Stephen R. Reimer: Introduction

The Canon of John Lydgate Project

Personal Introduction

Stephen R. Reimer, Ph.D.

I am a Professor of English at the University of Alberta, teaching in the area of late Middle English literature, with a particular interest in computer applications in literary studies. I have been involved with computers since 1979, when I took a course in how to program in SNOBOL: I wrote a little "word-processor" to take the text that I had in all-caps and 80 columns on punch cards and print it in upper and lower case and in lines that were as long as those in the original manuscript. So I like to think that I've been reproducing manuscripts on computer since the days of the punch card.

My interests in texts and computers are primarily in the area of stylistics and authorship identification. I am currently engaged in a study of the canon of the works of John Lydgate, reassessing all the scribal attributions and opinions of his critics through the ages (as part of the process of reviewing the literature I am also producing bibliographical guides to the manuscripts and to the published criticism), but also hoping to bring to bear in dubious cases computer techniques of stylistic analysis--and towards that end I am preparing electronic texts of all of the works ever attributed to Lydgate (nearly 400 poems and one prose piece) plus the poetic works of contemporaries with which to do comparative studies.

Mostly I am dealing (with their permission) with EETS editions, but going back to the manuscripts where it seems desirable (as in the case of the various recensions of the Temple of Glas, for instance: for it I have multiple manuscript transcriptions). One Lydgate text of particular interest is his Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund, an important hagiographical piece done on behalf of his own monastery as a gift for the child king Henry VI who came to visit for Christmas and stayed through Easter. The presentation manuscript exists (Harley 2278), and it is a deluxe manuscript in which the poem is illustrated with 120 illuminations, and it has been called one of the greatest treasures of the British Library. This website is intended primarily as a showcase for a prototype of an HTML edition of Harley 2278, which will include reproductions of the illuminations plus lots of layers of various types of commentary. Elza Tiner claims that we have lost the fifteenth-century appreciation for Lydgate because we do not read him aloud; I would add that we do not read him aloud out of manuscripts with 120 pictures, and that would have been a very different experience than reading him in a modern critical edition.

The Canon of John Lydgate Project

email: Stephen.Reimer@UAlberta.Ca
URL: http://www.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/lydgate.htm/