Welcome to a virtual archive of the "minor" works of the fifteenth-century poet, John Lydgate.
The goals of this project are twofold: first, it is an attempt to make some version of the manuscripts and other media containing the works of Lydgate that exist in less than twenty witnesses more accessible to scholars of the poet, students who may have only read them in print editions, and individuals interested in manuscripts as artifacts in their own right. To this end, it is intended to provide not a critical edition of these poems, but to accurately transcribe and record the variations in the witnesse
Second, this project is meant to bridge a gap between the digital world, where anything that cannot be concretely categorized is often left by the wayside, and the physical object with its rich set of significations. This goal is less about the archive as understood by the methodologies of archival theory or concentration on and analysis of textual content. Instead, it is an attempt at praxis regarding some theories about how to best preserve the messy, analogue, digitally liminal aspects of the physical ob