In other copies of the Chronicle , Claudius had set the date of Christ's resurrection as March 23. In this manuscript, however, the date was set at March 25. The answers had significant ramifications because Claudius was considered a heretic and his writings were banned. If the error had been picked up, it would indicate that, despite the ban, the Chronicle had been circulated. Upon further comparison, Allen found a number of other verbal echoes and was able to argue that Geoffrey had indeed used Claudius' Chronicle very liberally.
Physical manuscripts can provide crucial information on poetic abstractions.
Studying the ways he laid out his poems helps me understand how he conceived of the connections between them and how he thought of the book as a whole. The surviving copies of Les Miracles are all in Europe, but Duys finds ways to use other manuscripts in her teaching. Last year, for example, she brought her class on The Romance of the Rose to Special Collections to view the library's facsimile copy of the Old French poem. Along with the influx of young medievalists, the resurrected Medieval Studies Workshop, which entered its sixth year in October, has contributed fundamentally to the recent surge in medieval studies at Chicago. Its earlier incarnation, a departmental workshop that catered to historians, dissolved in the early 1990s, leaving a big hole for scholarly exchange outside the classroom.