Neil Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon was published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1957. At an extent of 64 preliminaries and 568 pages with eight plates, the volume cost £5 5s. This equates to more than £100 in 2024, so to purchase an original volume now is to pay an outstripping of the inflated cost by 100%, because second-hand Catalogues, when you can get them, regularly cost around £250. A new edition of the Catalogue, with a Supplement, was issued in 1991, and this instantiation has been updated by two further supplements compiled by Mary Blockley and included in the ‘Contemporary Scholarship’ section on this site.
Ker’s scholarly place in this almost seventy-year period since the publication of the Catalogue has been absolutely central to medieval studies. To a large extent, the Catalogue was published at a moment of consolidation of new approaches to early textual studies—the corpus being established by, in poetry, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records (ASPR), which was published between 1931 and 1953, with a complete reprint in 1961—and in prose by Early English Text Society editions emerging from the 1830s until the present day. Ker’s contribution to textual scholarship in the pre-1200 English tradition and his laying the foundations for scholars’ reception and understanding of the manuscript production and transmission of Early English texts is fundamental. In the Catalogue, because of his item-by-item process, he lays out the literary ground for exploration in as thorough a way as one could, and this was all completed without the availability of digital aspects of manuscripts, and without so many of the editions upon which scholars rely.
For scholars all over the world, the publication of Ker’s Catalogue provided the stimuli for brand new research. There are two particularly important aspects of this success to note. First, for very many scholars prior to 1957 (and subsequently, too), Humfrey Wanley’s Catalogue of Manuscripts had been immensely difficult to access and demanded good Latinity to read thoroughly. The arrival of Ker’s Catalogue made available thorough descriptions of manuscripts and texts to an international readership. Since most scholars worked from restricted numbers of published plates and, if they were lucky, microform reproductions, to have Ker in their possession opened up a world of possibility in relation to the study of individual codices or sets of texts transmitted in more than one manuscript. How many articles and essays were published based on what Ker says, without the author’s ability to check for themselves? Such trust that was put into Ker’s descriptions, entirely justifiably, has generated decade-upon-decade textual scholars who repeat what he says, perhaps without the ability to follow up. Indeed, for scholars unable to fly to Cambridge or Paris, Princeton, or Kansas City, to have Ker was to have the potential to research these early medieval manuscripts almost through back-engineering. Second,
Ker provided whole manuscript analysis and description; he was invested as a codicologist even before that term had taken hold. (As an aside—and obvious to those who are familiar with the manuscripts themselves—readers of Ker occasionally do not realize that the item as it appears in Catalogue is not, in fact, the whole book at all, but only the English portions of that manuscript.) For many scholars their dependence on him was quickly established by this whole manuscript description; effectively, a dependence as complete as the manuscript items themselves listed. Ker’s Catalogue quickly became the only citation required to anchor a text or a manuscript or a scribe, and this is how it continues, despite the useful and important work that has subsequently complemented and expanded upon Ker’s initial vision as seen here in PDF form.