Quite old books

In the sort of stuff I work on there are a lot of monumental books from the Victorian and Edwardian periods. This is especially true for liturgy. If I had been born a hundred years earlier and a reasonably well-off man I would have loved to have been a canon of an Anglican cathedral, working away at things antiquarian with a tremendous knowledge of Latin behind me and an innate sense of how ritual works. (As it is ritual is alien to me and such Latin as I have is very hard-won.) These people were serious scholars, even if strictly speaking they were amateurs. Their works were often printed by subscription, and have to be ordered in Rare Books rooms or tracked down in some Cambridge college where they moulder in a basement, part of an unloved bequest of theological volumes by a pious reverend to his alma mater.

However, these days there is an idea that information wants to be free. Copyright prevents this for recent books, and in some areas of study this means that the most modern editions and the vital monographs cannot be made available, and most of what is on the web has been seriously superceded. But if you want to know about, say, the Bosworth Psalter, then the last word is Bishop and Gasquet's monograph of 1908. And because they are both long-dead, and there's a copy in a North American library, you can now get it all in pdf form. (Here is the link but the file is huge.) This is going to save me so much time, although I will miss the Divinity Faculty copy, which no one but me ever borrows, and which has original letters from Edmund Bishop bound in the front. Bishop was a brilliant liturgist; there aren't many liturgists about these days, and there's not really anyone to match him. His work on the Bosworth Psalter is a little marred by the fact that he thought that Arundel 155 (the Eadwig Gospels) was written after the Norman Conquest, but this makes less difference than you'd imagine to its overall usefulness, and wasn't such a very stupid thing to think. (It is my half-serious intention, if ever asked to contribute to a festschrift for David Dumville, my PhD supervisor, to argue that "Eadwig Basan" is a chimaera, and that the work attributed to him does in fact date from the third quarter of the eleventh century.)