealing secrets after more than six centuries. Professor Daniel Mosser is one of the scholars unlocking those secrets through manuscript studies. As a Leverhulme Professor at the University of York in the United Kingdom in the fall semesters of 2007 and 2008, Professor Mosser worked at the Centre for Medieval Studies with collaborator, Professor Linne R. Mooney.
Dan Mosser in Belfast
While at York, Professors Mosser and Mooney worked on a joint project to identify the individual scribes who produced at least thirteen manuscripts of Middle English verse and prose by Geoffrey Chaucer and other authors. The scribes were formerly considered to be a single scribe because they all adopt the same script, format, and spelling. Now that Mooney and Mosser have identified some individual scribes, they have learned something about the production of literary manuscripts in the fifteenth century. They believe that the copying of literary manuscripts, such as the Canterbury Tales, was something scribes working in London did after they finished their “day jobs.”
Watermarks on manuscript pages are another clue to early printing and publication. Watermarks are the designs on fine paper one can see when holding the paper to the light. Because different printers used different watermarks, a researcher can use them to help date and otherwise place a manuscript. Professor Mosser is one of the researchers, along with David Radcliffe and Ernest W. Sullivan II, developing the Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive, an online collection of more than 45,000 marks.
Although his work concerns manuscripts from six centuries ago, Professor Mosser‘s digital publication represents twenty-first century distribution. Mosser‘s future publications from his manuscript studies include his Digital Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Pre-1500 Editions of the Canterbury Tales.
Another project on which Professor Mosser is working is an electronic version of The Index of Middle English Verse. A print version of the Index from 1943, with a supplement in 1965, is the most frequently cited reference work for scholars working on primary texts of Middle English literature. The enhanced electronic Index will provide full bibliographical references for all editions of the texts indexed (and links to any on-line editions), to allow scholars to study the reception of Middle English literature at different periods. The electronic Index will also include hundreds of new entries. Scholars will be able to study subject matter, authorship, dates, manuscript transmission, and poetic form of all surviving Middle English verse from c. 1200 to c. 1550. They will be able to follow new lines of research in this field. The illustration shows the print edition and supplement.
In the spring of 2009, Professor Mosser is back on this side of the pond, but his work has followed him home, where he will continue to look for answers to questions that manuscripts both raise and answer. He will also engage a wide scholarly community in answering these questions by making information available with the publication of digital archives, indexes, and catalogs.
