Activities
Throughout its history, the Group has worked to promote research and disseminate the results. It draws upon integrated multidisciplinary expertise, while its activities are open to wide audiences. It organizes meetings designed to report findings, pass on information, exchange advice, and gather feedback on methods, approaches, and materials. Our meetings variously take the form of lectures, discussions, consultations, classes, workshops, seminars, symposia, colloquia, and exhibitions. Officers of the Group also plan, commission, edit, and prepare publications which appear under its auspices, in both traditional and electronic forms, including this website.
Often our activities take place in conjunction with other educational institutions, which act as host or co-sponsor. Our approach to co-sponsorship enables groups of institutions as well as individuals with shared interests to join in a series of international events, without overtaxing their own administrative burdens and overheads. We create a "moveable feast," as we move from center to center, so as to bring a rich array of expertise in research and its applications to a wide range of audiences, in universities and other cultural institutions, who host our events in turn and with other sponsors. Our work is devoted to the development, invigoration, and flourishing of education as a vital, and essential, performing art.
We focus on manuscripts, but our interests are not confined to them, as we recognize that they stand in a whole world of material, both then and now. This perspective requires experts from many disciplines, including codicology, palaeography, history, art history, archaeology, musicology, bibliography, archival research, conservation, and textual and linguistic studies. Although we began our work with a focus upon medieval materials and their transmission to and through the present, we have extended our research to both older and more recent materials, in manuscript (of whatever form) and in other modes of transmission of the written word.
The Group has selected specialist Honorary Associates who, based in various centers worldwide, share a commitment to integrating knowledge in the arts and sciences, both in the academic and wider worlds. Together, our range both covers such fields and extends them to computing, image-processing, advanced photographic techniques, forensics, and non-destructive and spectroscopic pigment analysis. The Group also welcomes contributions and feedback from "outsiders" to specific disciplines, so that, through such interaction and discourse, together we might learn from perspectives shared across multiple areas of life.
Our activities thus represent a broad range of interests, experience, and expertise. When taken in combination, these aspects can powerfully illuminate connections between seemingly disparate elements, and provide insights into the fuller picture of the whole. By drawing on these multiple disciplines, we can better assess, refine, and advance research, and so promote knowledge in a wider setting.
