The Index of Middle English Prose is our most important reference tool for non-verse texts in manuscripts written in English between 1200 and 1500. The series has been published by Boydell … Brewer since 1984. The first twenty volumes cover the contents of seventy-two manuscript collections, mostly in Britain, but also some in the rest of Europe and in the United States. The descriptions have been done repository by repository. In some ways the title chosen when the series began is a misnomer. The most important part of each volume is the main body of text, which is perhaps best described as a partial descriptive catalogue of the manuscripts concerned, since the entries also contain extensive textual scholarship. The only access to this information is through the indexes at the back of each volume and researchers may often need to search several, and even all twenty, in their quest for a particular item. This is clearly unsatisfactory. Scholars would be best served by digitised access to the indexes, but until funding can be found for digitisation and the maintenance of such a database, the present printed finding-tool is being made available. It will be of considerable help to researchers (including compilers of future volumes), and will provide a starting point when a digitisation project eventually gets under way.

The preparation of this book has presented a considerable challenge in that the first twenty IMEP volumes are characterised by divergent approaches to indexing. An absence of editorial guidelines has meant that procedures have evolved over time, and have to some extent been adapted to the peculiar features of individual collections. The situation is perhaps best described as confusing. Eleven volumes have a combined titles and rubrics index, and in ten of those the two are not distinguished. Of these eleven, nine also have a general index which includes titles, while two have separate indexes for authors, for titles, for owners, scribes and provenance, and for subjects (one of these two also has an index for persons and places).