The collection contains many works that have been digitised for the first time, giving the general reader their first access to manuscripts dating back hundreds of years. We have these precious pieces of our literary heritage that we need to preserve, but we also need to make them available Mary Wellesley, a specialist in medieval manuscripts “All of Cædmon’s poems are lost, but Bede gives a report of one of them – it’s a wonderfully compressed piece of poetic verse,” said Wellesley. But then, Bede recounts, Cædmon had a vision when he awoke he performed the song he had sung in the dream, amazing everyone. According to Bede, Cædmon was one of his age’s greatest poets, but initially, “he was so shy that when the harp came out at parties he would hide,” said Wellesley. Describing Christianity in Roman Britain, and the arrival of St Augustine in Kent, it recounts how the English were converted to Christianity.īede also tells of the first named English poet, a cowherd named Cædmon who lived at the Abbey of Whitby. “In a way, we’re pleased he had this essential tremor, because it means we can identify his work on a huge number of manuscripts … He was interested in preservation is a metaphor, in a way, for what we’re trying to do with these manuscripts today.”Ĭovering medieval drama, epic poetry, dream visions and riddles, the British Library project includes the eighth-century illuminated manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which Wellesley called “the first great piece of English historical writing”. The language was changing a huge amount, and Old English was no longer spoken generally,” said the British Library’s Mary Wellesley, a specialist in medieval manuscripts. “The Tremulous Hand was from one of the last generations who would have understood Old English.

Incredibly fragile, the Beowulf manuscript dates back to the 11th century, and survives in a single manuscript that was singed in a fire in the 18th century. One of the manuscripts on which the Tremulous Hand worked is part of the British Library’s free new online resource, Discovering Literature: Medieval, which brings together digitised copies of more than 50 medieval manuscripts spanning the fifth to the 15th centuries, and includes some of the period’s most valuable texts, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

A 13th-century manuscript written by the Tremulous Hand.

Tremulous game 2018