"The MMTC exists thanks to the extraordinary lifetime’s work of Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, who met as young actors in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the London Docklands Settlement in the East End in the late 1930’s, and formed a professional and personal partnership that was to last until Raymond’s death in 1983. Both were already keen collectors of theatre-related material, and the home they shared at 5, Venner Road in Sydenham was filled over the years with the vast collection of theatre ephemera, works of art, books and props which they accumulated together. [read more]

"Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography was first published in 1968. It provided a comprehensive, systematic and accurate guide to the entire corpus of charters, and immediately transformed the study of the subject. Charters were previously known by their numbers in the great nineteenth-century editions by Kemble (KCD) and Birch (BCS); now they are invariably known by their number in ‘Sawyer’, e.g. S 876. The revision and updating of Sawyer’s catalogue began in the early 1990s. [read more]

"The manuscripts of the West Midlands have long been valuable resources for medieval English literary and book history. Research has focused on individual manuscripts or small groups. Surviving in large numbers and from well-documented regional centres of book production, they potentially offer a resource for investigation of the regional parameters of manuscript culture. Systematic manuscript geography has hitherto been inhibited by lack of research tools for large-scale comparative work. [read more]

"The 'Imagining History' project is the first large-scale collaborative investigation of the manuscripts of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle, arguably the most prolificly disseminated secular text of the English Middle Ages. [read more]