Dr Peter Stokes

Affiliated Lecturer in Palaeography

Contact Information

Department of ASNC, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP (+44-1223-767314)
Email: pas53@cam.ac.uk
Personal Webpage:http://peterstokes.org/

Departmental and College Responsibilities

After Honours degrees in Classics and English Literature and in Computer Engineering, both from the University of Melbourne, Peter Stokes completed a PhD at Cambridge on English Vernacular minuscule, for which he identified, catalogued, and analysed all known scribal hands datableca 990-ca 1035. He was then Research Associate from 2005 to 2007 on the LangScape project of Anglo-Saxon boundary-clauses at the Centre for Computing in Humanities at King’s College London. He was then Leverhulme Fellow in Palaeography in ASNC, where he developed new methods of quantitative and computer-based palaeography. He then returned to the Centre for Computing in Humanities as developer and analyst on the ESawyer and ASCluster projects before receiving a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (FP7) for his project, `Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic’.

He has been lecturing in palaeography and codicology in the ASNC Department since 2004, has lectured in medieval history at the University of Leicester, and teaches Digital Publishing at the Institute of English Studies in London and material culture of the book at King’s College London, as well as being the principle coordinator of the AHRC-funded Research Training Scheme for Medieval Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age (http://ies.sas.ac.uk/study/mmsda/). Other responsibilities include Associate Editor for the journal Digital Medievalist, board member of Digital Medievalist, and board member of the Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Cataloguing Project.

Academic Interests

  • Palaeography, especially quantitative methods and English scripts of the late-tenth through twelfth centuries.
  • Humanities computing, especially image-processing database and XML technologies as applied to medieval handwriting.
  • The language and literature of late Anglo-Saxon and early Anglo-Norman England.
  • Book-collectors and the formation of libraries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Selected Publications

  • ‘The Vision of Leofric: Manuscript, Text and Context’, Review of English Studies Advanced Access (2011). doi:10.1093/res/hgr052
  • ‘Recovering Anglo-Saxon Erasures: Some Questions, Tools and Techniques’, in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, ed. by R. Chai-Elsholz, T. Silec, and L. Carruthers (New York, 2011), 35–60
  • ‘Rewriting the Bounds: Pershore’s Powick and Leigh’, in Place-Names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, ed. by N. Higham and M. Ryan (Woodbridge, 2011).
  • ‘Teaching Manuscripts in the “Digital Age”’, in Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age II, ed. by Fischer et al. (Norderstedt, 2010), 229–45. urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-43521
  • E. Pierazzo and P.A. Stokes, ‘Putting the Text back into Context: A Codicological Approach to Manuscript Transcription’, in Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age II, ed. by Fischer et al. (Norderstedt, 2010), 397–430. urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-43605
  • ‘N.R. Ker’, ‘E.A. Lowe’, and ‘Scripts’, in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms, Methods, Trends, ed. by A. Classen, 3 vols. (Berlin, 2010), pp. 2398–401, 2484–87, and 1217–33 respectively.
  • ‘Computer-Aided Palaeography: Present and Future’, in Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter, ed. by M. Rehbein et al. (Norderstedt, 2009), 313–42. urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-29782
  • ‘The Digital Dictionary’, Florilegium 26 (2009): 37–69. [A study of the use of technology in the Dictionary of Old English]
  • ‘King Edgar’s Charter for Pershore (AD 972)’, Anglo-Saxon England 37 (2008): 31–78. doi:10.1017/S0263675109990159