The Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside

The LangScape project has at its core a rich body of material relating to the English countryside of a thousand years ago and more: Anglo-Saxon boundary surveys drawn up by those who lived in, owned or worked the land, and who described it in their own words.

These boundary clauses contain a wealth of detail about the Anglo-Saxon landscape and about the Old English language. They have been well explored at the level of close-focussed topographical studies, but these are often in specialist publications and have been treated, understandably, county by county. The LangScape resource complements and extends such studies by bringing all the primary materials together into a comprehensive searchable Electronic Corpus. This will allow an overview of the material and facilitate comparative studies in a way which has not been possible before. More importantly, however, it brings these largely unknown and fascinating texts to a very much wider audience.

The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is based in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London.

LangScape is managed by Joy Jenkyns MA and directed by Professor Janet Nelson FBA. Dr Peter Stokes joined the Project in October 2005 as Research Associate for a term of two years.

News

May 2008: Progress report

June 2008: Progress report