I’m Lexi Bond, and I’m an undergraduate student at Northeastern University. I just completed my third year here, I’m an English major, and I’m so excited to be working on this never-explored, entirely mysterious Prayer Book. Along with undergrad students Anna Smith and Laura Packard, as well as Professor Erika Boeckeler of the Northeastern English Department, I plan to take what I see “a voyage in miniature” into this extraordinary book.

A book is a world. And this book is a world that’s totally unexplored. No one knows where this book came from–and I don’t know how that happens, but I’m glad that it did, because that qualifies this manuscript as a bona fide mystery, and that, above all else, makes it pretty exciting.

My hope for this project is that we’ll take a voyage into this text; I really do believe that there is no object of study too small, and pretty much everything in the world contains a world of information to be learned. This book is one of those things, and kind of a big one, depending on what your scale is. It feels big to me. There’s a lot to be learned, both through direct contact with this preserved text, as well as through all the processes of digitization, transformation, and representation. There’s so many directions to go in with an artifact this detailed, well-preserved, and virtually unknown; the paths that we can take on our voyage into the micro-but-also-macro frontier of this manuscript are endless. There’s words, there’s illustration, there’s calligraphy, there’s illumination, there’s music, and, most importantly to me, there’s human spirit, all preserved for us in this text. I’m excited to get started on soaking up as much knowledge from both this text as well as from the processes that will make up this experience, and to chronicle that experience here–let’s start the voyage!

Lexi