The Index of Middle English Prose

The project to publish a complete listing of all known manuscript items containing Middle English prose began in 1978, and the first volume appeared in 1984. The final listing will consist of some fifty volumes; with the publication of the twentieth volume in 2009, the corpus was sufficiently extensive to justify the first comprehensive index to the contents of the existing titles. This, the resulting volume, is a vital research tool for anyone working with Middle English prose texts. It is designed to give immediate access to the indices now found separately in the first twenty descriptive manuscript catalogues and begins with a summary contents list for each of these. In addition to an index of first lines, the volume contains other finding aids in the form of an index of rubrics and titles, and a general index. This will enable scholars to quickly find all surviving manuscript copies of a particular text in the collections catalogued to date, and will form the basis of future index volumes. KARI ANNE RAND is Professor of Older English Language at the University of Oslo.