The British Academy announces 2022-23 Neil Ker Memorial Fund award to promote the study of Western medieval manuscripts

The British Academy has announced the recipient of the 2022-23 Neil Ker Memorial Fund award as independent researcher Professor Susan Rankin, whose research focuses on English music scripts between 900 and 1150.

The fund was established by the family and friends of Neil R Ker FBA to promote the study of Western medieval manuscripts. Ker was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature, best known for his milestone 1957 work Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon.

Professor Rankin’s successful monograph, ‘From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Notations, 900-1150', will present the series of Lyell lectures she delivered at the Bodleian Library in May 2022. It examines how musical scripts changed during this period and the impact of the Normon Conquest on the written recording of music and liturgical repertories for singing.

The award is for £2,000 and it is for a duration of 12 months.

The 2022-23 Neil Ker Memorial Fund awardee is:

Professor Susan Rankin

‘From Memory to Written Record: English Liturgical Books and Notations, 900–1150’

This monograph will present the Lyell lectures delivered at the Bodleian Library in May 2022, and will be published by PIMS, Toronto. Its central topics are English musical scripts between 900 and 1150 and the ways they change, enquiry into what drove changes, the localisation of distinct ways of notating music, and the impact of the Norman Conquest on the written recording of music and liturgical repertories for singing. The monograph will also include detailed studies of the relation between scribes and content in seven manuscripts, and a guide to musical notations which is intended to support the study of liturgical and other manuscripts by non-musical scholars.

With palaeographical study of the text and music scripts in individual manuscripts as its fundamental source of evidence, the monograph will incorporate a large number of high-resolution images as well as musical transcriptions.