Before the sixteenth century

On 3 November we handed over the new dictionary's entire text and illustration material for the second and final time to the typesetters: Interactive Sciences Ltd (ISL), of Gloucester. We first sent them the entire dictionary late in March, and between April and June this year ISL produced our first page proofs: 60,000 pages in all, which we finished reading at the end of September. After completing corrections in our own database during October, we sent the entire edition off to ISL again for the preparation of the second and final pages for printing. So we have started back at 'A' again as we check through these second proofs - not reading the contents this time, but checking the typesetting: spacing, alignment, line-ends, pictures and captions, pagination, running heads, and so on. This is indeed the final check: the volumes we are passing now in proof, at the rate of one every working day, will go on press at our printers from 5 January.

Meanwhile our editorial emphasis has turned to work on the Oxford DNB's on-line version, whose prototype gets better and better every time I look at it. We have appointed an American firm Interactive Factory (no relation to Interactive Sciences Ltd!), to design and develop the on-line edition's final version, and we consult continuously with them about how to make it still better. Yet even the old prototype is impressive enough. When illustrating a talk in Winchester earlier this month with the old prototype on the screen, I felt proud of what we have achieved.

I turn now to concluding my year-long tour of the Dictionary's thirteen areas with the area we call MED (for 'medieval'). Arriving at this destination constitutes a culmination and not at all a tail-end of my tour: I end with a bang and not with a whimper. Henry Summerson, the research editor who has been responsible for MED ever since 1992 when the Oxford DNB started, tells me that by then no medievalist used this part of the Dictionary "except as an occasional short cut to source references", and that "factually and conceptually it was completely obsolete". Very different will be the situation with the Oxford DNB . It has mined the wealth of new information and insights about the period that has become available since 1900, not always from literary sources. So we have articles on, for example, those trophies of archaeology: Lindow Man and the Sutton Hoo burial. As our contributor points out, "although it is impossible to know who the man commemorated in mound 1 at Sutton Hoo was, its contents and location tell a lot about him"; a substantial and most interesting article on the remarkable discoveries made in 1939 is the result.

A powerful alliance between Barbara Harvey, its consultant editor, and Dr Henry Summerson has brought off MED's great rejuvenation. Knowing that Barbara was behind the new venture, medieval scholars world-wide responded to the call, and probably 95% of the DNB 's medieval articles have now been completely replaced. An experienced scholar with a wide range of expertise, and totally dedicated to the project, Henry has put all historians of medieval Britain in his debt. In this he was enormously helped by Dr.Marios Costambeys, now at Liverpool University, who was his colleague in the medieval area from 1994 to 1997, and with whom he formed a most effective partnership. Henry later worked on the Tudor area with Drs John Cooper and Alan Bryson, both discussed in my last website message. For its medieval coverage the new dictionary has been able to mobilize the expertise of senior scholars like Southern and Barlow, together with a very large number of university teachers from several countries, and several young scholars who are now moving up the academic ladder.

The MED area covers a huge chronological span, from c.300 BC to 1499 AD. Furthermore, unlike all areas after 1500, it covers all subjects within the period, including science, medicine, literature and the arts; these topics in later periods are assigned distinct areas with more specialist coverage. The number of medieval subjects has grown from 3115 to 4937, and women in the Oxford DNB constitute 11% of the area's 1822 newcomers, as against 3% in the DNB. Four group-articles are devoted entirely to women: those on Lollard women, on women medical practitioners, and on women traders and artisans in York and London. There are 25 group articles and 116 family articles in the area as a whole, and these are valuable in enabling us to set little-known figures properly in context. For example, five group-articles on Irish saints, and entries on several Scottish families, exemplify the great benefits of transcending the extreme individualism that lies behind assigning one article invariably to one person. There were very few family articles in the DNB, and the abundance of new ones in the Oxford DNB reflects our enhanced interest in local and regional factors.

I hasten to add that some contributors to Leslie Stephen's original DNB were distinguished: T.F.Tout, Sir John Lloyd, James Tait and C.L. Kingsford, for example. The DNB also gave good coverage to the nobility, the senior clergy, the saints and the theologians. None the less, few contributors of medieval entries to the old DNB cited unpublished documentary sources in the Public Record Office or in other repositories, so (as Henry Summerson has written) "the result was inevitably a very heavy dependence on narrative sources and a few antiquarian collections with a biographical slant". We have now forsaken the DNB's antiquarianism and occasional narrowness of view, and our articles are better rounded. Whereas James Gairdner viewed John Ball, a leader of the Peasants' Revolt, as just a demagogue, his new biographer sees him in the round, and places him firmly in context. Politics, too, are seen in a different light. Following the work of K.B.McFarlane it is no longer customary to regard kings and magnates as necessarily at odds - a change reflected in, for instance, our fine article on Edward III, whose achievements our new author judiciously summarizes in a concluding section. Edward's reign "marks one of the longest periods of domestic peace in the history of medieval England", and our contributor points out that he was "the first of his line to make concerted and self-conscious use of a whole range of media - the proclamation, the sermon, religious ceremony, art and architecture, even his own clothing - to create an image of monarchy".

Everywhere in MED we have added new subjects, especially in the Roman and Viking periods, which gain from the Oxford DNB's relative receptiveness to people not British by birth. There is also much that's new on science and medicine, urban and commercial life. Our interesting new subjects include Thomas Croft, who around 1480 financed a search for 'the Isle of Brasile' in the Atlantic; Sir Geoffrey Langley, Edward I's ambassador to the ilkhan of Persia, who gave him a leopard to bring back to England; and John Tate, the first English papermaker. In MED, as in other areas, we are keen to include symbolic as well as real people, and our new subjects include Friar Tuck and Saints Andrew and George. But perhaps the most colourful is the twelfth-century Nun of Watton, her name unknown, who is included for a scandal whose lurid details I will spare you. In the Oxford DNB, as in the DNB of Leslie Stephen, the Dictionary's doors are open to the unrespectable, so long as their sins are significant, colourful or in some way influential on British society during their time. At a reading-party at Malvern, Benjamin Jowett was asked late in life what was the real character of people in the Middle Ages: "oh, much like ourselves, I expect", was his reply, "only dirtier in their habits".

Brian Harrison