Professor Kleinman Awarded NEH Grant to Expand Access to Rare Early Middle English Texts

English professor Scott Kleinman has received a $200,000 Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Kleinman will serve as co-principal investigator with his colleague Dorothy Kim from Vassar College on the Archive of Early Middle English, with NEH funding to be awarded over a three-year period.

The Archive of Early Middle English is an ongoing project for Kleinman, Kim, and collaborators at four other universities. This electronic resource will make available to scholars worldwide the texts of original Early Middle English manuscripts (c. 1100–1350), beginning with three volumes whose restricted status at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library makes them currently inaccessible to the vast majority of researchers. Including some of the earliest extant completely English manuscripts, the volumes they have selected for publication are important both as literature and as a key to understanding the evolution of English and its development into a primary literary language in the Middle Ages.

The Department of English congratulates Professor Kleinman on his NEH grant and on the continuing success of the project. Those wishing to follow its progress can learn more on the Archive of Early Middle English web site.