While a machine-readable library of Old English verse has been available in different forms for many years, it is based on the standard edited text, and so reflects a wide variation in spellings, while also eliding and obscuring scribal and editorial emendations; the normalized version that appears in CLASP alongside the edited version (and the ability to toggle between the two), represents a significant advance. Likewise, while there are scattered machine-readable versions of those texts that have relatively recently been identified as school-text authors available in the public domain, the identification of Anglo-Latin verse is a field still relatively under-developed, and electronic texts have been hard to come by: CLASP’s consolidation of these three hitherto quite separate corpora (Old English, Anglo-Latin, and school-text authors in Classical, Late, and Christian-Latin verse) is in itself both innovative and significant, and is intended to challenge the prevailingly monoglot and synchronic attitudes towards Old English in general, and Old English poetry in particular.
Other innovative features include a normalized corpus for Old English, so flattening the spelling-variants of individual manuscripts and scribes, and therefore enabling and encouraging comparisons and contrasts across the corpus in ways impossible previously; a parsing tool for Latin, to assist in the identification of sense and grammatical structure; and bespoke markup of caesuras, alliteration, and line-patterning in both languages. There is also a limited Audio-Visual archive, showcasing poems in both literary languages, as well as new translations and transcriptions of some of the longer Old English and Anglo-Latin poems.
The combined corpus can be interrogated in both normalized and manuscript spellings, and are further analysed through a number of different lenses, so offering a multi-layered tool for mapping the transition from script to print in ways previously unimaginable. The comprehensive multilingual and multifaceted perspectives provided by CLASP are unparalleled for the poetry of any period of English literature, and offer innovative opportunities for teaching and research, encouraging new editions, translations, readings, interpretations, and audiences. The other outcomes all contribute to the success of a significant and paradigm-shifting project. CLASP is not intended to be the end of anything, but rather the beginning of everything else.
