Because I spent most of the past two days with my wife and four girls, swimming, clowning around and generally having a great time, I’m pretty much mailing it in today.
But be forewarned: If you’re dyslexic, a thin-skinned evangelical Christian, a Santa/Satan worshipper, a dog lover or just someone who’s easily irked, save your rants.
Of course, as far as I can tell, the half-dozen folks who stumble across this blog on a semi-regular basis seem to have a pretty good sense of humor, so I doubt anyone’s going to threaten to jerk a knot in my tail. (Not that we don’t all need a good knot jerked in our tail now and again.)
(HT: Graphjam)
Vast store of ancient English works online
02/17/2012
The Parker Library holds a collection of priceless manuscripts, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English, to the St. Augustine Gospels, said to have been brought from Rome to England by the Catholic saint in 597.
In a decidedly modern touch, the library’s entire collection, among the most impressive anywhere in the world, is accessible online.
The library was entrusted to Corpus Christi College in 1574 by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth I.
It contains more than 600 manuscripts, along with such items as letters from King Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn and Protestant firebrand Martin Luther, and the bill for burning Thomas Cranmer in 1556, according to the University of Cambridge.
The Parker Library put its library online in 2010, becoming the first research library to have every page of its collection captured digitally.
One of the key works in the Parker collection is the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, thought to have been commissioned by Alfred the Great as he pushed for greater use of the language through educational reforms.
The Chronicle is considered the single most important historical source of the period in England between the departure of the Romans and the decades following the Norman Conquest.
